Is there any chance either that the North Korean leadership would not take the great gamble it did or that Stalin + May (or other Soviet and Chinese leaders) would have stopped the war
The perception in the Politburo at the time was that the Truman Doctrine only held for Western Europe, this was reinforced by the rapid rate that US forces withdrew from Asia; the last US forces withdrew from the Korean peninsula in 1949 – North Korea invaded the south in June of the following year. Had the Truman administration been more categorical in its statements that it would oppose the military expansion of communism and had they maintained even a small force in South Korea, Stalin would have been very unlikely to sanction Kim Il-Sung’s plan.Is there any chance either that the North Korean leadership would not take the great gamble it did or that Stalin + May (or other Soviet and Chinese leaders) would have stopped the war
It might have been possible to avoid the division of Korea completely if the US had first attacked Korea's large Cheju Island, rather than Okinawa for use as a base against Japan and followed that attack up with an attack on Japanese forces in Korea, say in May 1945. I think that it is reasonable to assume that at least Cheju and quite possibly Korea itself could have been occupied without the loss of life involved in taking Okinawa. The attack would have had to have been at Anju, where the Korean Peninsula was at it's narrowest to prevent the Japanese Kwantung Army, then stationed in Manchuria from meeting the Americans in an unfavorable position and be designed to keep the Kwantung Army away from Japan. The US would then have had the inside track in helping members of the Korean Independence Movement to craft a government for newly occupied Korea.
I notice that the OP involves stopping or postponing the Korean War, and some of the responses so far have largely involved avoiding the partition by having the Americans control the peninsula.
All I really know about this time period comes from watching reruns of M*A*S*H, so I thought I'd ask: Would it be more feasible that the Soviets invade and control the whole peninsula? That, too, would stop or postpone the war, right?
IIRC, the Korean War, like the Gulf War, started partly because an American diplomat wasn't clear in saying, "No, we won't allow you to invade our ally, and we'll fight back if you do invade." I don't recall just which American diplomat was the culprit in the case of Korea, but the war might have been stymied with some clear warnings...
Actually, if memory serves, it was Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, who omitted Korea in a description of the US's "defense perimeter" in Asia. The communists took this to mean that we wouldn't intervene.