The Korean War and NSC-68

From this morning's Situation Report:

Show of force. There was some international cooperation on Sunday, when U.S., South Korean, and Japanese warplanes staged a major show of force over the Korean peninsula, releasing live weapons during a joint training exercise. The flight was “in response to North Korea’s launch of an intermediate range ballistic missile over Japan on September 14,” according to a statement from the U.S. Pacific Command. The mission included two B-1B Lancer bombers, four U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightnings, four South Korean F-15K fighters, and four Japanese F-2 fighters.

“North Korea will be destroyed.” The exercise came hours after U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley warned Sunday that if Pyongyang continues with its nuclear and ballistic missile tests, “North Korea will be destroyed. And we all know that. And none of us want that. None of us want war...we’re trying every other possibility that we have, but there’s a whole lot of military options on the table."

Haley later told CNN that if the Washington exhausts its diplomatic options on North Korea, the U.S. military would “take care of it.” Haley continued, “We wanted to be responsible and go through all diplomatic means to get their attention first. If that doesn't work, General Mattis will take care of it.”

It is unclear what the point is of all these bellicose U.S. threats -- Proving credibility to allies? Instigating a war with North Korea? The U.S. military failed to "take care of it" 65 years ago; its track record since has not been anything to boast about.

I'm reading Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia (1984) by former Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief  Robert J. Donovan. It is a mainstream history that hews closely to the "U.S. are the good guys" perspective. I thought it would be interesting to read a political history of the Korean and Vietnam wars written at a time before neoconservative revisionism clamped down on discourse.

One interesting, if not original, insight Donovan has is that the Korean War was key to enshrining the huge military budgets and perpetual war footing of the Cold War. Truman had been sitting on NSC-68 for months. Once hostilities broke out on the Korean Peninsula in June of 1950, adoption of NSC-68 became a fait accompli.

Since a militarized Cold War can be traced back to the Korean War, it is interesting now that we are in an era of a New Cold War, that the womb of the Old Cold War appears to be gestating. This bodes ill for Pax Americana.

For an excellent primer on the ignominious history of U.S. relations with North Korea read "End the 67-year war" by Robert Alvarez.