Chapter 33: America’s Anti-Communist Lessons (Part 2)

In fact, the Second World War was avoidable. The key mistake was that the United States abandoned Wilson’s initiative to establish the League of Nations. Without an institution to mediate conflicts among European states, the United States stood by and did nothing in the face of German and Italian aggression. In the 1930s, the United States continued its neutral foreign policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt focused only on America and paid little attention to other countries. He pursued neutrality toward both Europe and Japan. The policy of appeasement enabled the rise of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japanese militarism, and allowed the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy to form their alliance. This, in turn, fueled German and Japanese aggression. Had Roosevelt followed the example of Theodore Roosevelt—dispatching sixteen major warships to cruise the world, sending powerful U.S. aircraft carrier groups to patrol Europe, the English Channel, the Sea of Japan, and the China Seas to demonstrate American resolve to intervene—Germany and Japan might have been deterred, and they might not have dared to launch wars of aggression.

In the Republic of China, Japan advanced step by step, nibbling away at Manchuria and North China and eventually launching a full-scale war of aggression against China. All of this unfolded under American inaction and indulgence. Only after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and launched the Pacific War against the United States did America passively rise to fight. By then, the world war had already reached a stalemate. Although the United States had no choice but to enter the war, it committed another grave mistake—allying with a communist country. Through the Lend-Lease Act, it provided Stalin with virtually unlimited support, supplying the Soviet Union with weapons and equipment—aircraft, artillery, tanks, everything imaginable—allowing communist power to expand rapidly and bring disaster to the world. Roosevelt fantasized that by allying with Stalin he could contain Hitler. This was a fundamental misjudgment of the global situation. History has shown that the greatest enemy of human civilization was Soviet totalitarianism, not Hitler’s racism. Hitler’s racism and nationalism, and Soviet communism and totalitarianism, were all extreme right-wing ideologies and state systems harmful to humanity. Yet comparatively speaking, communism and totalitarianism occupied the extreme end of the extreme right. Their degree of evil and the damage they inflicted on human civilization defy verbal description.

During World War II, the United States joined Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union to form the Allied Powers and defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. The outcome of the war, however, was far from satisfactory. Nearly one-third of German territory—East Germany—fell under communist rule. All of Eastern Europe gradually came under Stalin’s control. Stalin also carved Mongolia away from the Republic of China and ultimately helped Mao Zedong seize all of China. Within just four years after the war, nearly half of the Eastern Hemisphere had almost fallen under the iron heel of communism. This was the result of Roosevelt’s alliance with the communists. By then, Roosevelt had been dead for only four years. By allying with Stalin, what was lost was the world.

Only two years after victory in World War II, Stalin turned his guns toward the United States, imposing a military blockade on West Berlin in an attempt to force U.S. forces out of the city. What kind of ally behaves this way—turning hostile within two years and pointing its guns at America? Stalin’s alliance with Roosevelt and Truman was clearly a sham; in reality, he was an enemy of the United States. Truman was weak. He rejected the strategy proposed by U.S. commanders in Germany to confront Soviet provocations forcefully by defending the access routes to West Berlin with armed force, and instead responded to the blockade with the weak measure of an airlift. Soviet provocation in Germany was an inevitable step in the postwar military and political expansion of communist totalitarianism. Unfortunately, the U.S. government at the time failed to recognize the true nature of Soviet communist totalitarianism.

After helping Mao Zedong defeat the government of the Republic of China, the Soviet Union dared, in the very next year, to send massive forces into Korea to “Resist America and Aid Korea,” fighting directly against the United States. General MacArthur counterattacked fiercely, driving the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” back to the Yalu River. At this point, Truman feared a third world war and astonishingly dismissed MacArthur. This display of weakness before Mao Zedong was incomprehensible to the world and only emboldened Mao further. The American people wholeheartedly supported MacArthur; more than a million people in New York gave him a grand welcome.

Having tasted the sweetness of American weakness in the Korean War, Mao Zedong went on to fight the Vietnam War after the armistice. China not only sent troops and military advisers to participate directly, but also dispatched engineering units to repair bombed bridges and roads, and transported massive quantities of strategic supplies via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This lasted from 1959 to 1975, precisely during the periods of the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution in China. The Chinese people tightened their belts to help the Vietnamese communists fight the United States. In 1975, the Chinese Communist Party and the Vietnamese communists together finally drove U.S. forces out of Vietnam. After the U.S. withdrawal, the democratic government of South Vietnam collapsed, and Vietnam fell under communist rule. U.S. military deaths in Vietnam reached 58,209. After South Vietnam fell, the Vietnamese communists turned against the Chinese Communist Party, expelling ethnic Chinese from Vietnam.

Since the great geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century, the world has gradually become interconnected. Nations influence one another, and no country can exist in isolation. A leading power like the United States, whose national strength had already ranked first in the world by 1900, is a decisive force in global affairs. Because of U.S. participation, both World War I and World War II were resolved relatively quickly, restoring peace and stability. When American leaders recognize their responsibility as a great power and participate appropriately and responsibly in world affairs to resolve international disputes, the world enjoys peace. When the United States retreats inward, focusing only on itself and pursuing isolationist diplomacy, the world descends into disorder—often escalating into war and massive destruction—until, in the end, the United States is once again forced to intervene to resolve the crisis.

Summarizing the lessons of the Vietnam War, it was a “proxy war.” In 1961, President Kennedy decided that the United States needed to demonstrate strength and resolve in opposing communism in Vietnam. At the same time, he believed the conflict should follow the Korean model—limited to proxy forces using conventional weapons—as a way to reduce the risk of direct nuclear war between the two superpowers. On the surface, the Vietnam War appeared to be a conflict between South Vietnam and the Viet Cong, but in reality it was a war between the United States and the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. Yet throughout the Vietnam War, in order to avoid provoking a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the United States did not dare to confront the two true adversaries—the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party—directly.