re: #190 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)

China had been sold out to the Communists since Truman (with Marshall as SoS) hadn’t militarily intervened into what would have probably been Vietnam x20 (or worse) in order to save a very corrupt Nationalist Chinese government that pretty much was incapable of running the country, was at least partially fascist in it’s core, and in all likelihood was not salvageable anyways.

I recently read a book about the Truman Administration’s China policy, and your analysis is pretty much spot-on. Part of the problem (if not the main one) was that for most of the late ’40s, Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalists kept reassuring the US that everything was going just great, as Mao and the Communists kept capturing province after province and city after city. By the time it became obvious that the Kuomintang’s days as a mainland regime were numbered, it was too late for the US do much about it: so the “fall of China” came as something of a surprise to the American public. Which, coupled with the equal “surprise” of the Soviet atomic bomb test (1949) was quickly exploited by Red-baiting politicians to fan anti-communist hysteria for political gain. Which was no surprise at all…..