| Summary/Abstract |
During the Cold War, the United States preferred to husband, rather than expend, its military power. The idea was not to fight but to defend, deter, and contain, a cold peace infinitely preferable to nuclear cataclysm. When U.S. policymakers strayed from this principle, attempting to unify the Korean Peninsula in 1950 [1] or deploying combat troops to Vietnam in the 1960s [2], the results proved unhappy in the extreme.
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