Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rich, Kelly M

Titel

Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption

Ist Teil von

• Representations (Berkeley, Calif.), 2023-08, Vol.163 (1), p.51-78

Ort / Verlag

Berkeley: University of California Press Books Division

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• T. R. Fehrenbach’s classic history of the Korean War, This Kind of War (1962), famously calls the conflict “not a test of power—because neither antagonist used full powers—but a test of wills.”1 Originally subtitled A Study in Unpreparedness, it describes a US that learned the hard way what it took to fight a limited proxy war abroad. The first chapter, “Seoul, Saturday Night,” recounts the eve of the Korean War in anticipatory detail, with the pathos of retrospective knowledge. Surveying the American colony and its embassy bars, the narrator observes: Over tax-free liquor, the colony laughed over Foster’s [John Foster Dulles] visit, and over the official who had been caught keeping North Korea’s Number One female spy. This man had even bought the woman a short-wave radio, and it was said the ROK’s would shoot her. In spite of American influence, the ROK’s were still extremely brutal to...