Different Korea, Truman runs and wins 1952?

WI

1) China and Stalin talk the North Koreans out of starting the war or at least posptpone it to 1953 (possibly different public signals by the US)

2) McArthur dies after Inchon, via back channels Mao reassured about China not being invaded if it stays out and a clear victory is achieved, maybe no North Korea, maybe a much smaller one.

Does this have a big impact on US politics?
 
WI

1) China and Stalin talk the North Koreans out of starting the war or at least posptpone it to 1953 (possibly different public signals by the US)

2) McArthur dies after Inchon, via back channels Mao reassured about China not being invaded if it stays out and a clear victory is achieved, maybe no North Korea, maybe a much smaller one.

Does this have a big impact on US politics?

I always hate it when people threadcrap, but I can't see this happening. Back channels or not, Mao didn't have any trust for the United States, especially at this period, when he was perhaps his most militant and overconfident.

Rollback of North Korea, if achievable, would probably net him another term, but it's impossible to achieve that without Chinese intervention. I'd look for another foreign policy PoD. He did have quite a few successes anyway (Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift etc.) which didn't do it, but there might be some other things you can do.

I feel like Adlai Stevenson would actually do better against Eisenhower if foreign policy was less of a focus, and would likely win if anyone other than Eisenhower was the Republican nominee.
 
WI

1) China and Stalin talk the North Koreans out of starting the war or at least posptpone it to 1953 (possibly different public signals by the US)

2) McArthur dies after Inchon, via back channels Mao reassured about China not being invaded if it stays out and a clear victory is achieved, maybe no North Korea, maybe a much smaller one.

Does this have a big impact on US politics?

What if the UN commander simply stops at cutting off the North Koreans after the Inchon landings and does NOT invade North Korea?

Say MacArthur stops a sniper round/steps in front of a truck after his forces take Seoul. His replacement is less of an egomaniac and decides that cutting of and destroying the Norths army, currently a Pusan, is possible and all that UN intervention was aimed at achieving.

MacArthur being replaced by someone with a smaller ego would not be hard. Replacing him with someone with more of an ego, that would be hard. Not invading North Korea should be easy enough, or at least keeping UN forces from doing it. If the ROK sends its army north that would be, um, interesting in a number of ways.

But it would not, as I understand it, be the same as a mostly American army doing the same thing from Mao's perspective. At least that is what I understand the Chinese themselves were saying at the time in radio broadcasts.

The UN force digging in along the official border would trigger a different response from Peking than driving for the Yalu while talking about invading China while we are here anyway. Hopefully a less militant one.

A quick victory then peace would change the 50's in various ways.
 
What if the UN commander simply stops at cutting off the North Koreans after the Inchon landings and does NOT invade North Korea?

Republicans in 1952: "Truman lost China, then (through Acheson's "defensive perimeter" speech) practically invited North Korea to attack, then after Americans had died in the ensuing war, deprived MacArthur of a chance for victory and settled for the indefensible boundaries that had led to the war in the first place."

What if the war had been avoided altogether? Even that would not necessarily make Truman very popular. Korea was only one of the reasons Truman was unpopular in 1952. (Others were corruption in government--the "mess in Washington" as the GOP called it; the "loss" of China; the issue of communism in government, which was gaining some traction even before Korea because of the Hiss case, the atomic spies, etc.; and the perceived political ineptness of an administration that couldn't get its program through a Democratic Congress) Truman's job approval numbesr were already below 40 percent in the first half of 1950 (the start of the Korean War temporarily gave him a boost because of the "rally around the president in times of emergency" effect). See the chart of Truman's approval ratings at http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/p...ings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx

Of course it is possible that without the tensions created by the Korean War, Eisenhower would decide not to run, and Taft would presumably be a weaker candidate. But I would not rule out even Taft beating Truman in 1952. Apart from specific reasons for Truman's unpopularity, there would just be a general sense that eleven years as president would be too much for peacetime--a lot of people would be against the idea of a third term for Truman, even though the 22nd Amendment specifically allowed it.

I do think that *if* there is no Korean War, and *if* the GOP nominates Taft in 1952, and *if* Truman decides not to run again, Stevenson might well defeat Taft in 1952. But even that is not a certainty--after twenty years of controlling the White House, there will be a lot of wear and tear for the Democrats.

(On the positive side, the Democrats will have prosperity working for them--but maybe not as much as in OTL, since the OTL prosperity of 1952 was in part fueled by the war.)
 
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I do think that *if* there is no Korean War, and *if* the GOP nominates Taft in 1952, and *if* Truman decides not to run again, Stevenson might well defeat Taft in 1952. But even that is not a certainty--after twenty years of controlling the White House, there will be a lot of wear and tear for the Democrats.

OTOH, OTL the GOP had a more or less uninterrupted control of the White House from 1861 to 1913, with Johnson and Cleveland's two separate terms being the only exceptions. If Lincoln hadn't been shot, you would have had 24 years of GOP presidents - of course, a surviving Lincoln creates a large batch of butterflies.

To be sure, The Great Depression wasn't as damaging for the GOP as the Civil War was for the Democrats (economic mismanagement vs collusion in a war killing hundreds of thousands), but it may be that voters aren't as averse to one party holding power for long stretches of time as we think.
 
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