Fearing the worst: how Korea transformed the Cold War

Abstract

Most observers do not consider the Korean War the most important episode of the Cold War. While key to the development of the conflict in east Asia, the war was too remote, too much of a stalemate and too much like the Second World War to have determined the course of the East–West struggle. That three-year conflict has been called ‘the Forgotten War’ because it never rated as highly in American or western memory as either the titanic Second World War or the morally wrenching Vietnam War. Samuel F. Wells, Cold War historian and associate of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, makes an excellent case for considering the period surrounding the Korean War as vital to everything that came after. The book's first section outlines the course of the war on the Korean peninsula and shows how it forced policy-makers in Washington, Moscow and Beijing to change direction....