Some Notes on the “Korean War” Scenario

September 1, 2023

Among the several arguments for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, the analogy with the Korean War armistice periodically pops up, as it did most recently in the article about Samuel Charap. It was made openly and in a most sustained manner by Carter Malkasian in Foreign Affairs this summer, so I will use this for my critique.

There are numerous problems with trying to reason by analogy from the Korean War: it is a very atypical war in several relevant respects, the narrative of its causes they present is often not quite right, and the analysis of its termination glosses over important details. When we account for all of this, we will learn that if there are any parallels to be drawn, they are not at all what Malkasian and fellow travelers imagine them to be, and the lessons to be had are neither that we should negotiate with the Russians nor that we should calibrate our military aid to Russian participation in negotiations. The lesson certainly is not that diplomacy produced an armistice that lasted for decades and allowed the emergence of a prosperous South Korea.

Instead, the Korean War shows that talking while fighting is useless at best, and counterproductive at worst, that peace is only possible when at least one side drastically revises its expectations about continuing to fight, and that concerns for the fate of people who would have to be forced to live under a regime they hate are real drivers in limiting the kind of concessions that are deemed acceptable while also enabling the leaders to continue fighting at great cost. In other words, essentially the opposite of what people who use the analogy say it suggests.

The Korean War is Atypical

Proponents of an immediate ceasefire often say that it’s not uncommon for parties to talk while fighting is going on. In the Korean War, they famously did so for over two years, between July 10, 1951 and the agreement on July 27, 1953. The negotiations were not continuous since they involved two breaks: the first, from Aug 23 to Oct 25, 1951 when the Communists broke off the talks over supposed bombings in the neutral zone, and the second from Oct 8, 1952 until Apr 26, 1953, when the UN Command suspended them over the POW repatriation. Thus, the belligerents had three negotiation periods at various points during the war, with durations of 44 days, 412 days, and 92 days, respectively.

How typical is this? Not at all. Here’s a summary from an article by Eric Min, who collected data on war negotiations for 92 interstate wars from 1823 to 2003. In 79% of these wars, negotiations did take place (which is why I, and many others, do say that it’s likely that this war will end with negotiations as well), but in only 17% did negotiations take place while fighting was going on. The Korean War had three negotiation periods, which is above the most common cases, which do not exceed two (subfigure c), and each of these periods exceeds the typical duration of 25 days or fewer, the second one, of course, excessively so (subfigure d). Moreover, the Korean War lasted 1,128 days, so the total of 548 days of negotiations constitutes 49% of the war’s duration, which subfigure (a) shows to be quite the outlier as well. Moreover, even in the Korean War, negotiations did not begin until after 380 days of fighting, or when about 1/3 of the total war duration had elapsed. Subfigure (b) shows that only about a third of wars feature earlier attempts, and the majority are clustered toward the end. This suggests that most negotiations tend to take place when there’s a relatively high chance of success; that is, when the belligerents are ready to settle. This is important, and I will return to it below.

Fighting and Talking in 92 Interstate Wars, 1823-2003

Min’s analysis also reveals a distinctive break in the negotiations while fighting patterns at World War 2. Before 1945, negotiations were relatively rare, tended to occur right at the end, and were quite brief. In other words, the belligerents tended to fight it out until they were ready to make peace, and then negotiations were basically codifying their shared expectations. After 1945, however, things changed: there were far more numerous attempts to negotiate end to hostilities but they were very likely to fail. The figure below shows the estimated probability that negotiations would occur during a particular stage of the war, for the two time periods. One can see that in both periods, there is a spike toward the end of the war, but that post-1945, the likelihood that talks are the attempted — and fail (since they do not end the war) — is two to three times higher. (Another interesting fact is that post-1945, the probability of talks ending hostilities is also lower as most wars during that period sort of peter off without formal agreements of any kind, but that’s a fascinating story for another time.)

