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The Decades-Long Battle Within the Democratic Party Establishment Between the Heirs of Dean Acheson and Franklin Roosevelt

The calamitous history of America’s wars of choice.

As Trump’s disastrous war against Iran continues to grind on, it might benefit the incoming class of Democratic policymakers who seem poised to take over not just the House but possibly the Senate to reflect on the calamitous history of Washington’s wars of choice. The first such war was President Harry Truman’s, in Korea, begun by North Korean forces in June 1950. As Nation contributing editor James W. Carden shows in The Great Betrayal: How the Democrats Became the Party of War, Truman and his hawkish secretary of state, Dean Acheson, steered the party in a direction not intended by Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman and Acheson’s embrace of the burgeoning national security state and their adoption of the paranoiac anti-communism that heretofore had been characteristic of the American right led them headlong into an unnecessary war of choice in Korea. Korea set the precedent for Vietnam, for Iraq, and for Iran—it was the first of many wars waged in the absence of constitutional authorization on the flimsiest of pretexts.

The invasion of South Korea by North Korea’s Kim Il Sung provided Washington’s Cold War planners with just the story they needed at just the right time. As President Harry Truman reached the midpoint of his first elected term, he surprised some of his Defense and State Department planners by not immediately accepting his national security staff’s more hawkish recommendations. “We were sweating over it,” one Truman adviser admitted later, “then thank god Korea came along.”

The idea that South Korea represented a core US national security interest was a novel one. In fact, there was, in the years and months leading up to the conflict, broad agreement among US policymakers that it represented no such thing. At Yalta, a four-power trusteeship was created to oversee the former Japanese colony. In April 1948, Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) admitted that Korea was “of little strategic value to the United States.” In a speech on January 12, 1950, Acheson famously left both Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) outside the boundaries of the US defense perimeter in East Asia. North Korea launched its attack on June 24, and even then the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that it would be “militarily unsound” for Washington to commit large forces “in an area of slight strategic importance.”

But once the war was joined, Truman made the ever-dubious historical parallel with Neville Chamberlain’s decision to “appease” Hitler at Munich. “The free nations........

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