World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Contemporary research has shown that the motivation on the Communist side was complex. When the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked Stalin’s approval for the invasion in April 1950, the Soviet dictator encouraged him. He had learned from the defection of Tito two years earlier that first-generation Communist leaders were especially difficult to fit into the Soviet satellite system that he thought imperative for Russia’s national interest. Starting with Mao’s visit to Moscow in late 1949—less than three months after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed—Stalin had been uneasy about the looming potential of China led by a man of Mao’s dominating attributes. An invasion of South Korea might divert China into a crisis on its borders, deflect America’s attention from Europe to Asia, and, in any event, absorb some of America’s resources in that effort. If achieved with Soviet support, Pyongyang’s unification project might give the Soviet Union a dominant position in Korea and, in view of the historical suspicions of these countries for each other, create a kind of counterbalance to China in Asia. Mao followed Stalin’s lead—conveyed to him by Kim Il-sung in almost certainly exaggerated terms—for the converse reason; he feared encirclement by the Soviet Union, whose acquisitive interest in Korea had been demonstrated over the centuries and was even then displayed in the demands for ideological subservience Stalin was making as a price for the Sino-Soviet alliance.