After 1945, more negotiations, but they tend to fail

The overall dynamics make sense from the perspective of the informational theory of war termination, which is something I have written a lot about, both academically and for the current war. For peace to have a chance, the expectations of the belligerents about what continuing the war would yield must be close enough, as do their expectations about what peace would look like. Without this basic necessary condition for peace, it is not possible to end the war with a negotiated settlement. The reason is simple: such a settlement has to be voluntary and both sides can always continue to fight if the concessions offered by the other are less attractive than what one expects to get from fighting. Fighting reveals information about the true state of the correlation of forces, and since this tends to be more objective than (strategic) diplomacy, it is more credible — meaning, that it can cause the belligerents to change their estimates toward something more consistent between them. There are, of course, complicating factors such as escalation that introduces new sources of uncertainty, but the basic idea is clear. Moreover, convergence is not sufficient to produce peace because other issues (commitment problems with enforcing the deal, for example) might prevent an agreement. We have some evidence that is consistent with this theory: initiators of wars (who tend to be optimistic about their chances and start with large demands) do progressively worse in the final settlement the longer it takes to reach that settlement. In other words, they are forced to learn enough from the battlefield (since longer wars means they have been unable to prevail on the battlefield as quickly as they had thought) to lower their demands sufficiently to create an opening for peace.

There is, however, a striking difference between the pre-1945 and post-1945 periods that needs to be accounted for. Given the higher failure rate of negotiations after WW2, one focal explanation would be that some factor is interfering with the process of convergence of expectations, forcing the belligerents to engage in talks that do not have a decent chance of success. Min’s analysis suggests that it is external pressure from UN Security Council and nuclear powers afraid of escalation that is causing belligerents to negotiate even when they are not ready to do so. The fact that these talks fail shows the limits of this pressure. At the end of the day, unless the third parties provide sufficient carrots and sticks to alter the expectations of the belligerents from the trajectory they see on the battlefield, the prospects of peace will remain dim.

The fact that neither of these factors was responsible for the failure of negotiations during the Korean War — where the UN was technically a belligerent itself, and where the US enjoyed a clear preponderance in nuclear power, suggests that there are alternative explanations, and this is where things get interesting for the analogy with Ukraine, as we shall see next.

The bottom line is that the Korean War is highly atypical in the incidence and duration of negotiations even in the post-1945 world where talks during war have become more commonplace, and so using it as an analogy requires great caution and attention to detail.

China and the United States Did Not Want to Fight Each Other

The first, and most important, thing to understand about the Korean War is that by late 1950, there were two relevant belligerents — the People’s Republic of China (on behalf of North Korea and supported by the USSR) and the United States (on behalf of South Korea and supported, diplomatically by the UN, and militarily by several Western and Asian countries) — and they had not wanted to fight each other to begin with. The second is that by March 1951, when the line of control stabilized along the 38th Parallel, they did not want to continue to fight over the territorial distribution either. This might sound like a strange assertion: how is it that the two principal belligerents did not wish to fight each other but somehow ended up doing so and then continued for three years? The answer to this question shows why this war is a very bad analogy to the present one.

Let’s start with how the US and China ended up fighting each other despite not wanting to. Malkasian brushes over this with a glib, and somewhat misleading, interpretation:

“Mao and Stalin had embarked on a joint venture of sorts, giving their blessing to the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung when he invaded South Korea.”

Modern historiography of the war is pretty clear that the initiative to invade South Korea came from Kim Il Sung, and that despite seeming to encourage him initially (the Soviets had equipped and trained the North Korean army), Stalin suddenly got cold feet when Kim presented him with the invasion plans. Kim engaged in some skillful diplomacy playing off the rivalry between Stalin and Mao for preeminence in the communist camp, and exploiting Stalin’s fears that Mao might support Kim sidelining the USSR in a successful war. For his part, Mao was not keen on supporting Kim because his focus was on (partial) demobilization and invading Taiwan. The war — more properly described as an attempt of North Korea to conquer the peninsula — began with the reluctant “blessing” of the Soviets and the Chinese who had been reassured by Kim’s optimism regarding success. At this point, there was no inkling that China would be fighting for North Korea, let alone that it would be fighting the United States. The goal was the rapid conquest of South Korea and unification of the peninsula under Communist rule before the West had a chance to organize a response.

