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Memo to Zelenskyy: Study Korea
Dear Volodymyr,
Does any of this sound familiar? The bad guys, North Korea, invaded the good guys, South Korea. To stop the bad guys from winning, the Americans intervened. Unfortunately, just as the Americans were about to eliminate the retreating North Korean army, the adjoining super bad guys, China, intervened and pushed the Americans back. The Americans had all the military advantages except one — China had an unlimited number of soldiers. The result: a bloody stalemate.
North Korea wanted to fight to the death. South Korea wanted to fight to the death. China was willing to fight forever as long as China itself was unthreatened. America, however, wanted the killing to stop.
So, America told the South Koreans it had to agree to a ceasefire or America would leave. America told the Chinese that they had to agree to a ceasefire or else things would escalate and put China itself at risk. (The North Koreans had no choice but to do whatever China said to do.)
There was no permanent and lasting peace agreement. The bad guys were not punished. Justice was not done. Not only was a country divided, families were divided. South Koreans were made to watch as their Northern relatives were subjected to horrific oppression.
But, the killing stopped. America stayed behind to hold the line. America also assisted in the reconstruction of a devastated South.
Seventy years later, still no peace agreement. The North continues to threaten and oppress. America continues to hold the line. South Korea has become fabulously wealthy and successful, while the North has become one of the poorest places on Earth.
To quote The Rolling Stones, you can’t always get what you want, but you just might get what you need.
Best wishes,
G-Pub
Published in Foreign Policy
Are you kidding? If America were to intervene, it would be as one-sided as the Gulf War. Russia can’t even move more than 150 miles into military weakling Ukraine in three years. How do you think they would fare against American stealth bombers, cruise missiles, and satellite targeting?
Of course they would have attacked again. American troops on the ground did not deter them at all the first time. And North Korea has been belligerent this whole time even with the armistice. In 1968 North Korea captured the USS Pueblo and tortured its 83 man crew for 11 months. They followed that the next year by shooting down a U.S. Navy aircraft killing all 31 people aboard. North Korea paid absolutely no price for these incidents from two different Presidents. Why would they have been afraid of killing American mine workers?
When one chooses to end a stalemate with a compromise solution, that is never what one ‘wishes’. It is what one accepts as the best outcome of a bad situation. The first wish is always victory. Stalemate means the first wish is off the table.
Actually, he doesn’t. If he really thinks this is not America’s problem, why is he intervening by doing negotiations with Russia, instead of just letting the war play out by itself? He is actively stripping Ukraine of any defenses he possibly can, giving Russia the greatest possible advantage in killing them. He is even taking away the stuff that doesn’t cost us any money, like satellite targeting and intelligence information.
That is an incredibly silly comparison. I think a more apt comparison would be the wishing of dead German soldiers before they could have inflicted tens of millions of deaths in World War II.
Do you understand why those aren’t comparable? Apparently not.
The Russian soldiers aren’t just MIGHT doing in the FUTURE, they ARE doing NOW.
ibid.
Are they on the “border of Poland, Finland, Norway, and the Baltic States” NOW? Or is that merely something that some people (e.g. Doug Watt, perhaps even you) IMAGINE they MIGHT do in the future?
They ARE killing in Ukraine NOW. If they get killed in Ukraine NOW then they CAN’T kill somewhere else later.
But they ARE killing NOW, so they’re not some kind of innocent bystanders. Unlike your “analogy.”
What you were replying to was a statement about Russian SOLDIERS, not just Russians.
Yes, they are. Had Doug Watt written, say, “Every dead Russian soldier in Ukraine is one who will not be able to kill any more Ukrainians”, I would have found that perfectly understandable. That’s how wars work, after all. But that’s NOT what he wrote.
Russia’s got plenty of soldiers who are not in Ukraine now. According to Doug Watt et al.’s argument, they would deserve to be killed NOW, too, lest they remain available to march on “Poland, Finland, Norway, and the Baltic States” at some point in the future.
But Doug Watt’s wish for their being killed is not based on what they’re doing NOW, but what he IMAGINES they MIGHT do at some point in the future. That’s exactly the kind of “pre-crime” mentality that was at work in the Deep South way back when.
No, what I was replying to was a ghoulish statement that called for the killing of Russian soldiers in the name of preventing a HYPOTHETICAL scenario from occurring.
