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Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive is focusing European and American minds on the possibility of finding some way to wind the conflict down. By Ukraine’s own admission, it looks unlikely that the country is going to win back control of the substantial portion of its territory still under Russian occupation. Ukraine’s military seems to be focused on trying to steadily attrite Russian personnel rather than winning back territory, a tacit admission that it needs to preserve its own scarce manpower and materiel. The future of Western aid is uncertain, but it could be made slightly more likely to arrive if Ukraine or Washington could come up with some plausible path to something that could be called victory. In other words, the West is grappling with the same question that David Petraeus famously asked during the occupation of Iraq: “Tell me how this ends”.
One of the ideas being dusted off is the “Korea model”, which sees the conflict ending in a way similar to the Korean War of the 1950s. The Korean War famously ended not with a formal peace treaty but with an armistice which left the troops on both sides in place. It created a demilitarized zone between them which has mostly been left alone to this day, and both countries then went back to their own business - South Korea building an enormously successful capitalist democracy, and North Korea building a hellhole.
Put that way - and it often is put this way - the “Korea model” sounds great. End the war without the need to negotiate a difficult peace treaty, and then Ukraine can carry on its integration into the West. Although it of course would be better if eastern Ukraine could be liberated as well, the Korea model would at least ensure no return to fighting in the future.
Unfortunately, the analogy is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t get everything wrong, but it certainly doesn’t provide a reliable blueprint to bringing peace to Ukraine.
Probably the most valuable insight the Korea analogy brings is that it recognizes that Vladimir Putin is probably not going to be willing to negotiate any sort of actual peace agreement anytime soon. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed, Western aid seems to be in doubt, and Donald Trump might be on his way back to the White House - so why settle now for an agreement which could be drastically better in 18 months? This point is often missed by people who advocate for negotiations to end the conflict right now, and pushing for some sort of ad hoc armistice is in fact much more realistic.
Unfortunately, though, the same logic applies to the Korea model. Even an armistice would only be sustainable with continued Western support at a high level, because otherwise Russia - whose industrial base and population exceed that of Ukraine - could just come back for another try in a few years. It’s here that we run into the main obvious difference between Korea and Ukraine. The armistice in Korea hasn’t held because of some magical diplomatic technique - it’s held because tens of thousands of U.S. troops have remained in South Korea ever since and it’s commonly understood that if the North invades the South again, it will trigger the United States to directly enter the war.
But there aren’t going to be U.S. troops in Ukraine, and the U.S. is not going to enter the war directly. The U.S. and its allies can probably continue to provide Ukraine with the means to defend itself for the foreseeable future so long as other priorities like Taiwan and their domestic politics don’t get in the way. Unfortunately, it looks like they will, and nobody knows what should happen next. Many of the proposals for the “Korea model” or the “Israel model” or “security guarantees” are just fancy ways to try to dance around this problem, whose only real solution is continued political resolve in the West. If you want to know what Ukraine’s fate will be then keep track of this, not the latest diplomatic fad.
Image credit: Jeon Han, CC2.0.