Kim’s plans almost worked. The North Korean Army shattered the forces of South Korea, captured Seoul, and pushed the remaining defenders and their US allies into a pocket at Pusan within several weeks. What the Communists had not anticipated, however, was the swift and decisive American reaction. President Truman, who had just recently been very skeptical of proposals to expand the US military (presented to him in April 1950 in Nitze’s NSC-68 memorandum), surprised everyone. He sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent Mao’s takeover of the island (and also keep the Kuomintang from attempting to exploit the situation to attack Mao). He got the UN to brand North Korea as the aggressor and demand its withdrawal north of the 38th parallel (Resolution 82), recommend member states to provide military assistance to South Korea (Resolution 83), and create a unified command of this assistance under the US (Resolution 84). He reinforced the defenders in the Pusan Perimeter, and authorized General MacArthur’s bold plan to land at Inchon. The speed of this reaction, and the size of the forces committed was stunning. The Soviets, which had been boycotting the UNSC because of the refusal to seat Mao’s China rather than Kuomintang’s China on the Security Council, failed to exercise their veto power.

The other unexpected event was the dramatic success of the Inchon Landing, which had been so unconventional and risky (not for MacArthur, who had a penchant for such operations) that its opposition in the military establishment was quite serious. However, the General’s reputation carried the day, and the JCS approved his plans, which had gotten Truman’s backing. Within two weeks of the landing, the UN forces had liberated Seoul, and reached the 38th parallel. The North Korean Army in South Korea was effectively obliterated.

At this point, despite the utter failure of Kim’s invasion, there was still no prospect of war between China and the United States provided the UN forces halted at the 38th Parallel, which was the limit of their UNSC mandate and the JCS’s instructions to MacArthur, which had authorized him to fight any Chinese units south of the parallel and explicitly forbade him from moving north if China even threatened to enter North Korea. With the collapse of the NK army, however, the temptation to change the original war aim of preventing the conquest of the South and expand it into a conquest of the North was very great. MacArthur pushed for it but Truman and the JCS were worried about a possible intervention by China and, God-forbid, the USSR. The Americans made determined attempts to figure out how likely such an intervention was through aerial and land reconnaissance, and consultations with allies who had diplomatic representation in Beijing (e.g., United Kingdom). They detected no preparations in China for an intervention, saw no movement of troops into North Korea, and their allies also dismissed the mixed warnings from China and the changing interpretations of Indian Ambassador Panikkar — based on available evidence, the US administration concluded that China was bluffing and would not intervene in the war. MacArthur declared all Korea open for war on September 30th.

The United States decided — as it turned out, incorrectly — that China would not intervene to prevent the unification of the peninsula under South Korean rule. The decision to attempt that unification was predicated on that assumption. There was no appetite for war with China over the expanded war aim.

Much ink has been spilled on explaining why the US failed to foresee the Chinese intervention, a lot of its centering on the traditional assumption that the Chinese had been serious about entering the war, and that the US had, for some reason, dismissed its repeated warnings that it would do so. But, as I explain in my book, it was not true that the Chinese leadership had been resolved to fight, and in fact Mao would not make the final decision until October 16th, more than a week after UNGA Resolution 376 (V) authorized the unification of Korea (October 7). The problem was that while China did not want to see a hostile power along the Yalu River, Mao was worried about confronting the United States without air support (which could only come from the Soviets), and did not wish to be distracted from his plans to invade Taiwan. Stalin, who was worried that his defensive alliance with Mao could drag him into a war with the USA, had abruptly reneged on his promise to provide air planes too. Since the Chinese had not decided to enter the war, their warnings were tentative and confusing (at one point they had said that it’s OK for South Korean units to cross the 38th Parallel, but not for American ones to do so), which explains why so many had dismissed them as bluffs — at this point, they were nothing more than that.

