ABSTRACT
Waiter Lippmann had never been much interested in Asia, except as a geopolitical abstraction, and his trip reinforced his conviction, as he told his readers, that the Asiatic world was "outside the reach of the military power, the economic control, and the ideological influence of the Western world." Lippmann was sure that Western concepts like democracy and Marxism had a different meaning for Asians. Moscow was trying to divert the United States from its European plans by its "bold measures" in Asia. Even though the British and the Indians were "dancing on the fringes of appeasement," the administration would not be diverted from its objectives in Europe. The only danger, Dean Acheson warned, was that his domestic critics might "sabotage" his policy. The decision to send American troops above the thirty-eighth parallel and to unify Korea by force had plunged the United States into a disastrous war with China.
