From book A Force So Swift
“While Mao and Stalin courted [December 1949] and snubbed, each other in Moscow, Truman and his staff worked to complete their new containment strategy.
For hawks like MacArthur, any such effort had to begin with Taiwan, from which they hoped to start rolling back Mao’s conquests.
[Secretary of State] Acheson, on the other hand, believed the United States would have to accept the reality of Mao’s victory—including, eventually, on Taiwan—and go from there.
“It seems to me inevitable we are going to live on this globe with a vast number of people who think as oppositely as we do as it is possible for human beings to think,” Acheson had explained to his audience in a speech at at the War College.
‘We must understand for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.’”
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