Another element in Stalin’s reversal may have been his disenchantment with Mao stemming from the negotiations leading to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship described earlier. Mao had made it abundantly clear that Russian special privileges in China would not last long. Russian control of the warm-water port of Dalian was bound to be temporary. Stalin may well have concluded that a unified Communist Korea might prove more accommodating to Soviet naval needs.

  Ever devious and complex, Stalin urged Kim to speak about this subject with Mao, noting that he had “a good understanding of Oriental matters.”26 In reality, Stalin was shifting as much responsibility as he could to Chinese shoulders. He told Kim not to “expect great assistance and support from the Soviet Union,” explaining that Moscow was concerned and preoccupied with “the situation in the West.”27 And he warned Kim: “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.”28 It was authentically Stalin: haughty, long-range, manipulative, cautious, and crass, producing a geopolitical benefit for the Soviet Union while shifting the risks of the effort to China.

  Stalin, who had encouraged the outbreak of the Second World War by freeing Hitler’s rear through the Nazi-Soviet pact, applied his practiced skill in hedging his bets. If the United States did intervene, the threat to China would increase as would China’s dependence on the Soviet Union. If China responded to the American challenge, it would require massive Soviet assistance, achieving the same result. If China stayed out, Moscow’s influence in a disillusioned North Korea would grow.

  Kim next flew to Beijing for a secret visit with Mao on May 13–16, 1950. In a meeting on the night of his arrival, Kim recounted to Mao Stalin’s approval of the invasion plan and asked Mao to confirm his support.

  To limit his risks even further, Stalin, shortly before the attack he had encouraged, added reinsurance by withdrawing all Soviet advisors from North Korean units. When that hamstrung the performance of the North Korean army, he returned Soviet advisors, albeit under the cover of their being correspondents from TASS, the Soviet press agency.

  How a minor ally of both Communist giants unleashed a war of major global consequences was summed up by Mao’s translator Shi Zhe to the historian Chen Jian, who paraphrased the content of the key conversation between Mao and Kim Il-sung:

  [Kim] told Mao that Stalin had approved his plans to attack the South. Mao solicited Kim’s opinions of possible American response if North Korea attacked the South, stressing that as the Syngman Rhee regime had been propped up by the United States and that as Korea was close to Japan the possibility of an American intervention could not be totally excluded. Kim, however, seemed confident that the United States would not commit its troops, or at least, it would have no time to dispatch them, because the North Koreans would be able to finish fighting in two to three weeks. Mao did ask Kim if North Korea needed China’s military support, and offered to deploy three Chinese armies along the Chinese-Korean border. Kim responded “arrogantly” (in Mao’s own words, according to Shi Zhe) that with the North Koreans’ own forces and the cooperation of Communist guerillas in the South, they could solve the problem by themselves, and China’s military involvement was therefore unnecessary.29

  Kim’s presentation apparently shook Mao sufficiently that he ended the meeting early and ordered Zhou Enlai to cable Moscow requesting an “urgent answer” and “personal clarification” from Stalin.30 The next day the reply arrived from Moscow, with Stalin again shifting the onus back to Mao. The cable explained that

  [i]n his talks with the Korean comrades, [Stalin] and his friends . . . agreed with the Koreans regarding the plan to move toward reunification. In this regard a qualification was made, that the issue should be decided finally by the Chinese and Korean comrades together, and in case of disagreement by the Chinese comrades the decision on the issue should be postponed pending further discussion.31

  This, of course, placed the blame for vetoing the project entirely on Mao. Further disassociating himself from the outcome (and providing Kim with an additional opportunity for exaggeration and misrepresentation), Stalin preempted a return telegram from Beijing by explaining that “[t]he Korean comrades can tell you the details of the conversation.”32

  No records of Mao and Kim’s subsequent conversation have yet been made available. Kim returned to Pyongyang on May 16 with Mao’s blessing for an invasion of South Korea—or at least that is how he described it to Moscow. Mao may well have also calculated that acquiescence in the conquest of South Korea might establish a premise for Soviet military assistance for a subsequent Chinese attack on Taiwan. If so, it was a grievous miscalculation. Because even had the United States stood aloof from the conquest of South Korea, American public opinion would not have allowed the Truman administration to ignore another Communist military move in the Taiwan Strait.

  Ten years later, Moscow and Beijing still could not agree on which side had actually given Kim the final green light to launch his invasion. Meeting in Bucharest in June 1960, Khrushchev, who was by then Soviet General Secretary, insisted to Chinese Politburo member Peng Zhen that “if Mao Zedong had not agreed, Stalin would not have done what he did.” Peng retorted that this was “totally wrong” and that “Mao Zedong was against the war. . . . [I]t was Stalin who agreed.”33

  The two Communist giants thus slid into a war without addressing the global implications should Kim Il-sung’s and Stalin’s optimistic forecasts prove to be erroneous. Once the United States entered the war, they would be forced to consider them.

