Underestimating our Asian enemies nearly led to defeat in the Korean War

Darrell Todd Maurina
9 min readMar 17, 2023

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the armistice that, on July 27, 1953, ended the hostilities of the Korean War, it’s worth looking back at what went wrong, and how mistakes similar to those made seven decades ago may today lead to dire consequences caused by an underestimation of the rising power of China. The attached article from The Atlantic gives a good analysis, written shortly after the armistice, of how American leaders thought what had once been expected to be an easy victory turned into a stalemate. Underestimating our enemy and misjudging what the Koreans and Chinese were capable of doing to the American army was a large part of the problem.

Here’s the link: Our Mistakes in Korea — The Atlantic

How could America go from defeating Japan in World War II to being surrounded in the Pusan Perimeter barely five years later?

We live in a world today in which too many people raise a cry of “racism” and blame it for all problems that befall us, but that doesn’t mean the word doesn’t apply in some cases. Chinese and North Korean forces, knowingly or otherwise, perfectly applied the advice of the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu to mislead enemies into underestimating the abilities of those on the other side of the fight.

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Darrell Todd Maurina
Darrell Todd Maurina

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Mao very clearly stated that he would intervene if US or coalition forces came within 10 miles of the Yalu River. MacArthur overreached his authority as a commander and decided that it was inevitable that the US was going to have to fight a war…...