The significance of events in Asia for superpower relations

Model answer

The arrows labelled A show the attack by Chinese forces, the 'People's Volunteers', and B is the Yalu River.

Model answer

Source A shows American fears because Eisenhower compares the countries of South East Asia to a row of dominoes. If the first one is knocked over, the rest will fall 'very quickly'. He meant that if Vietnam fell to communism, neighbouring countries such as Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and even Malaya and Indonesia would follow. The words 'the certainty' show how strongly the Americans believed this.

The context explains the fear. China had become communist in 1949 and was supplying the Viet Minh, and the Korean War seemed to show that communists would use force to expand. Eisenhower was speaking in April 1954, when the French were besieged at Dien Bien Phu and close to defeat, so he was explaining to Americans why Indochina mattered. This is why the USA was already paying about 80% of France's war costs, and why, after the French defeat, it set up SEATO and supported Diem's government in South Vietnam.

Model answer

Source B is useful because it gives the official reaction of the Truman government to the Communist victory in China. Acheson argues that the result of the civil war was 'beyond the control' of the USA and that nothing it could reasonably have done would have changed it. This fits what I know: the USA had given Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists more than 2 billion dollars of aid, but his government was corrupt and unpopular, inflation was out of control and many of his soldiers deserted. The word 'ominous' also shows that the government saw the Communist victory as a serious threat. However, the provenance shows that this is a self-justifying source. The China White Paper was published in August 1949 to defend the government against critics who blamed it for 'losing' China, so Acheson was bound to argue that the defeat was the Nationalists' fault, not America's.

Source C is useful because it shows the political storm the victory caused in the USA. The senator claims that China has been 'handed over to Stalin', blames the State Department for cutting off arms to Chiang, and accuses 'men in Washington who are soft on communism'. There was some basis for the arms claim, as the USA had stopped arms supplies for a time in 1946-47 while trying to arrange a ceasefire. The speech is clearly partisan, as it comes from a Republican attacking Truman's Democratic government, and it exaggerates. But that is exactly what makes it useful: it is typical of the 'Who lost China?' attacks which, along with Senator McCarthy's claims in February 1950, pushed Truman into a harder line. The call to defend Formosa and the warning about Japan and the Philippines show the fear of further communist expansion.

Overall, the sources are most useful together. Source B gives the government's view and Source C the opposition's, and the contrast shows how deeply the victory divided and alarmed Americans. This pressure helps explain why the USA refused to recognise Communist China, protected Taiwan and adopted NSC-68 in 1950. Neither source tells us much about ordinary Americans' views, so an historian would need other evidence for that.

Model answer

In many ways UN intervention in Korea was a success for containment. Containment meant stopping communism from spreading to new countries, and in Korea it achieved exactly that. When North Korea invaded in June 1950, it came close to conquering the whole peninsula, pushing the UN and South Korean forces back into the Pusan Perimeter. MacArthur's landing at Inchon in September 1950 reversed this, and when the armistice was signed in July 1953 South Korea remained non-communist, with the border close to the 38th Parallel. The USA had shown that it would fight to defend an ally, and the UN, with sixteen countries sending combat troops, had shown that aggression would be resisted, unlike the League of Nations in the 1930s.

The war also strengthened containment more widely. It persuaded Truman and Congress to carry out NSC-68: US defence spending rose from about 14 billion dollars in 1950 to about 50 billion in 1953, NATO was strengthened, and containment was extended to Asia through alliances such as ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954, as well as the protection of Taiwan. By dismissing MacArthur in April 1951 rather than extending the war to China, Truman also showed that containment could be achieved through a limited war without starting a third world war.

However, the intervention also had serious failures. In October 1950 the UN went beyond containment and tried to reunite Korea by force, advancing into North Korea and towards the Chinese border. This brought China into the war: Chinese forces drove the UN back south of the 38th Parallel, and Seoul fell again in January 1951. The result was two more years of costly stalemate, and North Korea survived as a communist state. The attempt to 'roll back' communism had failed.

The costs were also enormous. About 36,000 Americans were killed, and millions of Koreans died, most of them civilians, while much of the peninsula was devastated. Communist China emerged as a major military power, and its hostility to the USA lasted for twenty years. The war also deepened America's commitment in Asia, leading it to pay for most of France's war in Indochina, which would eventually draw the USA into Vietnam.

In conclusion, I largely agree with the statement. UN intervention was a success for containment in its original sense, because South Korea was saved and communism did not spread beyond the 38th Parallel. But it was a limited and costly success: the attempt to go further and reunite Korea failed, China became a powerful enemy, and the war committed the USA to further conflicts in Asia.