1949 Redux: Who Lost China?

Chiang Kai-Shek And Mao Zedong (NY Books)

72 years ago the United States suffered a "geopolitical disaster" that makes Afghanistan look like a stubbed toe.

The current parallels to "Who Lost China?" are obvious: in 1949 the intelligence and diplomatic agencies showed that they had totally misjudged the situation on the ground, and the widespread corruption of the U.S.-supported Nationalist government made the success of "our side" impossible.

Wikipedia: [bold added]

During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt had assumed that China, under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership, would become a great power after the war, along with the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

John Paton Davies Jr. was among the "China Hands" who were blamed for the loss of China. While they predicted a Communist victory, they did not advocate one. Davies later wrote that he and the Foreign Service officers in China reported to Washington that material support to Chiang Kai-shek during the war against Japan would not transform the inefficient and corrupt Nationalist government, adding that Roosevelt's poor choice of personal emissaries to China contributed to the failure of his policy. Historian Arthur Waldron argues that the president mistakenly thought of China as a great power securely held by Chiang Kai-shek, whose hold on power was actually tenuous. Davies predicted that after the war China would become a power vacuum, tempting to Moscow, which the Nationalists could not deal with. In that sense, says Waldron, "the collapse of China into communism was aided by the incompetence of Roosevelt's policy."

In August 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson issued the China White Paper, a compilation of official documents to defend the administration's record and argue that there was little that the United States could have done to prevent Communist victory.

In 1949, the fall of the Kuomintang government was widely viewed within the United States as a catastrophe...At the time, Acheson's China White Paper with its catalog of $2 billion worth of American aid provided to China since 1946 was widely mocked as a lame excuse for allowing what was widely seen as a geopolitical disaster which allowed the formation of a Sino-Soviet bloc with the potential to dominate Eurasia.

One '50's parallel that I hope doesn't repeat: the subsequent "witch hunt" by Congress, particularly Sen. Joseph McCarthy, searching for those "who lost China." The accusations went far beyond incompetence to treason and ruined some individuals who were only marginally involved.

In my humble opinion, the backlash against the Afghan debacle won't abate, the reckoning will come, and the establishment should pray the investigation is as finely targeted as the American rules of engagement in Afghanistan.