Filenews 31 August 2023 - by Andreas Kluth
It seems increasingly likely that the Ukrainians will not be able to expel the Russian invaders, and at the same time the Russians will not be able to swallow more of Ukraine. What, then, comes next beyond unimaginable human suffering?
As they have done since the beginning of this invasion, experts and leaders instinctively resort to historical analogies to guide their thinking, and three of them stand out.
One "model" for Ukraine is West Germany in the 1950s, another is Israel from the 1970s onwards, and a third is the Korean Peninsula, also from the 1950s.
People who cite the case of West Germany argue that NATO should accept the unoccupied part of Ukraine into the Western alliance as soon as possible.
This would deter Russia from any additional land grabs and allow free Ukraine to rebuild into a prosperous democracy, as West Germany did during the Cold War.
Embracing only the free part of Ukraine in NATO's cocoon, according to this reasoning, is probably feasible legally, politically and strategically, as this is roughly what NATO did with West Germany in 1955.
Germany at the time was divided and occupied by the Allies, victorious in World War II. However, NATO extended Article 5 – which states that an attack on one is an attack on all its members – only to West Germany, the entity that represented the occupation zones of the three Western Allies – the US, UK and France – but not to East Germany, which was in the Soviet occupation sector.
This collective guarantee prevented the Soviet Union from attacking for the rest of the Cold War, the argument goes. And eventually Germany was peacefully reunited, as Ukraine may one day. Conclusion: let the Ukrainians join NATO, with as much territory as they control now.
Others point to Israel as a better model. This country has never joined any collective alliance. Since the 1970s, however, the US has formalized its security guarantees and armed the Israelis to the teeth.
As an invincible warrior nation and ally of the United States, Israel prospered until it finally began to make peace with its Arab enemies from a position of strength. Give the Ukrainians the same bilateral guarantees, money and weapons, the argument continues, and Russia will understand that it will never win.
A third group counters that the front line in Ukraine is more like the one on the Korean peninsula since 1952. Neither side seems capable of making big gains anymore, even though both are suffering increasingly unsustainable losses and costs.
The longer all sides – the belligerents and their supporters – refuse to talk to each other, the longer death and collective suffering continue, without changing the overall situation. Therefore, the only way out, as in Korea in 1953, is to fight and negotiate simultaneously, with the aim of signing not a peace treaty, but an armistice that leaves unresolved questions open, but at the same time silences the guns.
Kiev is not Bonn
The West German analogy seems tempting, but it is unachievable. It is true that Bonn ruled only part of a country which it theoretically claimed to represent entirely. Under American, British, and French patronage, however, West Germans had created a new country, the Federal Republic, with fixed borders accepted by all four Allies, including the Soviets. At the time of its accession to NATO there were no battles.
Moreover, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer formally accepted the division of his country as an indefinite state in exchange for its integration into the West.
This provoked tremendous acrimony from the opposition, which wanted to see him insist on reunification in exchange for neutrality – the path taken by Austria (which was also part of the Third Reich) at the time.
Ukraine differs from West Germany in 1955 in all respects. Its internal borders demarcating areas of Russian control are not recognized, nor have they been defined.
NATO will constantly have to decide whether Article 5 extends to the same city, even when it changes hands (for example, Bakhmut for much of last year).
Eventually, the allies would either have to enter the battle and fire at the Russians (risking World War III) or downgrade their famous mutual defense clause. But then Article 5 would lose its deterrent effect, endangering the entire alliance.
Alternatively, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could channel himself with a little Adenauer spirit and formally bid farewell to the five Ukrainian provinces that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, claims to have annexed — the East German equivalent in that analogy. Kiev, however, wants all its territory back.
Neither Zelensky nor any other Ukrainian leader can dismiss this war goal today.
Even the hope for a final and peaceful 1990-style reunification is not well on its feet. The Soviets during the 45 years in which they ruled East Germany never attempted to purge or Russify the local population.
In Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea, the Russians have been doing it, on the contrary, all this time.
Nation-warrior in the making
The analogy with Israel may therefore seem more apt, but a closer look reveals equally large holes in this scenario as well. The U.S. security guarantee became official only after Israel had already won four wars against its Arab enemies.
Instead of fighting enemies on its own soil, as Ukraine does, Israel until the 1970s waged war on theirs. At the same time, it also built its own nuclear weapons – although it has never confirmed the existence of this arsenal.
To date, none of its Arab enemies have nuclear weapons (Iran, which is not an Arab country but is close to going nuclear, is another matter).
Therefore, Ukrainians are in the opposite situation to that of Israel in the 1970s. They never routed the Russians, even if they held them back in the Donbas region between 2014 and 2022. Nor do they have nukes – they handed over their own Soviet-era stockpiles in the 1990s in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow (!), God willing!
So the Israelis, by the time they became U.S. allies, were already victorious and had a nuclear deterrent, while their enemies had been defeated and had no atomic bombs.
Through this situation, Israel became a thriving economy and society. The Ukrainians, however, are fighting without nukes for their existence against an enemy, Putin, who constantly rattles his nuclear swords.
Ceasefire without peace
So what about the Korean analogy? Although it is also imperfect, it may be the best available. Then, as now, Moscow and Beijing supported the side of the aggressor (North Korea in 1950), while the US led an international coalition to defend the victim. In Korea, as in Ukraine, a kinetic phase of opening up the conflict gave way, from mid-1951, to a bloody stalemate.
By that time, both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons.
Even then, however, the main competitors were not yet ready to talk to each other. Pyongyang and Beijing were considering the idea, but Joseph Stalin in Moscow was rigid. On the U.S. side, President Harry S. Truman and his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had to worry about domestic politics and whether they would look weak in the face of communism.
South Korea was defending its own interests, which were not aligned with those of the United States.
President Syngman Rhee wanted the entire peninsula and surprised his American allies with abrupt gestures, such as a mass release of prisoners.
And yet, after a long delay, negotiations finally began, even though the massacre continued. This is one of Korea's lessons, according to Carter Malkasian of the Naval Postgraduate School: "You have to be prepared to talk and fight at the same time."
And yet the negotiations continued to fail. Even when they got back on track after Stalin's death in March 1953, they led to a result that satisfied no one. In reality, the armistice merely recognized the front line of fire as a border, as it had been formed for two years.
It was not settling anything else, it just froze the conflict. But this ceasefire is still in force today. And, in the intervening seven decades, South Korea has become a bustling and prosperous democracy.
If Korea is the right model, the lesson is that warring parties take too long to start talking to each other, even when it is obvious that neither side can win militarily, and then it takes too long to silence their weapons, even when it is clear that the outcome is not going to change and that the only parameter left to be determined is how many people will die unnecessarily until they die recognize this.
None of this is about who is right. History will record that one man, Vladimir Putin, is guilty of the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine. However, the wisdom of the past suggests that it's time to fight and speak at the same time—not in the hope of scoring some kind of victory, but in the sense of resignation that, somehow, this horror must end.