Moreover, the lack of Soviet air cover presented the Chinese with a terrible dilemma. They could move openly into North Korea in the hope that a show of force would deter the US from crossing the 38th — as indeed it would have, per JCS instructions to MacArthur (of which the Chinese were not aware). But they worried that deterrence might fail, and then the US airpower would decimate their troops, negating their numerical advantage, not to mention the tactical advantages of surprise. This dilemma was eventually resolved, after long and painful deliberation, in favor of foregoing deterrence, as formal analysis shows should sometimes happen. The Chinese entered North Korea stealthily and remained undetected until they engaged the UN forces in late October. The massive offensive they unleashed on November 25 caught MacArthur by surprise, occasioning his dramatic declaration that the US now faced “an entirely new war.”

Communist China did not look to fight the United States, and vacillated for weeks because of the changing position of the Soviets. They tried bluffing the US to prevent their crossing of the 38th Parallel, but it failed because they could not back up their words with actions at the time.

As for the Soviet Union, Stalin must have been ecstatic. His major fear was that if the United States wanted to, it would easily outbid the USSR for economic and commercial relations with China, causing Mao to drift away from dependence — and control — by the Soviet Union. With Mao at war with the USA, there was no danger of this happening anytime soon, and Mao was getting even more dependent on Moscow. Because China went into North Korea to fight, its defense treaty was not activated, so there would be no war between the USSR and the US either, again as Stalin wished. Moreover, the busier the US was with a war with China, the less resources it would be able to dedicate to this confrontation with the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, when Kim begged Stalin to help bring about an armistice as soon as possible in mid 1952, his words fell on deaf ears. Instead, Stalin counseled both him and the Chinese to stand firm, have patience, and that eventually the Americans would give in.

From the Soviet perspective, while China should not be abandoned to fail, the longer its war with the United States lasted, the better. It would either end in an American defeat, which would be great since then there would be no chance at all for reconciliation (losing Korea would mean committing fully to Taiwan’s defense), or in a Chinese defeat, which would turn China into a Soviet satellite. Thus, as long as China was willing to keep going and the Americans showed no desire to expand operations into China itself, the Soviets would be happy to keep supplying the Chinese without exerting any pressure for peace.

None of this is explained by Malkasian, but it is important in order to understand the context of negotiations. Unlike the situation in the current war, where both the Russians and the Ukrainians are willing participants — the first because they want to conquer, and the second because they want their country — the two major belligerents in the Korean War did not want to fight each other in order to ensure the unification of the Korean peninsula under their respective protégé. They had ended up at war due to tragic circumstances where the strategic imperatives combined with uncertainty to cause the US to expand its war aims just when China could not signal credibly to deter it.

Almost from the outset of this part of the Korean War, the two were reluctant participants. This actually makes the continuation of the war and the repeated failed attempts to end it rather puzzling. Ironically, this also suggests that negotiations are highly unlikely to work in the present war at this stage if one wishes to use the Korean War analogy, an interesting case of a self-denying claim.

Why Did Negotiations Repeatedly Fail during the Korean War?

Once we understand how China and the US ended up fighting each other in Korea, we begin to wonder why they did not end the war as soon as the UN forces were pushed back south of the 38th Parallel. The immediate problem was similar to what happened after Inchon, except on the other side. The massive counter-attack by the Chinese on November 25 was wildly successful and pushed UN forces out of much of North Korea. With this momentum, they now attempted to conquer South Korea, and captured Seoul in January 1951. This restored the original objective of the UN, which now concentrated on preventing this (again). MacArthur’s replacement, General Ridgway, who had assumed command of the Eighth Army after Walker’s death in an accident in December, counter-attacked and by March stabilized the front along the 38th Parallel. There would be several major offenses and counter-offenses , but very little changed on the ground. It was clear that the territorial distribution would remain essentially the same as the prewar division with the difference that while in 1950, the (supposedly temporary) division ran straight along the 38th Parallel, the Armistice division would run along the line of control that zigzagged around the Parallel depending on the final locations of the opposing forces. The largest change was that the city of Kaesong with a prewar population of about 40,000 ended up on the North Korean side of the border. As Malkasian notes, that the border would run along the line of contact was the American demand (the Communists wanted to return to the prewar status quo) but the Communists agreed to it after a few months of wrangling in 1951.

