DBWI: Korean war lost?

[Fenrir_Angerboda]

so it's been 55 years sense the End of the Korean war......

so here's the thing, I've been thinking, what would it be like if we had lost
the war?

I don't mean like the Reds Pushed us out and took the whole Country (that's been done to death), but, I dunno, reached some sort of stalemate or something, and split the country in two?

would this affect anything, like maybe Macarthur's Presidency, or the great victory in Vietnam?

any ideas?

OOC: in a timeline of a decisive South Korean Victory. POD is up to you guys, just agree on it.

 

[Jon0815]

so it's been 55 years sense the End of the Korean war......

so here's the thing, I've been thinking, what would it be like if we had lost
the war?

I don't mean like the Reds Pushed us out and took the whole Country (that's been done to death), but, I dunno, reached some sort of stalemate or something, and split the country in two?

That wouldn't mean we "lost" the war. When Country A invades Country B, and the invasion fails, that's not a victory for Country A. Although maybe you could indeed call it a "stalemate", if a counter-invasion of Country A by Country B also fails.

would this affect anything, like maybe Macarthur's Presidency, or the great victory in Vietnam?

Well, the most plausible way for the North to survive would have been a successful intervention by China. In that case, MacArthur would probably never have been president, and fear of a similar Chinese intervention could have led the US to take a more cautious approach in Vietnam, thereby prolonging or maybe even losing that war (although the latter is pretty unlikely).

 

[Dave Howery]

Macarthur's 'great victory' damn near didn't come off. From what I've read, Truman had to threaten him with dismissal if he didn't back down from his plan to actually drive right up to the Chinese border... and maybe even beyond it. As it was, the Allies had a pretty good idea; stop roughly 30 miles from the border and then annex the conquered part of NK to SK. The tiny sliver of what was left of NK certainly didn't last long on its own, in spite of Chinese aid, and it wasn't long before NK collapsed completely, especially after Kim Il Sung was killed by his own officers. I read somewhere recently that China was sending out warnings to the allied command that they would intervene if the Allied troops reached the border... thank God Truman was able to make Macarthur back down...

 

[glenn67]

Don't forget that President MacArthur listened to the advice he received from Secretary of State Henry Cabot Lodge and UN Ambassador Joseph Kennedy Sr.

 

[trekchu]

The Korean war is my favourite post-WW2 what-if. I mean, what if Mao had lived longer instead of having a heart attack when hearing of the North Korean Surrender? Or what if the US had actually nuked China instead of just bombing acouple of Manchurian Airbases`with conventional bombs?

 

[bobbis14]

Lets not forget about the aftermath of that war. The execution of Empress Sunjeong in 1954, and the resulting police and one party state that followed. Freedom of speech that we went to defend we ended up destroying, as we backed Rhee's state. We may have won the war militarily but it gave the Soviets plenty of ammunition, especialy after they boycotted a UN involvment. It was a war fought by the US without the aproval of the rest of the world and when we achived "victory" the state we left was far worse under Rhee, and that not mentioning the innocent civilians killed. No one seemed to see that MacArthur was a murderer whose policy contridicted itself, we Americans only saw a war hero and patrioticaly obeyed his every word .... and boy did we pay for it!

 

[SunilTanna]

The "great victory in Vietnam" is really a matter of perspective.... I'm sure the Vietnamese anti-colonialists who died in the atomic bombings at Dien Bien Phu, don't regard it as a "great victory".

The fact is the victory in Korea made the US over-confident, and hence the US decided to stick its nose into every supposedly anti-communist conflict around the world (many of which were actually revolts by colonial peoples) - not just Vietnam, but also Algeria, Libya, Egypt...

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

Certainly the reputation of the United States wouldn't have been as tainted as it has been around the world. Consider that as the "world's policeman" we are the only nuclear weapon that has utilized nuclear weapons. And in the cases we have used nuclear weapons (Japan-1945, Vietnam-1954, Iran-1979, Libya-1986, Iraq-1990, Yugoslavia-1996), we have demonstrated our force on nations that clearly couldn't respond. Is it any wonder that every nation has rejected the proposed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty every year since 1962? Even our allies like Brazil, Israel, and Taiwan have decided to develop nuclear weapons rather than accept "nuclear umbrella" from the United States...

 

[Mr Stereo1]

I can't see the war being lost, no sensible person would ever fight hard enough to defeat the worlds nicest superpower for a goverment type as corrupt as Communism, the ideas are ok but it get more authoritarian then socialist after a while.

 

[gtrof]

A Chinese intervention would have been disastrous. MacArthur's skimps on it in his auto-bio, but some of the better books on Korea show how stretched out the leading UN forces were. One of them I think it might have been Amborse suggested had the Chinese gone over the Yalu, they would have routed the Americans.

 

[Mr_ Bondoc]

One has to ask, what effect would the loss of Korea have meant to race relations in the United States? With the USSR and People's Republic of China held in check, there was little incentive to address race relations. To make matters worse, most of the countries that the U.S. would later intervene in were home to "coloured peoples". As Muhammad Ali said in 1965, "No Indie (OOC: Independence Movement) guerilla ever called me Nigger!!!"

Would we have to wait until the 1970s and 1980s to deal with Jim Crow?