The Diplomacy of War: The Case of Korea

Serge Durflinger is an assistant professor of history at the University
of Ottawa. He is the author of Lest We Forget: A History of the Last
Post Fund, 1909-1999 and Fighting from Home: The Second World War in
Verdun Quebec.

The authors of this disappointing publication seek to examine whether
Canada’s use of a multinational forum like the “Old Commonwealth”
swayed Washington’s decisionmaking during the Korean War. Despite
efforts to show examples to the contrary, even they must conclude with a
resounding “no.” What is assumed throughout this left-wing polemic
is that American policies were dangerous as a matter of course. (The
book begins with an inappropriate screed against current U.S. President
George W. Bush.) What the authors fail to ask is why the United States
should submit to the counsel of marginal powers unable even to project a
common foreign-policy voice?

Perhaps Black Rose’s habitual readers will find comfort in the
authors’ apparent ideological wisdom and unabashedly anti-American
moralizing. According to Mount and Laferriиre, an aggressive Washington
engineered elections in South Korea to install a puppet regime, thereby
provoking North Korea, which felt obliged to respond with an invasion of
the South in June 1950. In what nearly amounts to an apologia for Soviet
diplomacy in the post-1945 period, they suggest, citing Soviet archival
sources, that Moscow had no plans to forcibly spread its political
doctrine in the Asia–Pacific area. Then why did the Soviets arm North
Korea to the teeth?

What this book does reveal is that the “Old Commonwealth” was
simply no longer a relevant military or political bloc in a rapidly
changing world. Bilateral ties with the United States were what mattered
to the individual Commonwealth states, with each seeking to secure its
own national interests. The book focuses largely on Canada’s normally
minor divergences with America before, during, and following the war.
“If ever there was an international event where Ottawa’s opinions
might have mattered to official Washington,” write the authors, “the
Korean War should have been it.” But why? Even they admit Canada had
no interests in Korea and limited influence in Washington.

The writing is sophomoric, choppy, and repetitive; the editing is no
better. Read the work of Denis Stairs and Jeffrey Grey instead.