A Korean War Ceasefire in Ukraine Won't Work

Western pundits, as they have moved on from the idea of a Ukraine victory and the removal of Putin, have started discussing the end of the war with a Korean War ceasefire. This isn't as likely as they suppose and won't work anyway. But first, let's revisit the Korean War.

Korea

Korea had been a quasi-vassal state of China for centuries. All of the attempted invasions of Japan by China had come from Korea and the Japanese viewed Korea as a dagger ready to be stabbed into the heart of Japan. Korea, even though a Chinese vassal state, largely remained cutoff from the outside world. It finally did attempt to modernize, but after the Japanese and Chinese had done so.

Japan defeated China in the 1st Sino-Japanese War in 1895, which was largely over which country would dominate Korea. Japan fought a war against Russia a decade later to secure its control of Korea and extend its power over Manchuria. Japan then annexed Korea in 1910.

When Japan surrendered in WW2, Korea was split between US and Soviet zones of occupation. These became two separate countries in 1948. The Chinese Civil War ended with the KMT fleeing to Taiwan. The cry of “who lost China?” was prominent throughout American politics. Soviet troops left North Korea in 1948 and US troops left South Korea in 1949. However, at least 50,000 Koreans returned to Korea from fighting for the CCP in the Chinese Civil War. These troops helped North Korea in the border conflict and guerrilla campaign that began in South Korea in 1948 and continued until war broke out.

Kim Il-sung, the ruler of North Korea, was born in what was in now North Korea, but his family fled when he was just a baby into Manchuria, having been involved in anti-Japanese activities and fearful of arrest. Kim was a dedicated Marxist from a young age. He was one of the first Marxists in Manchuria and was arrested at seventeen years old and jailed for his subversive Marxist activities. Kim remained active in communist and anti-Japanese activities, and eventually joined the Soviet Red Army, where he served until 1945.

Kim was picked by the notorious Beria to be Stalin’s henchman in Korea, having been gone from Korea for over forty years by 1945. Kim was picked over several Koreans who had local groups and connections. With Soviet backing, Kim built his army, trained them, and consolidated control over North Korea as well as over the communists in South Korea. He repeatedly asked for Stalin’s permission to invade South Korea.

Stalin finally gave permission to Kim to invade after the Soviet Union had broken US code and determined that Truman would not engage in nuclear war to protect Korea and did not see Korea as a vital US interest. Most in Washington barely even understood what Korea was and had little knowledge of the people and culture and history of the Korean people. A US official also left out South Korea when discussing US interests in Asia, though that was likely an accident.

In any event, Stalin gave Kim permission to invade, and Kim convinced Mao to support him in case anything went wrong.

All this took place in the early Col War when the new idea of containment was being discussed.

The war went remarkably well for North Korea at the beginning, and the South Korean forces were almost eliminated. The Soviet Union was boycotting the UN Security Council in 1950, so the US secured a UN mandate in June of 1950 to push back on North Korea.

When I was a young adult, I met an older gentleman who told me about his experiences in the Korean War. He had been a high school senior in the San Diego area and, like many of his friends, had enrolled in the Marine Corps ROTC. Suddenly, he was activated and was an officer of a tank command. Most of the soldiers under his command were WW2 veterans, so this was pretty impressive thing for this high school senior to be in command.

He led his tanks as part of the landing Incheon. Incheon, near Seoul, has one of the highest differences between low-tide and high-tide in the world and a narrow passage, so this was a rather risky landing. The US forces quickly rolled up through North Korea. This man told me that they were completely unprepared for cold weather when they reached the border with China. The Chinese then came with their counterattack, which was overwhelming to this ill-prepared force in very cold weather. The UN troops gradually retreated.

Eventually, the Chinese counterattack stalled near the 38th Parallel, which was near the old border of North and South Korea. This line remained stalemate, and an official ceasefire was reached, with the conflict officially not over for 70 years.

So, the Korean War division is roughly where the country had been divided in 1945. There were some differences between the Korean people in the north and south long prior to that division, but the division line, across the Korean peninsula, was possible in part because it is just over 150 miles across.

The line has been static with troops built up along both sides of the border ever since. North Korea has spent a lot of time isolated from the world, in line with its history, but also been a major arms supplier and has developed nuclear missiles to ensure its security.

