It was a huge mistake not to have let MacArthur and LeMay take out Mao and the entire PLA in 1950. We could have annihilated them then.
Yet, once again , ass dragging, pantywaist, civilian politicians set the stage for a much worse future .
We had the full capability , but we failed to pull the trigger. Look how the dark and evil hand of the ChiComs has affected the world ever since. Including against the Chinese themselves .
Free Tibet
Actually there was a much better opportunity.
When the Truman administration abandoned our staunch ally Chang Kai Shek in the Chinese civil war against Mao right after ww2. All we had to do was continue sending weapons and aid. There were literally 100s of millions of Chinese fighting for the US. At the most supply some air support.
Just a few years later Joe McCarthy proved the government was full of communist spies and sympathizers. McCarthy is the most falsely smeared man in US history, the leaked Venona files after the USSR fell proved he was correct on most accusations.
From The Washington Post:
“ In the 1940s, the NSA had a top-secret program called Venona which intercepted (and much later decoded) messages between Moscow and its American agents. The recent publication of a batch of Venona transcripts gives evidence that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were rife with communist spies and political operatives who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, much as their anti-communist opponents charged. The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.”