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The Korean War has become an important subject of study since declassification of state papers from Western, Soviet and Chinese archives. New light has been shed on North Korea's decision to invade South Korea in June 1950, Soviet and American policy-making during the war, and Chinese intervention in 1950. This book presents a re-examination of the Korean War in several dimensions. Through a close study of a wide variety of documents, it analyses the thinking that governed British, American and Chinese policy-making in the war. It examines why and how Britain came to agree to expand the Korean War into a US/UN invasion of North Korea. It also demonstrates how US policy-makers made North Korea's conquest a necessary project to undertake. It addresses how the Korean War interactions that took place in the war's first year could have been constituted differently, and how different responses by nations were possible and would have altered the conflict in important ways. Finally, it shows how the standard explanations of the war in international relations theory, inherited from foundational approaches, are misleading or incomplete.