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Roosevelt and his advisors acknowledged at once the importance of this strategic peninsula for peace in Asia, advocating a postwar trusteeship to achieve Korea’s independence.
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But after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Roosevelt, and Stalin at the yalta Conference,īefore 1941, the US had no vital interests in Korea and was largely in- different to its fate. Before 1941, the US had no vital interests in Korea and was largely indifferent to its fate. Liberation in August 1945 led to division and a predictable war because the US and the Soviet Union would not allow the Korean people to decide their own future. Truman argued later in his memoirs, “was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier.” If North Korea’s aggression went “unchallenged, the world was certain to be plunged into another world war.” This 1930s history lesson prevented Truman from recognizing that the origins of this conflict dated to at least the start of World War II, when Korea was a colony of Japan. Cold War assumptions governed the immediate reaction of US leaders, who instantly concluded that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest. North Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, igniting the Korean War.
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Source: the uS Army Korean War Flickr page at.
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this picture was made just at the outbreak of the Korean War.
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