End the Ukrainian War using the Korea Model
End the Ukrainian War using the Korea Model
Last fall, Ad Astra called for a cease fire in Ukraine; 8 months later, our position is the same
After 500 days, the war in Ukraine is presently in a stalemate. The long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive hasn’t made any progress to date. Time is on Russia’s side as 1) they have a huge population advantage (4x), 2) they’re firing 20,000 artillery shells/day (50,000 on peak days) vs. 6,000-8,000 shells/day for Ukraine[i], and 3) the USA is out of ammo to supply Ukraine. Putin, Biden, and Zelensky’s political survival are all tied to battlefield success, making the situation extremely dangerous. The only thing to gain from further war is death and more favorable terms for Russia. Meanwhile, China wants the war to continue so the USA is distracted. A longer war is a win for China.
Despite the huge human cost of the war, the USA has been the big winner so far:
The Americans have managed to:
1. sever Europe from Russia economically and politically
2. re-orientate the EU’s economy toward the USA
3. make the EU reliant on US energy exports by denying it Russian oil and gas
4. reduce European states to little more than American satrapies, with European Prime Ministers/Premiers little more than local branch office managers
5. embarrass Russia on the global stage with its failure to deliver a swift knockout blow in Ukraine
6. expand US arms exports[ii]
The latest issue of Foreign Affairs provides a model for peace based on the 1950s proxy war on the Korean Peninsula. That ceasefire gave us modern North and South Korea, which are formally still at war. In 1952, Chinese diplomats began to broach the subject of an armistice with Stalin:
The fighting would rage for another ten months before the two sides would agree to an armistice…Ultimately, 36,574 Americans were killed in the war and 103,284 were wounded. China lost an estimated one million people, and four million Koreans perished—ten percent of the peninsula’s population.
The armistice ended that bloodshed, establishing a demilitarized zone and mechanisms to supervise compliance and mediate violations. But the Korean War did not officially conclude. The major political issues could not be settled, and skirmishes, raids, artillery shelling, and occasional battles broke out. They never escalated to full-blown war, however. The armistice held—and 70 years later, it still holds.
The war ravaging Ukraine today bears more than a passing resemblance to the Korean War. And for anyone wondering about how it might end, the durability of the Korean armistice—and the high human cost of the delay in reaching it—deserves close study. The parallels are clear. In Ukraine, as in Korea seven decades ago, a static battlefront and intractable political differences call for a cease-fire that would pause the violence while putting off thorny political issues for another day. The Korean armistice “enabled South Korea to flourish under American security guarantees and protection,” the historian Stephen Kotkin has pointed out. “If a similar armistice allowed Ukraine—or even just 80 percent of the country—to flourish in a similar way,” he argues, “that would be a victory in the war.”[iii]
https://twitter.com/davidsacks/status/1678463164864667658?s=42&t=nVb-5uC_WM3Cp0R0dGiqHQ
[ii] https://substack.com/inbox/post/134475794
[iii] https://reader.foreignaffairs.com/2023/06/20/the-korea-model/content.html