Trump engaged in verbal saber rattling with Korea, but then actually walked into North Korea at the DMZ and real progress seemed to be made to bring North Korea into the world and bring a final resolution to the issue. Biden has not seemed to care about continuing Trump’s efforts and North Korea is back to regular missile testing.

Ukraine

Right now, Russia controls somewhere around 20% of Ukraine, the Russian speaking zones of the Donbas region and Crimea. About another 30% of Ukraine is primarily Russian speaking and or Russian ethnicity, including along the Black Sea to Odessa and the formerly occupied regions in the northeast.

One good way to see how Ukraine is divided politically and ethnically is looking at past election maps.

Here is the 1994 Ukraine election map:

As we can clearly see from almost 30 years ago, Ukraine was split in two politically. The region to the west had been Polish until the Partitions of Poland, for the most part, while the rest of the country had been part of the Russian empire and not part of Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Most of the areas in blue were lightly settled before the Tsars conquered the region, and the Tsars recruited people to settle the region, including Germans and Greeks and Russians. The prior occupants had mostly been nomadic, without fixed housing. As such, it was never really Ukrainian and is very much Russian.

In theory, somewhere along this blue/yellow division line would be a good place to split Ukraine, and it might end up like that, but there are a few problems.

1. It is a very long border. The current front is over a thousand miles. This dividing line would still be very long, somewhere between 600 and a thousand miles long, or even much more, depending upon the final border. That would still be a very long border for such hostile neighbors.

2. Some of the blue areas are now anti-Russian. 20 years of Western meddling since the first coup in 2004 has changed Ukraine. We have funded and supported anti-Russian efforts included supporting Ukrainian Nazi organizations. Since the Maidan coup, this has ramped up. Now after a year of war it is not clear how much some of those in blue areas would resist, including in Kharkov and Odessa.

3. NATO won't accept it. NATO wants Odessa. Odessa is a major port and would put a check on Crimea.

So, don’t expect 70 years of peace like in Korea. Russia knows it can’t trust the West, as Russia knows now that Western leaders were dishonest in reaching the Minsk Accords and that Western leaders prevented an early resolution to the Ukraine crisis.

With no confidence in the West keeping its word in any resolution, Russia has been forced to fight for much larger goals than it originally planned. Where Russia initially invaded and hoped for a quickly negotiated peace where Ukraine will agree to never join NATO, stop shelling the Donbas, and give the Donbas region autonomy, such results are unrealistic today.

It is really hard to imagine worse diplomatic efforts than those done by the West towards Russia over the last 2 years. The absolute arrogance of Western leaders has been appalling. They were so overconfident in their plans to use Ukraine as a proxy against Russia and use sanctions to crush Russia that they did not stop and consider whether these were likely to succeed.

America Can’t Do Multipolarity

American diplomats have long acted in this manner. For most of the history of the country, European diplomats have looked down on Americans for not understanding how to even conduct diplomacy. Once America emerged on the world stage as a great power, American diplomats than acted like schoolyard bullies and still did not understand how to engage in realistic diplomacy. Since WW2, it really did not matter, as the United States was strong enough that no one could truly resist. This only got worse over the last 30 years.

Occasionally vassal states would exert a modicum of independence, like France leaving the military aspect of NATO or Germany engaging in Ostpolitik or Japan claiming to could say “No”, but those were truly exceptions. America has never truly operated as a member of a multipolar system. It really does not know how to do so.

When the Cold War ended, I went to graduate school with the intention of studying multipolarity in pre–Napoleonic Europe. It was an extremely chaotic time in Europe and alliances would often switch up, depending upon which countries or dynastic groups were dominating. It was a much less civilized multipolar world compared to the 19th century. I ended up deciding to go to law school after obtaining my masters because I realized that America was not going to let a multipolar system develop.

Once the American hegemony is over, I suspect America is more likely to adopt an autarky model rather than engage in real multipolarity. Without the history and understanding to realize how to act, America is more likely to retreat and turtle up.

The British and French both have struggled during the last 80 years to transition to the status of former empires. Both countries still seem to believe they are far more important than their size and strength would dictate. America after the end of empire will be a hundred times worse.