The wrong way to end a war

Dark lessons from history that explain Vladimir Putin’s “peacemaking”

IN THE opening months of the Korean war, one of the bloodiest conflicts ever fought between communist forces and the democratic West, China’s leader, Mao Zedong, cabled his fellow tyrant, Josef Stalin, with thoughts about the deaths that each side needed to suffer. My “overall strategy”, Mao wrote in March 1951, involves “consuming several hundred thousand American lives” in a war lasting years. Only then would the imperialists realise that, in the newly founded People’s Republic of China, they had met their match. Mao had already sent armies of “volunteers” to the Korean peninsula, where combat had raged since the previous summer, after a Soviet-sponsored regime in northern Korea invaded South Korea, ruled by an American ally. Coolly, Mao told Stalin that China expected to lose 300,000 more men to death or maiming.

Mr Trump is letting Russia pursue maximalist goals while it pounds Ukraine: a strategy that Mao called “talking while fighting”.

Mao’s disregard for casualties was no rhetorical flourish. By July 1953, when an armistice brought 37 months of war to an end, internal Chinese estimates put his country’s death toll at 400,000 (today, official propaganda admits to 150,000). Informed of his eldest son’s demise on the Korean front, Mao murmured only: “In a war, how can there be no deaths?” Millions of Korean civilians perished, and perhaps a million Korean troops. America lost almost 37,000 men, alongside thousands more from Britain and other nations. Korea’s cities were smouldering ruins.

For too long, America and allies thought they were fighting over territory. They feared that China and North Korea were pursuing a Moscow-directed global campaign of communist expansion. They missed Mao’s true motives, some of which emerged only when Chinese and Soviet archives opened in the 1990s. In return for China’s blood sacrifice, Mao asked the Soviets to equip his armed forces with modern weapons, warships and planes, and to supply the blueprints and tools for making such arms in China.

Control of the peninsula swung between communist and Western armies several times, before settling into a stalemate around the 38th parallel, a line cutting Korea in two. Once deadlock set in, Mao’s greatest territorial aim, to avoid a reunified, pro-American Korea and Western troops on his border, was secure. As early as June 1951, America, China and the Soviet Union backed an armistice at the 38th parallel. Still, the war ground on for another two years. Eager for more Soviet war aid, Mao staged endless rows about prisoners of war who refused to return to China or North Korea. Fully 45% of American casualties occurred after talks began. Veterans recalled deadly night-time skirmishes on hills overlooking the floodlit negotiation compound. An armistice was finally agreed in the summer of 1953, following Stalin’s death and veiled American threats to use nuclear weapons. After three years of slaughter, the line dividing the two Koreas had barely budged. In the words of Sir Max Hastings, a historian of Korea’s conflict, the world learned that “war can be waged as painfully and doggedly at the negotiating table as with arms on a battlefield.”

Now Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is stalling his American counterpart, Donald Trump. Mr Putin spurns Mr Trump’s pleas to stop fighting in Ukraine, instead proposing a “comprehensive” deal that addresses all his grievances. In turn Mr Trump now plays down the importance of the ceasefire he has failed to bring about, either to save face or because he buys Russian arguments that Ukraine is losing on the battlefield and would use a truce to rearm. Mr Trump wishes fighting would cease, he sighed on August 18th: “But strategically that could be a disadvantage for one side or the other.” Mr Trump and his inner circle now prefer to talk up “land swaps”, their code for Ukraine surrendering territory of such value that Mr Putin might be induced to settle.

To hear Mr Trump tell it, pushing belligerents to cut deals is an intrinsically worthy pursuit because it is the opposite of war, which is senseless and wasteful. Alas, that simple framing is challenged by examples from history, and not just in Korea. Ceasefires do not only matter because they pause the killing. They can also signal acceptance that a war will not have a military resolution.

Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, has first-hand knowledge of how wars end. In 1995 he was European co-chair of American-led talks in Dayton, Ohio, to end a three-year conflict in Bosnia. America’s and Europe’s goal at Dayton was peace. Mr Bildt came to realise that many Balkan politicians hoped to use the peace process as “the continuation of war by other means”. Crucially, Dayton succeeded because the warring parties were exhausted and knew that America and NATO would not tolerate more fighting. That left only a political solution. “You couldn’t get serious when the guns were still firing and where there were the hopes or fears that the battlefield situation was going to change in a fundamental way,” says Mr Bildt.

Not everything is a real-estate deal

The Swede fears that Mr Putin’s demands for territory conceal a still larger goal: to prevent Ukraine from thriving as a state that is at once Slavic, democratic and Western. He also distrusts Mr Putin’s call to tackle all disputes at once. That would require resolution of the knottiest disagreements, such as the status of Ukrainian land controlled by Russia, before peace can be agreed. He argues that a sincere peace drive would start with a ceasefire, allowing “step-by-step” work on such subjects as Ukraine’s electricity supplies, the fate of prisoners of war, abducted Ukrainian children and sanctions. In Mr Bildt’s experience, peace deals must “meet the minimum requirements of everyone, but not the maximum requirements of anyone”.

Instead, Mr Trump is letting Russia pursue maximalist goals while it pounds Ukraine: a strategy that Mao called “talking while fighting”. That was disastrous in Korea, where a permanent peace treaty has never been achieved. Why would it be different now?