| Publication |
2012.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In the United States, the decision to go to war has often been propelled by a singular event, a 'trigger' that both galvanises and unites, at least temporarily, the US Congress, the nation's press and the American public. The attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated US entry into the Second World War, and the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 led to American military involvement in Afghanistan. In both instances, thousands of innocent Americans had been killed on American soil by an easily identifiable, foreign enemy. The United States entry into the Korean War resulted from a somewhat different kind of trigger. While US forces were not directly attacked, there was, as President Lyndon Johnson's Deputy Undersecretary of State George Ball once wrote, 'a massive land invasion by 100,000 troops … a classical type of invasion across an established border'. Ball argued that North Korea's invasion of South Korea in June 1950 provided 'an unassailable legal and political basis for counteraction'.
|