The stumbling block was the fate of the Prisoners of War, and this proved to be an intractable problem. Under the Geneva Convention of 1949, all POWs were supposed to be returned to their homelands as soon as the war ended, if necessary against their will. The Communists wanted complete repatriation because they knew that many of their soldiers were impressed from the Nationalist army, and if given a choice would likely not go back. Moreover, it was possible that other Chinese soldiers would elect to stay out of fear of the Communists. The spectacle of potentially thousands refusing to return would create an embarrassing PR problem for the Communists. The South Koreans adamantly opposed involuntary repatriation because they knew that a lot of the POWs held by the allies were in fact South Korean citizens who had been forced to fight for the Communists, and they would not want to be sent North. Initially, the US military favored full repatriation because it was alarmed by reports of atrocities committed against allied POWs by the Communists, and it wanted them back as quickly as possible. However, the US position solidified on voluntary repatriation in January 1952 when Truman publicly committed that no POW held by the Allies would be forced to return against their will. According to the official list, this meant over 132,000 POWs would be given a choice (the Allies had determined that another 40,000 were South Koreas, and would not be counted for repatriation). The US estimated that 100,000 might stay, and the Communists apparently worried enough because they dug in their heels, which deadlocked the negotiations and caused the Allies to suspend them indefinitely in October 1952.

The issue that stymied negotiators and prolonged the war was the fate of people who preferred not to be forced to live under Communist rule. This became a public commitment, and a matter of domestic policy, with solid bipartisan support for Truman’s decision. The South Koreans themselves were adamant that none of their citizens should be forced to go to the Communists.

On this, the Communists would eventually have to concede, just like they had on the territorial distribution and the line of control (although the fact that it would be the line of control caused both sides to fight costly battles for advantage on the battlefield). Two key events occurred in late 1952 and early 1953 that forced Mao to terminate the war as quickly as possible even if that meant backing down on the POW issue.

The first was the election of Eisenhower to the Presidency. Ike had campaigned on “I shall go to Korea” promise and everyone understood that he meant to end the war there. As a military hero, he was not expected to end it by capitulating to the Communists. Indeed, Truman’s massive military buildup initiated under NSC-68’s recommendations was bearing fruit, and Eisenhower signaled that he would use these capabilities to escalate the war. There was talk about “unleashing Chiang Kai-shek” from Taiwan, and pointed hints that the use of nuclear weapons was being considered. Thus, the US government appeared willing to dramatically escalate the war in order to force the Communists to back down.

The Chinese might have been willing to resist but on March 5, 1953 Stalin died, and Soviet policy abruptly changed. In the ensuing period of instability and struggle for succession, nobody had time to deal with supporting China in a war that might get much worse and could eventually drag the USSR in it. Without Soviet backing, any potential escalation by the Americans would likely prove devastating (as Malkasian notes, by second half of 1952, “the war was absorbing roughly 50 percent of China’s revenues”) and the Communists moderated their demands, allowing negotiations to resume. This proved to be another delaying tactic, potentially designed to test if the Americans were serious about escalation while simultaneously providing themselves with an escape route if that turned out to be the case. Ike was not bluffing: the US resumed bombing (it had already proven quite devastating to the North Koreans), and he approved attacks on Chinese bases in Manchuria. The Communists backed down but the South Koreans would not agree, and President Rhee sabotaged the deal by releasing 27,000 POWs who did not wish to be repatriated. This was done without knowledge of UNC but the Chinese would not believe it: they launched another offensive that focused on attacking South Korean positions, and achieved enough success for Rhee to agree to the deal.

