And so they were run out of China, and were forced to take refuge in the island stronghold of Taiwan (then called Formosa). The nationalists were too corrupt, too compromised, and too disfavored by the rural population. Since the Second World War, the US had lavished training and money on the Chinese nationalist forces, and assumed that they would eventually prevail. Since the early 20 th century, America’s elites had had something of an infatuation with China and her culture, a product of the brisk trade that had been carried with the country since the early 19 th century. When communist forces took power in China in 1949, the shock to the West was profound. Neither should it be forgotten that eastern Europeans genuinely feared and hated the Soviet Union to a degree that equaled-indeed, probably even exceeded-their fear of Germany during the 1940s. The lessons of Munich in 1938 were then fresh on everyone’s mind there was a sense that communism needed to be confronted forcefully in a way that 1930s Germany had not. In 1948, for example, a communist regime was installed in Czechoslovakia in a blatant takeover about which the United States and Britain could do nothing. Their basic freedoms were ground under Moscow’s heel. Their intelligentsias were exiled, repressed, or liquidated. These eastern European client states were compelled to host Russian occupation forces. Free movement of peoples and goods was not permitted. After his victory in the Second World War, Stalin had installed a buffer zone in eastern Europe along his borders, from which the West was excluded. Soviet Russia was a totalitarian state that tolerated not the slightest domestic dissent.

Stalin still ran the show, and he ran it the way he always had: that is, with an iron fist. We so easily forget that the Soviet Union of 1950 was nothing at all like the Soviet Union of the 1980s.

Consider the threat posed by the major communist powers: the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.

There is so much of that era’s political history that has already slipped from the collective memory.

The Korean War broke out seventy years ago, a span of time long enough for its chief lessons to begin to be covered up by the silt of time. In the end, it is always a matter of choice. Some eras, forged in strife and hardship, embrace history’s lessons, and consume narratives of past conflict with an eager inquisitiveness other epochs, softened by luxury and lassitude, are largely immune to the lessons of the past. It is a question of what value we place on the lessons. There are no “forgotten wars.” We may choose to talk about them, to write about them, or to learn from them.

The Korean War by Max Hastings