This past week marks the sixtieth anniversary of the proclamation of the People's Republic of China by Communist leader Mao Zedong. Nationalist China leader Chiang Kai-shek and the routed remnants of his army had fled to the island of Taiwan (in those days, more commonly referred to as “Formosa” in the West).
On the other side of the world, what Winston Churchill aptly termed the “Iron Curtain” had descended across Europe. Allied cooperation of World War II had disintegrated. The Soviet blockade of West Berlin, combined with oppressive occupation of Eastern Europe, prompted the United States to create the NATO alliance in the same year that Mao's movement seized all of mainland China. Moscow followed suit with the counterpart Warsaw Pact military alliance with Eastern Europe in 1955.
In late June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the ensuing bitter and bloody war profoundly changed the geopolitical map. The conflict between the Soviet Union and the U.S., termed the Cold War, suddenly was regarded in global rather than European regional terms. Washington, which had implicitly written off Taiwan along with the mainland of China, suddenly became forcefully committed to the defense of the offshore redoubt.
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