Now, according to Malkasian, “the most important factor contributing to the delay was that the Communists simply took too long to appreciate the true costs of the war and to realize that they could not outlast the United States.” This is an odd assertion to make for the period after November 1951: the territorial division was agreed upon in principle (which held), and the sticking point was something that could end the war immediately if UNC would agree to the Communist demand that essentially wanted the Geneva Convention applied. It is true that Mao and Stalin believed they could outlast the Allies, and so they did not see the need to make concessions on the POW (Kim, whose country was suffering disagreed but had no choice in the matter). But it is important to realize that the issue they were demanding was not resolved because Truman would not back down on the voluntary repatriation. Elizabeth Stanley wrote a wonderful book, “Paths to Peace,” precisely on this, showing the key role of domestic politics in the termination of the Korean War. Malkasian knows this:

“The negotiations were hung up for 18 months by the U.S. demand that prisoners of war get to choose whether to be repatriated—a position driven by an ideological desire to show that communism held less appeal than democracy, and by domestic political pressure to look tough. For Truman, voluntary repatriation was an inalienable human right. In May 1952, he declared that forcible repatriation would be ‘repugnant to our most fundamental moral and humanitarian principles.’ The policy received robust bipartisan support, as fierce anticommunism defined U.S. political culture at the time.”

Notice the characterization that is designed to portray Truman’s commitment in a negative light: “ideological desire”, “pressure to look tough,” and, in the next paragraph, “could not backtrack without facing accusations of weakness,” and even Eisenhower — a Republican president and a war hero with impeccable credentials — was also apparently “worried that right-wing Republicans would cast any wavering on the issue as going soft.” To his credit, Malkasian cannot lie, which is why he had to admit that for Truman, “voluntary repatriation was an inalienable human right.” To his discredit, he sandwiched this fairly straightforward position — which was the reason for so much bipartisan support in the US — between descriptions designed to make it into a tawdry political ploy, a rash statement that could not be undone out of fear of looking weak.

Malkasian says, “If Truman had never made the demand in the first place, the Communists might have agreed to a cease-fire much earlier, possibly before Stalin’s death.”

I agree. This indeed was likely to be the outcome.

Malkasian then delivers what he doubtless considers the coup de grace, “Put bluntly, two U.S. presidents ended up allowing thousands of U.S. soldiers to die not in service of any particular territorial goal or tactical advantage but to avoid domestic political backlash.”

I disagree, strongly. Two US Presidents fought to keep a key principle that underpinned our entire involvement in this war: that no nation should be forced into subjugation by the Communists. This principle extended to the 170,000 POWs who had to be given a choice. Moreover, the two US Presidents had the South Koreans to think about, and they certainly would not permit tens of thousands of their fellow citizens to fall into Communist hands. Domestic politics in the US were not constraining but enabling because it was not the case that Truman or Eisenhower really wanted to wiggle out of that commitment but the fear of backlash kept them going as Malkasian asserts. Rather, domestic sentiment in the US on this issue was so strong (because it was a principled stand that Americans instinctively understood) that it permitted the continuation of hostilities despite the costs.

The parallel with the war in Ukraine here is strong but it is exactly the opposite of what Malkasian intends to use it for. In Ukraine, we are dealing with millions of Ukrainians under Russian occupation. The Russians have repeatedly shown themselves willing to perpetrate war crimes and atrocities against Ukrainian civilians under their control. Indeed, as I have argued, genocide is inherent in what they intend to do with the occupied territories. Our principled stand must be to attempt to prevent this even at great risks and costs to ourselves. As the South Koreans before them, the Ukrainians are adamant that they would not permit their fellow citizens to be destroyed by the Russian occupiers. And as the South Koreans before them, they would sabotage any attempt to negotiate a deal that allows this, as they should.

Malkasian is, of course, quite aware of this, but he just can’t resist to denigrate it by falsely portraying this as a policy exclusively attributable to Zelenskyy who is worried about his political future:

“a junior partner rarely does whatever Washington wants. Zelensky might resist pressure that the United States puts on him. His interests diverge in important ways from those of the United States and NATO, and so might his strategy. He has long refused to cede any of Ukraine’s territory under Russian occupation, including Crimea and the Donbas. Concessions on those areas could affect his future electoral prospects.”

