In Korea: The War Before Vietnam, Callum A. MacDonald writes with short, sharp clarity. The precision of his writing does not take away from necessary details or the importance of the Korean War in international history, especially for those involved in that conflict. The book is driven by a narrative told through official documents, robust secondary sources, and scholarship developed over nearly 35 years. Callum A. MacDonald died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 49. However, he is remembered as a historian with a broad range of interests and writing abilities with work spanning Anglo-American relations in the years prior to the Second World War, the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Battle of Crete, and others. MacDonald became Lecturer in American Comparative Studies in 1975 at Warwick University where he wrote Korea: The War Before Vietnam.[1] Written and published a decade after the end of American involvement in Vietnam, Vietnam only makes an appearance in the book’s final pages. MacDonald enters the discussion on limited war and its influence on the American conduct of war on the Korean Peninsula. Readers will find MacDonald’s discussion highly relevant for contemporary thinking around limited war and future planning for wars in an era of so-called great power competition.
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