in the key theater of superpower competition. If the United States and
the Soviet Union, and their allies, were better armed than before,
there was less chance that either of the principals would employ their
forces in a manner leading to direct confrontation.

This book is an interpretive account of the major diplomatic, politi-
cal, and strategic issues of the Korean War. Rather than providing a
lengthy narrative of the international dimensions of the conflict as I
did in my 1995 volume, my approach here is issue-oriented and syn-
thetic. ⁴ My aim is to provide an overview, of interest to specialists and
general readers alike, that takes into account the vast body of new
documentation that has surfaced in recent decades.

When I began studying this event in 1968, the standard synthetic
treatment of the event was David Rees's Korea: The Limited War, which
was based almost entirely on published sources. ⁵ Then, during the
1970s a wide array of official records and private papers became avail-
able in the United States. From the Soviet side, there emerged the
memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, although their legitimacy and/or accu-
racy was questioned in some circles. ⁶ During the next decade, this
wealth of new material began to be exploited in scholarly monographs
and new narrative syntheses. ⁷

There also appeared a major new revisionist account, the first vol-
ume in Bruce Cumings's magisterial Origins of the Korean War. Cum-
ings exploited Korean-language sources as never before and chal-
lenged other treatments for their downplaying of internal Korean
factors in the coming of the war and their emphasis on Soviet and
North Korean aggressiveness. ⁸ Since the appearance during the war of
journalist I. F. Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War, a revisionist
literature had existed in the United States; but the firm grounding of
Origins in archival and Korean sources gave the genre a new legit-
imacy. ⁹ Cumings's follow-ups, a brief coauthored volume designed for
a popular audience in 1988 and then his massive second volume of
Origins two years later, ensured that the revisionist perspective on the
conflict as essentially a “civil war” would continue to receive a wide
hearing. ¹⁰

Nonetheless, by the time Cumings's second volume appeared, revi-
sionism was on the verge of facing major new challenges. As early as

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