This is exactly the same blind spot as we saw above with Malkasian’s dealing with the US Presidents. In this, he is demonstrably wrong, every survey of Ukrainian public opinion shows overwhelming support for not trading territory for peace. This has not wavered through the difficult winter and the large casualties. After nearly a year and a half of war, 84% of Ukrainians are ready to fight as long as it takes, and they know exactly why. It is simply disingenuous to insinuate that “his interests” and “his future electoral prospects” are what’s driving Zelenskyy when the whole country is unified on this. This is why I wrote that the Ukrainians would not permit any such peace as long as they can keep fighting. What does Malkasian propose to do with an entire nation that does not agree with his ideas of a formal cease-fire?

The absurdity of his position is fully revealed when one recalls that unlike the Korean War, where UNC did most of the fighting, and the South Koreans were playing a subordinate role militarily, in Ukraine it is the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia. Their wishes is what is going to drive any process of war termination, and there is not a whole lot that the US or the West can do about it aside from halting the aid, which comes with such a formidable host of strategic, security, humanitarian, and political problems that I find it quite unlikely to be useful as leverage.

Venturing into La-la Land

In the concluding section, “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained,” Malkasian explains that one should want “an armistice featuring a signed document, international mediation, an agreed-on cease-fire line, supervisory mechanisms, and enforcement measures.”

Now, let’s just dispense with that “signed document” nonsense — Putin has shown that he is not bound by any agreement, signed or otherwise. Any agreement would have to be self-enforcing; that is, it has to embody conditions that would prevent resumption of hostilities by setting up incentives of the various parties such that nobody would want to break the agreement.

Malkasian focuses entirely on impressing on Putin how costly continued warfare would be but he does not consider the politics of continuing negotiations. He wants diplomats to “tightly integrate their bargaining with the use of military force: the idea is to fight and talk… That is what Truman did when faced with Communist intransigence in Korea.” As Hein Goemans and I have explained, this approach neglects the information that is being transmitted through talks, with the result that in the Ukrainian case, they are likely to stiffen the Kremlin’s resolve to keep going. Malkasian conveniently “forgets” that during the Korean War, the UNC suspended the talks when they realized that the Communists are not budging, and that it was only after the Communists backed down due to a drastic worsening of their war prospects that talks resumed and worked.

The talking that Malkasian wants so badly did precisely nothing to bring the end of the war because it was the developments on the battlefield and with third parties that caused the Communists to revise their war expectations and agree to the terms.

Malkasian further suggests that the US calibrate its aid to Putin’s stalling. That is, give it when Russia is not agreeing to things. What this really means is not giving the aid while Russia appears to be talking. In other words, Malkasian is an “escalation manager” who seems to believe that we can fine-tune Putin’s expectations through choices on what to deliver, when, and how much. This is a naive approach that only works on the blackboard. (I know that because I prove it on the blackboard every time I teach formal models in IR.) This is the strategy that the Johnson administration pursued during Rolling Thunder, when targets were being selected to signal something to the government in Hanoi. It does not work. The Korean War also shows this: the only verifiable reason for Mao to stop fighting and yield on the POW issue was that the Soviet Politburo had voted to end the war, and without their support he simply could not continue.

The escalation management that Malkasian wants is not going to influence the Russians except to encourage them to keep going while pretending to negotiate. Only drastic changes in their estimate of the potential trajectory of the war could possibly compel them to recede from their current demands.

Malkasian argues that the US and NATO “should include the UN” in these negotiations. He does not mention the Ukrainians or their thinking about this. Let’s suppose the Ukrainians are on board with the UN being a party to this. Then what? Malksasian tells us that “Russia may find it easier to accept ideas for compromise that come from neutral or friendly countries at the UN than proposals that come from the United States, NATO, or Ukraine.” Now, he does not explain what these compromises might be, and why Russia might not like them. It’s easy to see why: when one actually begins talking about them, it immediately becomes obvious that it simply does not matter who proposes them. As I have explained, the problem is that a stable peace requires that Russia give up almost all of its demands… like, you know, the Communists did in the Korean War (yes, irony), and they will not do this just because India proposes it. (Malkasian identified India as credible.)

