How the West could impose an Armistice
Why the Korean War is the right model for Ukraine, and 10 clues from history for today’s decision-makers…
May 31, 2024
Many today have the notion that the Korean Armistice was a wholesome affair, and a welcomed relief. It wasn’t. It was bitterly opposed, from all directions.
South Korea’s President Syngman Rhee was against it – and led demonstrations in opposition to it. The North was ambivalent. Stalin (until his death in March 1953) was deeply opposed. Eisenhower’s own Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was against it, as was much of the US Congress/Senate. Eisenhower’s biographer, Stephen E. Ambrose: “[There was] a near revolt by Republican senators against their own Administration… [Republican leader in the Senate Styles] Bridges and [Joseph] McCarthy believed that ‘freedom-loving people’ should applaud Rhee’s defiance of the armistice.” But bringing about the armistice ultimately came to be seen as one of the Eisenhower administration’s greatest achievements.
So how did it come about? And what clues might the example provide decision-makers today in view of Ukraine?
Illuminating a middle path between Western hawks and isolationists, here are 10 lessons from how the conflict was brought to a close…
1) Zelensky would not personally have to sign an armistice
The Korean Armistice agreement has signatures from the US, North Korea, Korean People’s Army representatives, and China. The South Korean government itself never signed the agreement, due to President Rhee’s refusal to accept having failed militarily to unify Korea.
A provocative idea, to be sure, but could an armistice be reached in Ukraine without President Zelensky’s signature? This would emulate Korea.
The signed Korean Armistice agreement, July 27, 1953
2) The enlightened clause of 13d
Paragraph 13d of the Korean Armistice agreement mandated that neither side introduce new weaponry into Korea, other than piece-for-piece replacements of equipment.
The Armistice agreement reads: “Cease the introduction into Korea of reinforcing combat aircraft, armored vehicles, weapons, and ammunition… [weaponry] may be replaced on the basis of piece-for-piece of the same effectiveness and type… Every incoming shipment of these items shall be made to the Military Armistice Commission and the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission [comprising Sweden, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Poland].”
This is a clue in how to grant security guarantees while being sensitive to an adversary’s desire for arms restrictions for a non-allied country on its border.
13d from the Korean Armistice agreement: “may be replaced on the basis of piece-for-piece of the same effectiveness and the same type... every incoming shipment of these items shall be made to the… Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission”
3) How to do a security guarantee for Ukraine?
Professor Stephen Kotkin of Stanford has the answer. In conversation with Peter Robinson:
NATO cannot bring a country into the alliance while that country is at war. It’s just not really thinkable. But NATO is not the only option here. You can have what I call ‘bilateral-plus’. What’s bilateral-plus? Bilateral is like what we [the US] have with South Korea. The ‘plus’ part is that others may want to join the bilateral. For example, Poland might want to join, or the Baltic states, or Scandinavian states. You don’t have to jump from nothing into NATO. You can go from a US-led ‘bilateral-plus’. This security guarantee still needs to be sold to the American public. But if you get a bilateral-plus [after an armistice], then you can have an EU accession process.
Encouragingly, the US State Department is already hard at work on this.
State Department: “Negotiations on US-Ukraine Bilateral Security Agreement Continue... The US is among 32 countries pursuing long-term bilateral security arrangements with Ukraine… nine countries have signed such an agreement”
4) How to put sensible limits on this security guarantee?
The US-South Korea Mutual Defence Treaty was signed on October 1, 1953, and ratified by the US Senate in January 1954. The treaty was signed with an understanding that the US was only obligated to come to South Korea’s aid in the event of an external armed attack – in territory controlled behind the truce lines.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the Senate, December 1953:
[The treaty] defines the area within which it is to operate, namely in territories now under the respective administrative control of either party, or hereafter recognized by one of the parties as lawfully brought under the administrative control of the other. This provision is designed to take cognizance of the fact that the Republic of Korea presently has effective control over only part of Korea. If either contracting state should initiate an armed attack against any territory not under its administrative control when the treaty was signed or thereafter recognized by the other as lawfully brought under the administrative control of the first, the treaty would not apply. Under its terms the treaty could continue to be applicable in event that a political settlement unifying Korea is reached.
5) How to sell this to the American people?
Again, Professor Stephen Kotkin shows precisely how to do this.
All wars are about winning the peace. Wars are generally a miscalculation. They generally don’t turn out the way people hope or expect. They rarely deliver the advantages that the people who start them think. But it’s not the war, per se; it’s the peace you should focus on.
The US in Afghanistan won the war, but then we lost the peace. In Vietnam, the US lost the war and it won the peace. Vietnam is a remarkably pro-American country, despite the atrocities the Americans committed there. The people there today are incredibly warm to Americans.
This is really interesting. You can not only win a war and lose the peace, you can lose a war and win the peace. How do you win the peace in Ukraine? How should we define victory in the war if our goal is to win the peace?
This is a criminal aggression under international law – what Russia has done. But we can talk about victory as: Ukraine getting into the European Union, and Ukraine getting some sort of security guarantee.
