ABSTRACT
On June 25, the defense of South Korea rose from low to highest priority as US policy-makers considered the consequences of North Korea's aggression, aggression that they believed could not have occurred without Soviet instigation or support. The United States drew a clear-cut distinction between peace and war, between the political purposes of war and the conduct of the campaign in which military considerations are primary. The cost of the Truman Administration's political weakness and inability to coordinate policy and strategy, so characteristic of the American belief that the two were divorced and that diplomacy would follow the use of force, was very high. The price was to reverse Secretary Acheson's disengagement from the Chinese civil war and reinforce the hostility of the new government in Beijing toward the United States. The United States wanted a post-war world free from aggression: the United Nations was new and was widely perceived as a symbol of a more peaceful world.
