Korean War #24: UNprecedented (Patreon)

UNprecedented - get it, because UN = United Nations, and it's unprecedented because it's never happened before?! I'm a genius!

 Episode 24: UNprecedented looks at the role of the United Nations, which the US used, for a variety of reasons, to frame its intervention in Korea. Here we look at the key moments in the history of UN, and we chart its development over the late 1940s as it became more heavily involved in the issues of the post-war world. Many nations placed their faith and trust in this new order; it was eagerly hoped that it would not go the way of the League of Nations, and that the UN at least would not cower in the face of armed aggression. So it was that the UN, by summer 1950, had built upon a history of peaceful intervention, foreign debate and great expectations even before Washington determined to appeal through the UN for the act in Korea that was desired.

Although it couldn't be known at this early stage what way the Korean War would go, it was believed that the best way to legitimise the American act would be to operate through this new body, for a variety of reasons. The two resolutions on 25th and 27th June will be here examined and placed in their proper context, as will the strange absence of the Soviet Union from the UN Security Council. With no Soviet veto, everything could proceed as planned, and in this episode we return the point of Stalin's end goal - that of uniting the West against communism in Korea, and then against the Chinese. These goals were possible thanks to the UN, and thus it has to be said, as it did before, Washington again made Stalin's job much easier than it would have been had he been forced to go it alone.

As we'll note though, the US wasn't doing anything especially extraordinary by asking the UN to weigh in on the Korean issue. After all there had been Korean commissions sponsored and supported by the UN since after 1945, so it seemed only logical to many within the UN's many Korea bodies to approve of the defence of the South Korean regime, and to condemn the North in the strongest possible terms. Such condemnation, in time, would be used to justify still greater actions, and from these protocols would the several armed delegations from 16 different states emerge. All such developments were instigated here.

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Music used:
"Bring Back My Blushing Rose", by John Steel, published in 1921. Available:http://freemusicarchive.org/…/A…/Bring_Back_My_Blushing_Rose