Ebook: A Guerra entre China e Estados Unidos na Coréia: da Escalada às Negociações de Cessar-Fogo

In recent years, there has been an increasing concern about the possibility of a war between China and the United States over influence in Asia, with global implications, mainly due to China's rise and hasty North Korean actions. What very few imply is that has already happened. China and the United States have already waged war with each other over North Korea's autonomy, Asia's balance of power and the international political status quo between 1950 and 1953.
The book takes the Sino-American War as the contemporary classic case for studies on limited warfare, coalition warfare, coercive diplomacy, Sino-American relations, and North Korea. To accomplish that, it recovers Carl von Clausewitz's theory of limited for the analysis and treatment of that war as a source of reflection and learned lessons. It recounts and reconstructs the history of the war between China and the United States on the Korean Peninsula between December 1950 and July 1951. That covers from the mutual recognition of belligerence between them through the alternations of their political objectives, offensives and defensives, successes and failures until they reached a strategic balance that enabled the opening of ceasefire negotiations.
As contributions, the book, first, minutely infers the causal relations among political conditions and institutions, strategic possibilities, the Korean theater of operations, the commanders and combatant forces involved, the war plans, diplomatic negotiations between and within the two coalitions, the campaigns and battles of this war. Second, it provides an empirical contribution by organizing and synthesizing Western and Asian primary and secondary sources. Third, the book has an original approach, by offering a comparative study of China and the United States’ institutions, policies, plans, commanders and forces from political, strategic, logistical and tactical levels of analysis.
The book has two general arguments, and others two specific arguments directed to China and the United States’ performances.
Regarding the study of Sino-American War, the book argues, first, that the internationalized civil war between the two Koreas was an important factor in the outbreak of the war between China and the United States, but marginal to its development and resolution. Second, it develops that the understanding of that war is reduced if the characteristics of their political motivations and limited means and the need to correlate diplomatic developments between the two sides and their respective military operations are not considered.
Furthermore, the book searches to support the argument that China had no need, nor did its combatant forces have strategic, logistical and tactical conditions for a long and intensive offensive at the turn of 1950 and 1951. Essentially, the Chinese were unable to provide a debacle strategy over the U.S. forces. By January 14, 1951, the U.S. forces had retreated to the southern portion of South Korea, abandoned Seoul, and, more importantly, the U.S. government had granted the negotiating agenda proposed by China, containing as items: the recognition of the new Chinese communist regime, its inclusion to the United Nations and conducting in China a conference to discuss the geometry of power in Asia. Nonetheless, this apex was illusory. The Chinese forces in Korea were unable to defend these objects, let alone additional means to put pressure on the United States beyond them, in order to give the new positive Chinese political objectives. Mao Tse-Tung should have kept the objectives of the war limited and accepted the opening of negotiations as long as he had an advantage in the theater of operations. This condition of advantage already existed in December 1950, before the New Year's Offensive. This, in fact, began the exhaustion of Chinese strategic and diplomatic advantages.
Finally, the book points out that the United States made two serious mistakes. The first mistake was that they regarded the Korean War as an isolated act from the rest of Asia. That is, it never properly considered the effects of the war on China. Consequently, the second mistake was that the United States was unable to organize a decisive response to the Chinese intervention, giving Mao and Stalin time and the possibility of strategic and diplomatic initiatives. The strategic surprise of the Chinese intervention caused such shock and helplessness that the United States had not been able to draw an effective course of action for nearly three months. Had the United States recognized Chinese involvement more quickly, they could, for instance, have prepared for the establishment of lines and points of defense from the beginning or, at least, since an earlier stage of the war against China. These errors were identified by Matthew Ridgway when he took command of the Eighth Army and underpinned caution in designing his plan and each operation.