Ukraine needs the mechanism of European Union accession to transform its domestic institutions. To go from a weakly institutionalized, corrupt state, to more like a European state – with rule of law, an open society, free and open media, and prosperity. And security guarantees so that a rebuilt Ukraine isn’t destroyed again.
What might that EU accession process and security guarantees look like? Those are worthy of debate, and are being debated – and that’s very positive. But to get to that road, you need an armistice.
You don’t need to get all of your territory back in order to start the process of European Union accession, transformation of institutions, and rebuilding the country in a new economy with some security arrangements.
It would, of course, be better if you got your territory. But it would be much better if you started the process with an armistice of gaining a Ukraine that the Ukrainians need. Getting however much of Ukraine you can control, and transforming it into a European country. ‘Joining the West’ is how we would put it.
How do you get an armistice? How do you get to the point where you can start that process? That’s a better definition of victory, and that’s how you win the peace.
If you look at the Korean peninsula, of course it’s a very unsatisfactory outcome. It’s only an armistice. It’s not a peace treaty. They’re technically still at war. But there’s not large-scale fighting. On the other side of that demilitarized zone, with the American security umbrella, in the absence of a peace treaty, they’ve rebuilt one of the most successful societies on the planet. It’s unbelievably impressive what they did.
Again: it’s not perfect. It would have been much better to get a peace treaty. But hey, look what they’ve achieved. An outcome like that for Ukraine would be a miracle. It would be a gift. And it would not necessarily involve Ukraine acknowledging loss of territory. South Korea doesn’t acknowledge that the Korean peninsula is divided forever. Quite the contrary. But in the meantime, they’ve rebuilt… [This is] how Ukraine could win the peace.
6) How to get Ukraine to the negotiating table?
There is presently a decree in place from President Zelensky ruling out the potential for high-level diplomatic talks from Ukraine.
Zelensky decree rules out Ukraine talks with Putin as ‘impossible’
Dr Carter Malkasian, author of The Korean War: “Rhee [President of South Korea] vociferously opposed the armistice. He wanted Korea unified and all Chinese forces withdrawn from Korea. Koreans filled the streets of Seoul and other cities throughout South Korea to demonstrate. Most South Koreans supported President Rhee’s stance that an armistice should not be concluded until North Korea was liberated. Rhee was intransigent.”
Eisenhower’s biographer, Stephen E. Ambrose, goes further:
[In 1953] Walter Robertson [Assistant Secretary of State] and General Clark [Commander of United Nations forces] were conferring daily with South Korean President Rhee, threatening him with an American pull-out if he did not cooperate in the armistice, promising him virtually unlimited American aid if he did. Rhee resisted the pressure, helped by reports from the [United] States that seemed to indicate a near revolt by Republican senators against their own Administration. [Republican Senator for Vermont] Ralph Flanders had said that Robertson and Clark were putting ‘us in the position of threatening the Korean government with an attack from the rear while the Republic of Korea Army were attacking the Communists at the front’. [Republican leader in the Senate Styles] Bridges and [Joseph] McCarthy believed that ‘freedom-loving people’ should applaud Rhee’s defiance of the armistice. An Old Guard representative introduced a resolution in the House commending Rhee for releasing the [North Korean] prisoners [an act which severely compromised armistice talks]. And on July 5, the acting majority leader, Senator Knowland blamed Eisenhower for a ‘breach’ with Rhee and announced his support for Korean unification before any armistice agreement was signed. Despite the clamor, Eisenhower insisted that Robertson and Clark be firm. They were, and ultimately persuaded Rhee that it was futile for South Korea to try to go it alone. On July 8 [15 days ahead of the Korean Armistice Agreement being signed], Rhee finally issued a public statement promising to cooperate.
Military historian Donald W. Boose Jr: “Rhee finally agreed to abide by the armistice only after receiving a promise of future US support, a mutual security treaty with the United States, and a major aid package – and after a series of heavy Chinese attacks aimed specifically at South Korean units nearly destroyed two Republic of Korea Army divisions.”
It’s notable that in 1952 (two years into the war) President Rhee altered domestic law to guarantee himself a second term in office – as President Zelensky has just had little choice but to do under martial law. The political parallels are striking.
7) How to get Russia to the table?
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled his openness to a ceasefire. We should, of course, be extremely cautious here. But in Reuters last Friday:
Putin wants Ukraine ceasefire
Sherman Adams (Eisenhower’s White House Chief of Staff), writing in 1961, looking back on 1953: “Eisenhower and Dulles were using a thinly veiled threat of a retaliatory atomic bomb attack to bring the Chinese into truce negotiations.”
It was a combination of pressuring both sides that brought each respectively to the negotiating table.
8) How does the US position itself to do this?
Two weeks ago in the New York Times, the Biden administration signaled it has begun to latch onto the Korea analogy: “There is a growing sense inside the Biden administration that the next few months [in Ukraine] could prove critical, because at some moment the two sides may finally move to a negotiated ceasefire, an armistice similar to the one that ended the active fighting in Korea in 1953.”
