I just personally feel like whenever war is taught, we learn about the World Wars, a tiny bit about the Korean War and way more about Vietnam. Just wondering why it seems like the Korean War wasn’t as important as the others.

Do you mean "wasn't as important" as others in terms of history or geopolitics, or "wasn't as important" in terms of public perception?

Because public perception doesn't always mirror historical or geopolitical importance.

The Korean War is called "the Forgotten War" for a lot of reasons, despite it being one of the largest wars fought in the post-World War 2 era. In terms of public perception, there are many contributing reasons:

• It was book-ended between World War II, the largest war in human history, and Vietnam War, an incredibly divisive and politically charged time at home in the US
• It was during a time of economic prosperity at home, and with much of the world recovering from World War II, it didn't occupy as much of the minds of people
• Television was in its infancy, unlike in Vietnam and it also wasn't a total war, like WW2

One other factor to consider: the Korean War ended in armistice and so the two sides are technically still at war with one another.

All the news about North Korea this past year has certainly brought that conflict back to the attention of many. It is one of the last vestiges of the Cold War, and one of the few places still likely for land warfare in Eastern Asia, as Robert D. Kaplan wrote in Asia's Cauldron.

And it certainly wasn't geopolitically irrelevant - it's just that many of its effects are still being felt today and so we don't have the full picture yet of what it all means.

If you look at American foreign policy and military doctrine, for example, you'll see that the Korean War saw the highest post WW2 military spending, as a % of GDP, jumping from ~8% to nearly 16% during the war.

Years prior, the Air Force had successfully lobbied to cancel the USS United States, a new class of 'supercarriers' for the Navy on the grounds that any future war would be settled by strategic bombers dropping atomic bombs. This led to the Revolt of the Admirals (as a side note, this piece was written at Maxwell Air Force Base's Air War College by a former flight instructor of mine...).

The Korean War confirmed that not all wars were going to be fought with atomic bombs and that traditional/conventional military forces - tanks and infantry of the Army and Marines, naval forces of the Navy, and tactical aircraft - were all required.

The aggression by North Korea reshaped much of US foreign policy for the Cold War too. As Jay Taylor argues in The Generalissimo, the US started paying more attention to Chiang Kai Shek and his forces on Taiwan, after having been much more 'hands-off' with the Chinese Civil War. The US began to take a more active role in Cold War politics.

Truman also entered the war without seeking a declaration of war, instead calling this a 'police action' under the auspices of the United Nations. This was, of course, the first major test of the United Nations against outright naked aggression in the post-WW2 era: and aided by the Soviet boycott of the UN, the Security Council authorized a force, to be led by the US, to repel the North Koreans.

As you can imagine, that's set quite a precedent for US foreign policy since then.

And all of this is before we discuss the impact the war had on South Korea - now a thriving liberal democracy with a global economy - or that of China, a country whose future and its impact on the world is still being written.

Long story short: public perception hasn't mirrored the actual major impact the Korean War had on the US and the world, and that war still affects us to this day