How prescient was General Douglas MacArthur 70 years ago? He foresaw all of this but as usual, the experts knew best and so here we are.
“…In his memoirs, MacArthur called the Truman administration’s decision to withhold aid from the Nationalists in China during the Chinese Civil War “one of the greatest mistakes ever made in our history
The communist victory there, he warned, will have consequences that “will be felt for centuries, and its ultimate disastrous effects on the fortunes of the free world are still to be unfolded.”
MacArthur’s prescience can be seen in the events of the past decade as China’s geopolitical challenge to America’s position in what is now commonly referred to as the Indo-Pacific region has grown.
War clouds gather in the western Pacific. Taiwan’s independence remains precarious. Our geopolitical position in the Indo-Pacific and our pre-eminent position in the global order hang in the balance. More than 70 years ago, Douglas MacArthur foresaw all of this.
And yet so many of our historians praise FDR and Truman — whose administrations were riddled with communist sympathizers and whose policy errors set in motion events that led to China’s rise and its current geopolitical challenge — and dismiss MacArthur as a dangerous megalomaniac who wanted to start World War III. We should have listened to the farsighted “old soldier…”