One former senior Western statesman who travels frequently to Kyiv: “It’s devastatingly obvious how this war will end. Ceasefire along the line of control, plus security guarantees for Kyiv short of full NATO membership. No formal ceding of territory. Ukraine becomes an EU member which does not recognise that it’s been partitioned.”
9) Is the war in Ukraine continuing now to China’s geopolitical advantage?
A chilling secret letter from Stalin in August 1950 to his Ambassador in Prague (two months into the Korean War):
America became entangled in a military intervention in Korea and is now squandering its military prestige and moral authority. Few honest people can now doubt that America is acting as an aggressor and tyrant in Korea and that it is not as militarily powerful as it claims to be. In addition, it is clear that the United States of America is presently distracted from Europe in the Far East. Does it not give us an advantage in the global balance of power? It undoubtedly does… It follows that America would overextend itself in this struggle. Second, having overextended itself in this matter, America would be incapable of a third world war in the near future.
Can we imagine Xi Jinping having penned such a private letter today?
China has observers watching how NATO intelligence, satellites and technology work. The longer the conflict in Ukraine goes on, the more intelligence China gets, and the better China will understand Western systems.
10) 71 years on from the Korean Armistice being signed, today in 2024, how do the people of South Korea view the US?
The majority of South Koreans are grateful to the US.
“There is clearly high favorability toward the US” Source: p.78
These surveys show vastly higher favorability for the US than any other major power.
Professor Niall Ferguson: “In 1991, per capita GDP was slightly higher in Ukraine than in South Korea. Today, South Koreans are four times richer.”
And Admiral James Stavridis (former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO): “If such a deal is reached, here is my prediction: despite being far smaller in terms of population and land, Ukraine will overtake Russia in a few decades in terms of gross domestic product, overall agrarian output and certainly in the sense of being a vital, democratic society in which people want to live.”
Would this be an audacious yet conceivable path to victory Ukrainians today, with Western support, could aspire to? (That would play to the West’s strengths.)
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How are Secretary Blinken, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, President Macron, and Lord Cameron, who have been advocating for freedoms on Western-supplied missiles to be fired into Russian territory – which President Biden last night finally signed up to go along with – going to ensure a lid on retaliatory escalation? What is the end game they are striving for?
Have our leaders seriously thought through the possible consequences of their action – and are they aware of the Korean-style alternative?
In the middle of 1952, the US did bomb Pyongyang – which is something North Koreans remember to this day. In 1953, the US also destroyed several dams in North Korea. But do we want to risk the same with today’s Russia?
The worrying thing today, 2.25 years into the war, is that we are in 1952 in our analogy, not yet 1953 (when the Korean Armistice was finally signed).
Ukraine’s military today is significantly more vulnerable than South Korea/the United Nations Command’s ever was in 1952. And the North/China (in the early 1950s) did not have nuclear weapons, or means of causing havoc in Western homelands, equivalent to Russia today.
The Truman administration deserves credit for standing up to Stalin’s regime and not letting conflict spread to further territories. But Truman allowed the war to go on for a year longer than it needed to – to his own political detriment.
Adlai Stevenson (who succeeded Truman as the 1952 Democratic nominee) advocated a strategy of continued limited war, believing the only alternatives to be a humiliating withdrawal or escalating the conflict to risk a Third World War. Stevenson won only nine states, and was raked over the coals by Eisenhower who won 442 of 531 electoral votes. The divergence of policies on Korea was central to Eisenhower’s landslide.
Does the West today further arming Ukraine – prolonging the conflict and further straining relations with Russia – increase or decrease the likelihood of Russia arming the Houthis or Iran? And, the course of an armistice not pursued, there is now a probable future of Russian military momentum continuing. Do we wish to risk Russia getting over-confident with victory while providing ample reason for it to continue expanding its military-industrial base?
In the words of Robert Caro, Eisenhower realized “Plans for an all-out offensive were irrational. The situation was intolerable; the only solution was to end the war on honorable terms as soon as possible.” Eisenhower had the insight to realize that unlimited war in the nuclear age was unthinkable, and limited war unwinnable.
The Biden administration today – Jake Sullivan, Bill Burns, and others – could succeed where Truman in 1952 failed.
Whatever one’s politics, emulating Eisenhower’s second greatest achievement would be the best route forward today for the West. It was the threat of military escalation and certain concessions that allowed Eisenhower in 1953 to secure a peace – which has stood for 71 years and counting.
Though challenging in the moment, as demonstrated by South Korea, cessation of war can lead to a very bright future.
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On July 27, 1953 the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was agreed as a 2.5-mile-wide (4.0 km) fortified buffer zone between the two Korean nations. The DMZ follows the Kansas Line, where the two sides confronted each other at the time of the signing of the Armistice. The DMZ is currently the most heavily defended national border in the world. A full copy of the Korean Armistice agreement can be found here.