Truman’s decision to intervene was the right one: It saved South Korea from destruction and reassured anxious allies that the West was not entering another age of appeasement. “Thank God this will not be a repetition of the past,” the French foreign minister exclaimed.27 Unfortunately, it also consigned the United States to fighting a bloody, draining conflict in a strategic backwater—a conflict that would escalate dramatically when the United States tried and failed to reunite the entire peninsula in late 1950.
