ABSTRACT

For the first time in twenty-five years Americans and Europeans are openly using the word 'isolationism', wrongly, perhaps, at least if the term is used in the sense of the external behavior of the United States between 1921 and 1939. In Korea regular armies were confronting each other on a continuous front. The talks at Panmunjon were dragging on, Mao Tse-tung's plenipotentiaries refusing Chinese prisoners the choice of repatriation to Taiwan or the mainland. As compared with the Korean War, there were two basic differences with regard to the Vietnam War, even if both were justified by the same doctrine of respect for demarcation lines; in the summer of 1950 the Soviet representatives had contended that the Korean War was a civil war, and, in point of fact, the invasion had followed vain attempts by the North to instigate guerrilla warfare in the South.