The US diplomatic historian who reframed the Korean War as a substitute for World War III and led the post-revisionist challenge to Cumings
"In many ways, the Korean War was the dress rehearsal for World War III. Since we avoided that third global war, veterans of Korea should have a sense they were involved in a very important event that was absolutely critical to shaping the world of today."
A US diplomatic historian and the leading post-revisionist scholar of the Korean War, Stueck argued in his 1995 The Korean War: An International History that the conflict functioned, by its timing, course, and outcome, as a substitute for World War III. Drawing on archives from seven countries, he pushed back against Bruce Cumings's revisionist framing of the war as primarily a civil conflict, re-situating it within the international politics of the Cold War. Over three decades at the University of Georgia, he established the diplomatic-history paradigm of Korean War studies and helped move the conflict from the 'forgotten war' to a central theater of Cold War history.
Career Timeline
- 1977Ph.D. in History, Brown University
- 1981Published The Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea
- 1982–2012Professor of History, University of Georgia; retired as Distinguished Research Professor
- 1995Senior Fulbright Scholar, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul
- 1995Published The Korean War: An International History (Princeton University Press)
- 2002Published Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History