> <i>"With the comfort and hindsight of a half-century,
President Harry Truman's decision to
commit American power to save South Korea
from Communist aggression in late June 1950
stands as perhaps America's finest moment of the
Cold War. [...] By dispatching the 24th
Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions from comfortable
occupation duty in Japan to death and
destruction in Korea in mid-summer 1950, the
United States actually did nothing less than save
the world from a global conflagration."</i><p>I spent two-thirds of the article waiting to find out how, exactly, the Korean War prevented Armageddon. TL;DR: A squabble between Communist states was looking likely to come to open war, and my countrymen planned to respond by nuking the Soviets and starting World War III for some fucking reason. Fortunately, our strong defense of South Korea convinced Stalin that we actually <i>were</i> crazy enough to start WW3 over Yugoslavia, so he backed down.<p>Further TL;DR: Fifty thousand red-blooded American soldiers nobly laid down their lives to protect the world from the psychopathic nuclear aggression of...America. This was clearly one of America's finest moments.