  American Intervention: Resisting Aggression

  The trouble with policy planning is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made. The various statements of Truman, Acheson, and MacArthur had correctly reflected American thinking when they were made. The nature of American commitment to international security was a subject of domestic controversy and had not ever considered the defense of Korea. NATO was still in the process of being formed. But when American policymakers came face-to-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their policy papers.

  The United States surprised the Communist leaders after Kim Il-sung’s attack on June 25, not only by intervening but by linking the Korean War to the Chinese civil war. American ground forces were sent to Korea to establish a defensive perimeter around Pusan, the port city in the south. That decision was supported by a U.N. Security Council resolution made possible because the Soviet Union absented itself from the vote in protest against the fact that the Chinese seat in the Security Council was still occupied by Taipei. Two days later, President Truman ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait by preventing military attacks in either direction across it. The motive was to obtain the widest congressional and public support for the Korean War; there is no evidence that Washington considered that it was, in fact, expanding the war into a confrontation with China.

  Until that decision, Mao had planned to attack Taiwan as his next military move and had assembled major forces in southeast China’s Fujian province to that end. The United States had conveyed in many statements—including a press conference by Truman on January 5—that it would not block such an effort.

  Truman’s decision to send the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait was intended to placate public opinion and to limit American risk in Korea. In announcing the fleet’s dispatch, Truman cited the importance of Taiwan’s defense but also called on “the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland.” Truman further warned: “The Seventh Fleet will see that this is done.”34

  To Mao, an evenhanded gesture was unimaginable; he interpreted the assurances as hypocrisy. As far as Mao was concerned, the United States was reentering the Chinese civil war. The day after Truman’s announcement, on June 28, 1950, Mao addressed the Eighth Session of the Central People’s Government Committee, during which he described the American moves as an invasion of Asia:

  The U.S. invasion in Asia can only arouse broad and determined resistance among the people of Asia. Truman said on January 5 that the United States would not intervene in Taiwan. Now he himself has proved he was simply lying. He has also torn up all international agreements guaranteeing that the United States would not interfere in China’s internal affairs.35

  In China, wei qi instincts sprang into action. By sending troops to Korea and the fleet to the Taiwan Strait, the United States had, in Chinese eyes, placed two stones on the wei qi board, both of which menaced China with the dreaded encirclement.

  The United States had no military plan for Korea when the war broke out. The American purpose in the Korean War was declared to be to defeat “aggression,” a legal concept denoting the unauthorized use of force against a sovereign entity. How would success be defined? Was it a return to the status quo ante along the 38th parallel, in which case the aggressor would learn that the worst outcome was that he did not win—possibly encouraging another attempt? Or did it require the destruction of North Korea’s military capacity to undertake aggression? There is no evidence that this question was ever addressed in the early stages of America’s military commitment, partly because all governmental attention was needed to defend the perimeter around Pusan. The practical result was to let military operations determine political decisions.

  After MacArthur’s stunning September 1950 victory at Inchon—where a surprise amphibious landing far from the Pusan front halted North Korean momentum and opened a route to the recapture of the South Korean capital of Seoul—the Truman administration opted for continuing military operations until Korea was reunified. It assumed that Beijing would accept the presence of American forces along the traditional invasion route into China.

  The decision to press forward with operations inside North Korean territory was formally authorized by a United Nations resolution on October 7, this time by the General Assembly under a recently adopted parliamentary device, the Uniting for Peace Resolution, which allowed the General Assembly to make decisions on international security by a two-thirds vote. It authorized “[a]ll constituent acts” to bring about “a unified, independent and democratic government in the sovereign State of Korea.”36 Chinese intervention against U.S. forces was believed to be beyond Chinese capabilities.

  None of these views remotely coincided with the way Beijing regarded international affairs. As soon as American forces intervened in the Taiwan Strait, Mao treated the Seventh Fleet’s deployment as an “invasion” of Asia. China and the United States were approaching a clash by misinterpreting each other’s strategic design. The United States strove to oblige China to accept its concept for international order, based on international organizations like the United Nations, to which it could not imagine an alternative. From the outset, Mao had no intention to accept an international system in the design of which China had no voice. As a result, the outcome of the American military strategy was inevitably going to be at best an armistice along whatever dividing line emerged—along the Yalu River, which denoted the border between North Korea and China, if the American design prevailed; along some other agreed line if China intervened or the United States stopped unilaterally short of Korea’s northern frontier (for example, at the 38th parallel or at a line, Pyongyang to Wonsan, which emerged later in a Mao message to Zhou).

  What was most unlikely was Chinese acquiescence in an American presence at a border that was a traditional invasion route into China and specifically the base from which Japan had undertaken the occupation of Manchuria and the invasion of northern China. China was all the less likely to be passive when such a posture involved a strategic setback on two fronts: the Taiwan Strait and Korea—partly because Mao had, to some extent, lost control over events in the prelude to Korea. The misconceptions of both sides compounded each other. The United States did not expect the invasion; China did not expect the reaction. Each side reinforced the other’s misconceptions by its own actions. At the end of the process stood two years of war and twenty years of alienation.

