(Adapted from an university essay already submitted and graded - yes, Turnitin, I'm copying myself)
Yes, the Vietnam War, but perhaps more so the release of American archival documents on the war in the late 1970s, led to a significant shift in the historiography of the Korean War in the 1970s and 1980s. This crystallised into an argument over whether the Korean War should be considered a civil war or an international conflict.
In an address made at the University of Virginia on 10 July 1950, the United States Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup had this to say:
No serious, honest scholar can ever have any question about it. North Korean Communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea without warning, with provocation and without justification.
Initially, historians accepted Jessup’s, and the American government’s, reasoning behind the start of the Korean War. Even during the war, the Truman Administration was already emphasising the external origins of the war by claiming that the invasion of South Korea was ordered, planned and supported by the Soviet Union (USSR). This claim was reinforced by the memoirs of American generals Clark and Ridgway, with both framing the North Korean invasion as an international conflict between communism and western liberalism. The British historian David Rees’ seminal work, Korea: The Limited War, identified Soviet encouragement as the main cause of the conflict, with such views supported by Sovietologists Mosely and Ulam. This is not to say there were no dissenting voices over the perceived orthodoxy of the war as an international conflict. Early on in 1952, the journalist I. F. Stone had suggested that South Korea deliberately initiated border skirmishes to provoke a large-scale attack by North Korea, which would then force the United States to intervene. Stone’s interpretation in The Hidden History of the Korean War was widely derided by commentators and historians as communist propaganda. From the 1950s to 1970s, a consensus had emerged that identified the Korean War as part of the wider conflict between the American and Soviet blocs.
Vietnam shattered the image of American moral superiority in its fight against communism. With the rise of left-wing thought in campuses around the world, the rightfulness of the American cause and the fundamental assumption of a world conflict between communism and democracy was challenged. Gupta’s “How Did the Korean War Begin?”, published in 1972, was the most forceful among an increasing amount of academic literature which argued South Korea had attacked first with implicit American acceptance, and that North Korea’s strike south was an act of self-defence.
However, the floodgates of revisionism did not open until the release of formerly classified American documents in the late 1970s. The new documents revealed to historians that communism in Korea had indigenous origins, instead of being an external Soviet or Chinese export. Using such evidence, the revisionist argument that the Korean War should now be identified as a civil war instead of an international conflict incited fierce debate. In Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War, Merrill argued Korea was already in a state of civil war by 1948, with a resilient communist guerrilla campaign in the south and an increasingly confident South Korean Army launching strikes across the 38th Parallel. Bruce Cumings further expanded upon this foundation in his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, a comprehensive assessment of the civil and revolutionary nature of the Korean War. His argument that America had incited the North Korean invasion to implement a “rollback” strategy of uniting Korea, as opposed to a “containment” strategy of merely resisting North Korean advances, became the new orthodoxy in the 1980s. Other scholars, such as Peter Lowe, rejected Soviet involvement in the planning of North Korea’s southern strike completely and presented it as Kim Il-sung’s own brainchild. Additionally, the revisionists also oversaw a re-evaluation of the United States Army Military Government in Korea, which was critiqued for failing to control the guerrilla war in the south and its inability to create a widely accepted Korean civilian government. This, the revisionists alleged, encouraged North Korea to take advantage of South Korea’s domestic turmoil and seek military victory through a conventional war. The release of new documents on the war and the left-wing impact of the Vietnam War saw a rising revisionist trend in the 1980s that stressed the domestic origins of the Korean War at the expense of an international interpretation.
The 1990s witnessed the renewed prominence of the old orthodoxy, with new Soviet evidence showing the major role of USSR and Chinese decision-making in the lead-up to the Korean War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the release of important documents on the Korean War from the Soviet perspective. The collaborative study Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War presented new evidence showing that the North Korean invasion was “pre-planned, blessed, and directly assisted by Stalin and his generals, and reluctantly backed by Mao at Stalin’s insistence.” Perhaps even more important was evidence that Stalin had repeatedly refused to authorise North Korean advances throughout 1949, which showed how international considerations trumped the domestic grievances of North Korea. Revisionist claims such as Cumings’ assertion of American incitement or Lowe’s dismissal of Soviet involvement accordingly lost much of its lustre when shown to be directly contradictory with new historical evidence. In an almost complete repudiation of the previous decade’s historiography, Stueck’s The Korean War: An International History could claim that “Participation in the war – its origins or its course or both – was often the result…of calculations having little to do with Korea.” With an increased awareness of the international dimension, historiography shifted to an analysis of Stalin’s motives behind delaying, and eventually endorsing, the start of the Korean War. Both Shen Zhi-hua and Kim Young-ho asserted that Stalin was more concerned with the international situation than domestic considerations in Korea. His hesitancy in authorising the North Korean invasion was due to a fear of an American response that would lead to “hot” war, while his final approval of the invasion was to preserve strategic interests in the Far East in the form of Korean warm-water ports. New Soviet evidence available in the 1990s led to a decisive shift back to the international origins of the Korean War.
Moving on to the 2000s, a more balanced view became established with more or less equal emphasis on international and domestic factors leading to war. Part of a planned trilogy, Millett’s The War for Korea, 1945-1950: A House Burning and The War for Korea, 1950-1951: They Came from the North provides, to this date, the most comprehensive overview of the road to war. While leaning towards describing the conflict as a civil war by characterising it as a clash between two Korean revolutionary movements, Millett also dedicates considerable space towards analysis of international decision-making. In They Came from the North, Millett advances his thinking further by boldly challenging the past sixty years of historiography, questioning whether the debate over civil war or international conflict is even relevant to historical discussion. To Millett, the Korean War is “both civil and international, with the two aspects inextricably interwoven.” Similarly, in Rethinking the Korean War, Stueck argues that it was the interaction of Korean and non-Korean elements that led to a decision to go to war – there was never a strict divide between internal and external factors. Kim Il-sung was the initiator of the war, but he could never move against South Korea without Stalin and Mao’s explicit approval and aid. In both Millett and Stueck’s accounts, “the Korean War can be understood only by integrating the internal and external components of its origins.” From the 2000s onward, there has been a growing reluctance to show a clear preference on domestic or international origins of the war – rather, a synthesis and interlinking of various factors seems to be the favoured approach.
The argument over the Korean War as a civil war or an international conflict is certainly not over. As recent as 2019, Jo Kyu-hyun’s dissertation, “The Rise of the South Korean Left, the Death of Unitary Socialism, and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1947,” (supervised by Cumings) has returned to an emphasis on the domestic origins of the war by investigating the southern communist guerrilla movement. The debate over the nature of the Korean War continues on.
So after this board survey, we return to the original question. Yes the Vietnam War did affect historiography by generating an atmosphere conducive to the discussion of arguments not in line with stringent American anti-communism. However, I would argue the release of archival documents in the late 1970s played a more important role in giving revisionists the firm evidence needed, as opposed to the speculative analysis of the 1950s to 1970s, to challenge previous perceptions of the Korean War.