I don’t know that there are many Russian soldiers who aren’t involved with Ukraine. If they had “spares” why bring in North Koreans?
At any rate, I think the “in Ukraine” part was likely implied. Perhaps elsewhere too. Are Russian soldiers still killing in Chechnya? Maybe.
You underestimate the resources available to Ukraine in this war. The arsenals of all NATO countries and a percentage we had better not admit of USA stockpiles were given them.
As well, The power imbalance I was referring to was the USA having nuclear weapons, the (noninvolved) Soviet Union barely having any, and the Chinese a decade or more from their first weapons tests (1964) when the Korean war ended (1953).
The Russian Federation inherited the Soviet Union stockpile and still have it. the Russian Federation army has now had three years of combat and 100k casualties to knock off the rust, where the US Army hasn’t fought any major land battles in thirty years. How many American troops do you want to lose to catch up?
Curious, this contradicts what Trump has been saying all along, that Europe has been very stingy in its support for Ukraine (however, it is not true at all). Besides, it took a while for Ukraine to collect weapons from the West. In the meantime, they fought the Russian Army off for a long time using their own resources, when everybody was so cock-sure they were going to be crushed within a few days.
I misunderstood, and didn’t realize that you were comparing the U.S. military advantage over the Soviet Union back in 1953 to the U.S.’s advantage over Russia today. I would posit that our advantage is even greater today than it was back then. Would the U.S. have been bogged down fighting against Ukraine for three years in an all-out war?
You really think Russia has emerged as a military powerhouse from this fight? And that the U.S. has deteriorated into an ineffective military force for not having fought a war in 20 years? The United Sates went into the Gulf War in 1991 after not having fought a major war in 20 years also. We routed Iraq in five weeks, only because we were trying to hold-back from killing too many civilians, otherwise it would have been quicker. The same holds true for the Iraq War that we won in three weeks.
NK attacked SK in 1950, shortly after Sec. State Dean Acheson defined the US security perimeter to exclude Korea and Taiwan. For NK’s Kim Il Sung, it was a green light. When NK attacked with 103,000 troops, there were only 510 US troops on the peninsula, hardly a deterrence. They were rapidly reinforced by US troops stationed in Japan, but were quickly pushed back into a small perimeter around the port of Pusan with orders to fight to the death.
NB. Dean Acheson was Under Sec. to Cordell Hull and both conspired to undermine FDR’s “carrot and stick” Japanese embargo policy with a hard stick approach. This convinced the Japanese, who were still debating their US policy, that their only means of achieving their military goal was to attack the US.
What would you think of a person who would smear a recently assassinated Russian corruption-fighter because he put a fist in the air at a rally, or of a person who tried to divert blame for the assassination of the corruption-fighter away from the most corrupt head of state in Europe by using the cui bono canard? Do you think such a person really cares about the hypothetical death of millions of Russians? Would you use the word monstrous to describe such a person?
Why, yes, dear. Were I to unquestioningly accept all of your premises regarding this hypothetical person’s hypothetical rhetoric about a hypothetical Russian corruption-fighter, I would indeed characterize his hypothetical rhetoric as monstrous.
As to whether this hypothetical person’s aforementioned hypothetical rhetoric would automatically preclude his really caring about the hypothetical deaths of millions of Russians, my answer is: No, it wouldn’t.
Yes, I do believe that the Russian Federation military is very strong in their neighborhood, fighting a ground war, under what they think are existential circumstances.
This strength erodes as they move further west, as naval force is involved, and as time goes by and their enemies adjust to their local advantage.
The sooner the Ukraine war ends and the Kiev regime is replaced by anything all sides can live with, the sooner the threat of Russian military force to Europe will rust away to peacetime norms.
So Russia is fighting for their very existence? Interesting. It never occurred to me that Ukraine was an existential threat to Russia all this time.
So the way to peace in Europe is simply to beat Ukraine and get rid of its government. I’m sure the Europeans would sleep well at night if this happened. Nice to know that someone can tell where the real threats are coming from. I’ve been brainwashed to think they were coming from Russia. What a dope I’ve been!
Why should the Kiev regime be replaced with anything all sides can live with? Russia has a regime that several sides can’t live with, and it’s not going to get replaced anytime soon.
And besides, it wouldn’t be very democratic for one country to have a veto on another country’s leadership. People have been complaining that Ukraine isn’t democratic enough (even though it’s far more democratic than Russia). