For a brief period after teh Korean War, there was a 'Never Again' Consensus, much as after teh Vietnam War.
In the Korean War (1950-53), the United States did fight China directly and the Soviet Union indirectly, and of all Cold War crises, this one had the most potential to escalate into a world war. It was quite similar to Vietnam in the sense that the U.S. had imposed an unpopular regime on South Korea after World War II and then suppressed various rebellions and guerilla movements that attempted to overthrow it. Only after these failed in 1949-50 did North Korea invade directly. Kim Il-sung had to send Stalin 48 telegrams promising a quick and easy victory in the South before the Soviet dictator gave the green light and agreed to provide tanks, planes and artillery. Stalin, as usual, was cautious about direct confrontations with the Americans, and economical with assistance to comrades abroad. In late 1950, he was even prepared to abandon North Korea completely until Mao's intervention changed his mind. Although more successful in getting its way here than in Vietnam, the war still ended in a draw, and the fact that the U.S. failed to reunify the country or liberate the North led to greater caution in foreign affairs during the Eisenhower Administration.
General Douglas MacArthur, ironically enough, had only joined the Cold War late and reluctantly, since he feared it would undermine his democratic reforms in Japan and restore the old elite to power. After the outbreak of the Korean War, NSC 68 was implemented in full in Asia, including the expansion of U.S. aid to the French forces in Indochina and refusal of all recognition of the Communist government in China. Even Dean Acheson had his doubts about the wisdom of recognizing only the Nationalist regime on Taiwan as the 'real' China, and paid a tremendous political price for it.
Like many defeated commanders, MacArthur's worst hour came when he tried to shift the blame to anyone and everyone else, claiming Washington liberals had stabbed him in the back. By that time, of course, there were hardly any of those left in government, but the Republicans found him useful in their 1952 campaign against the Democrats, with Acheson and George Marshall as targets of opportunity. Truman had shown considerable courage in relieving the populist General, but the war undermined his administration and his party, with his approval rating falling below 30%. By 1951, half of those surveyed thought it was a mistake for the U.S. to ever have become involved in Korea, and in fact, the public was far more dovish than McCarthyite, but in the atmosphere of the early-1950s, mass protests in the streets would have been unthinkable.33
In many respects, then, Korea was much like Vietnam, complete with blame shifting, stab in the back myths, as well as being followed by a period of caution in foreign policy. One key difference, to be sure, was that America did preserve its creation in South Korea, and an environment were a modernizing elite could usher in an industrial revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. This in turn laid the basis for economic and social conditions that leading to democratization in the 1980s and 1990s-in other words, everything that did not happen later with South Vietnam.
Eisenhower and Dulles learned certain lessons from the war that could be described as a 'Post-Korea Consensus'. Embodied in the New Look policy of the 1950s, the central goal was to avoid land wars like Korea and finding other ways to intervene in the world, whether though proxies, CIA covert operations or even the threat of nuclear retaliation. Members of the Never Again Club in the army, like MacArthur, Matthew Ridgway and J. Lawton Collins shared a consensus against future land wars in the Third World, preferring to train local allies for that task. Far from abandoning the Third World to realist laissez faire, though, the New Look attempted to keep interventions there low cost, avoiding inconclusive wars like Korea that had been so divisive at home. One of the reasons Dulles became so enamored of the CIA, besides the fact that his brother ran it, was that "it promised quick results at low costs" in the Third World, avoiding public exposure and unpopular ground wars like Korea. Eisenhower used it to keep the Shah in power in 1953 and also attempted to ally with non-Communist nationalists in the Middle East.37
