Us Involvement In The Cold War Essay

Throughout its history, the United States has consistently illustrated valiant efforts to circumvent powers of evil, as well as mistakes that the US must learn from to prevent themselves from being deceived by enemies, both foreign and domestic. For example, during the Cold War, the United States wanted to “contain” communism to the regimes that had initially declared it as their standard of government, which is why the United States pleaded to the United Nations to intervene in the Korean War. Initially the United States was only to intervene under the containment doctrine which provided a limit as to how far the United States could push the North Korean forces back (which would be back to the 38th parallel, the initial border). Under these
To understand this, one has to recall that the Chinese only intervened after the UN forces crossed the 38th, which means that the DPRK forces would still be fighting alone, and the end of the war could have been a legitimate treaty as opposed to an armistice. Therefore, the only casualties that would have occurred were in the months that the UN forces were countering the KPA. The amount of casualties up to that point were roughly 11,000. However, the acts of the UN effectively tripled that number to over 33,000 casualties (Rhem). Now, the argument to this case would be that the US was attempting to reunify the country, and that this was the first conflict that sparked the Cold War. Yet those who argue fail to understand that the decision to ignore the containment doctrine led to over 22,000 more deaths. That is 22,000 husbands who did not return to their wives, 22,000 sons who did not return to their mothers, 22,000 fathers who did not return to their children, 22,000 children who had to now grow up with the mentality that their father will not be with them throughout their lives. And yet, this is only the beginning of what the true damage by the decision had