Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Masuda Hajimu, and: Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Pierre Asselin (review)

If the “origins of the Cold War” is a well-trod subject for historians, Masuda Hajimu offers an innovative approach to the topic. The Cold War, he argues, was not “something that existed as an objective situation immediately following World War II.” Instead, the Cold War was an “imagined reality” that “existed . . . because people thought that it existed.” Cold War Crucible is “a history of the fantasy of the Cold War, focusing on its imagined and constructed nature as well as the social need for such an imagined reality” (p. 2). According to Masuda, the “imagined reality” of the Cold War initially took hold in the United States, East Asia, and Europe—areas that had potent recent memories of wartime experiences. (Africa and Latin America would be slower to adopt the “Cold War” construct because they tended to view international events through a postcolonial lens.) But even in areas where the “Cold War” reality took hold, it was as much a product of local conditions as it was the reflection of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the immediate post–World War II years, the United States, Japan, and China experienced periods of intense social and political conflict. In the United States, a grass-roots conservative movement attacked groups or individuals perceived to be “un-American.” In Japan, conservatives pushed back against postwar occupation reforms intended to reshape Japanese society. In China, anger at America’s “reverse course” in Japan led to growing support for the Chinese Communist Party and vocal denunciations of America’s Guomindang allies. While all of these disputes would later be identified as part of the early Cold War, Masuda sees them as outgrowths of local political and social conditions.

It was not until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that people in the United States, Japan, and China—and in other parts of the world—began to interpret domestic politics through a Cold War lens. Particularly in areas affected by World War II, people came to see the Korean War as the beginning of a new global conflict—the first salvo in World War III. In this heightened atmosphere, the political differences that had emerged after 1945 intensified and hardened. Moreover, political and social conflicts took on a distinctly “Cold War” cast, reflecting the growing perception of a global conflict between communism and capitalism.

The Korean War has long been understood as a key event in the hardening of American and Chinese Cold War policies. Masuda echoes this view, though he explains the relationship differently. In both the United States and China, common people reacting to the conflict in Korea pressured their governments to respond firmly. On the American side, Masuda argues that public opinion influenced the Truman administration’s decisions to cross the 38th parallel and to adopt NSC-68. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Communist Party similarly responded to growing public pressure to intervene in the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Both cases illustrate “the encroachment of the social into the sphere of high politics” (p. 143). They also show that “the Cold War was not necessarily a product created through policymakers’ conduct and misconduct; numerous nameless people were, more or less, also participants in the making of such a world” (p. 144).

Cold War Crucible concludes with a section describing the suppression of dissent—often violently—during the Korean War. In Korea itself, massacres of civilians were perpetrated under the guise of eliminating Communists or class enemies. Masuda suggests that a similar dynamic was at work elsewhere: at roughly the same time, “China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries; Taiwan implemented the White Terror; the Philippines suppressed ‘un- Filipino’ activities; Japan conducted its...