The UN or “neutral” countries like India are immaterial to the prospects of war termination in their capacity as negotiators or monitors because the fundamental obstacle to peace is the extreme nature of Russia’s demands, which is unlikely to change without significant deterioration of Russia’s prospects on the battlefield.

Malkasian devotes some thought on how “To coax Zelensky toward a compromise.” He has in mind some nebulous “assurances” and “long-term commitments to advise and train Ukrainian forces.” As I explained above, this has causality backwards — it’s the Ukrainian people that would need to be “coaxed.” On top of that it focuses on one, certainly important, aspect — security guarantees — while completely missing the fundamental one, which is the fate of Ukrainians under Russian occupation. Even the security guarantees he mentions are laughable (in the sense that the Ukrainians would laugh at them): like, really, after them fighting for 2 years, you are going to be advising them on how to do it? NATO membership is the most viable option here, and any substitute would have to be essentially equivalent and involve key states like US, UK, Germany, Poland, and the Baltics.

The Ukrainians would not accept some nebulous “guarantees” because they already had them and they did not work. Moreover, any agreement would have to somehow provide for the safety and well-being of any Ukrainians that would remain under Russian occupation. I can only think of one way of doing this: no Ukrainians can remain under Russian occupation. There are two ways of accomplishing this: either the Russians are pushed out of Ukraine or millions of Ukrainians are moved from these territories.

One can see why Malkasian and others who like to talk about “cease-fire” never deal with this problem. They would either have to concede that they want to reward Russia with an ethnic cleansing or accept that Russia has to return to, at the very least, the pre-invasion borders.

It is curious that Malkasian tackles the most important issue at the very end of his essay, where he finally acknowledges that “there are fewer options to address the single biggest obstacle to talks: Putin. His obstinacy may be insurmountable. The United States and NATO have no good levers to pull if Putin is truly insensitive to the costs of war.”

Yes. This is correct. This is the only thing that metters.

And here, Malkasian offers thoughts and prayers: “Since Putin probably cannot be ousted and probably will not die soon, pursuing negotiations is a gamble that he will cave at some point to military and economic pressure.”

No, “pursuing negotiations” is not going to contribute to Putin caving in. If ever caves in, it will be because of what Ukraine does on the battlefield, and what we do to help the Ukrainians achieve it. In that case, the Russians will ask for peace and there will be no preconditions to it. There is absolutely no reason to initiate talks with them now. Contrary to the bland assertions in the last paragraph, negotiations aren’t “with low risks and high potential rewards.” There are very serious downsides to talking before the other side is ready to make concessions. In this case, talks can (and will) be used by the Russians to drive a wedge between the West and Ukraine, and to split the Western camp. There is a reason why the Allies decided on unconditional surrender for the Nazis. I am also puzzled as to where Malkasian got his belief that talking can work in the absence of battlefield evidence. Because this is what “high rewards” means: that talks somehow lead to peace. But, as Malkasian occasionally admits throughout his essay, that’s not correct because talks can only succeed when the war expectations are favorable; that is, when the fighting has ensured the high reward.

If there is anything to learn from the Korean War, it’s not the superficial “hey, that war ended with an armistice, so this one can too” or the wildly incorrect “negotiating while fighting brought the end of hostilities.” It is rather that only very serious changes in the war expectations of the belligerents can push them into concessions. And that the commitment to the safety and liberty of people who would end up under occupation is not a minor concern that can be ignored but a major factor in the possibility for peace.

Finally, it is going to be the Ukrainians who decide when to make peace with the Russians and on what terms. The West can, of course, facilitate some solutions, and for that the Ukrainians might consider certain compromises. But people should abandon the idea that the US and Russia can negotiate something and compel Ukraine to accept it. In this, the Korean War really is a poor analogy.

• international relations
• Russo-Ukrainian War 2022
• war arguments
• war termination