  Chinese Reactions: Another Approach to Deterrence

  No student of military affairs would have thought it conceivable that the People’s Liberation Army, barely finished with the civil war and largely equipped with captured Nationalist weapons, would take on a modern army backed up by nuclear weapons. But Mao was not a conventional military strategist. Mao’s actions in the Korean War require an understanding of how he viewed what, in Western strategy, would be called deterrence or even preemption and which, in Chinese thinking, combines the long-range, strategic, and psychological elements.

  In the West, the Cold War and the destructiveness of nuclear weapons have produced the concept of deterrence: to pose risks of destruction to a potential aggressor out of proportion to any possible gain. The efficacy of the threat is measured by things that do not happen, that is, the wars being avoided.

  For Mao, the Western concept of deterrence was too passive. He rejected a posture in which China was obliged to wait for an attack. Wherever possible, he strove for the initiative. On one level, this was similar to the Western concept of preemption—anticipating an attack by launching the first blow. But in the Western doctrine, preemption seeks victory and a military advantage. Mao’s approach to preemption differed in the extraordinary attention he paid to psychological elements. His motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks. As we shall see in the later chapters, Chinese actions in the Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954–58, the Indian border clash of 1962, the conflict with the Soviets along the Ussuri River in 1969–71, and the Sino-Vietnam War of 1979 all had the common feature of a sudden blow followed quickly by a political phase. Having restored the psychological equation, in Chinese eyes, genuine deterrence has been achieved.37

  When the Chinese view of preemption encounters the Western concept of deterrence, a vicious circle can result: acts conceived as defensive in China may be treated as aggressive by the outside world; deterrent moves by the West may be interpreted in China as encirclement. The United States and China wrestled with this dilemma repeatedly during the Cold War; to some extent they have not yet found a way to transcend it.

  Conventional wisdom has ascribed the Chinese decision to enter the Korean War to the American decision to cross the 38th parallel in early October 1950 and the advance of U.N. forces to the Yalu River, the Chinese-Korean border. Another theory was innate Communist aggressiveness on the model of the European dictators a decade earlier. Recent scholarship demonstrates that neither theory was correct. Mao and his colleagues had no strategic designs on Korea in the sense of challenging its sovereignty; before the war they were more concerned about balancing Russia there. Nor did they expect to challenge the United States militarily. They entered the war only after long deliberations and much hesitation as a kind of preemptive move.

  The triggering event for planning was the initial dispatch of American troops to Korea coupled with the neutralization of the Taiwan Strait. From that moment, Mao ordered planning for Chinese entry into the Korean War for the purpose, at a minimum, of preventing the collapse of North Korea—and occasionally for the maximal revolutionary aim of expelling American forces from the peninsula entirely.38 He assumed—well before American or South Korean forces had moved north of the 38th parallel—that, unless China intervened, North Korea would be overwhelmed. Stopping the American advance to the Yalu was a subsidiary element. It created, in Mao’s mind, an opportunity for a surprise attack and a chance to mobilize public opinion; it was not the principal motivating factor. Once the United States repelled the initial North Korean advance in August 1950, Chinese intervention became highly probable; when it turned the tide of battle by outflanking the North Korean army at Inchon and then crossed the 38th parallel, it grew inevitable.

  China’s strategy generally exhibits three characteristics: meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions. Zhou Enlai started that process by chairing conferences of Chinese leaders on July 7 and July 10—two weeks after the American deployment in Korea—to analyze the impact on China of American actions. The participants agreed to redeploy troops originally intended for the invasion of Taiwan to the Korean border and to constitute them as the Northeast Border Defense Army with the mission “to defend the borders of the Northeast, and to prepare to support the war operations of the Korean People’s Army if necessary.” By the end of July—or more than two months before U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel—over 250,000 Chinese troops had been assembled on the Korean border.39

  The Politburo and Central Military Commission meetings continued through August. On August 4, six weeks before the Inchon landing, when the military situation was still favorable to the invading North Korean forces and the front was still deep in South Korea around the city of Pusan, Mao, skeptical about North Korea’s capabilities, told the Politburo: “If the American imperialists are victorious, they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them. This can be in the form of a volunteer force, and be at a time of our choosing, but we must start to prepare.” 40 At the same meeting, Zhou made the same basic analysis: “If the American imperialists crush North Korea, they will be swollen with arrogance, and peace will be threatened. If we want to assure victory, we must increase the China factor; this may produce a change in the international situation. We must take a long-range view.”41 In other words, it was the defeat of the still advancing North Korea, not the particular location of American forces, that China needed to resist. The next day, Mao ordered his top commanders to “complete their preparations within this month and be ready for orders to carry out war operations.”42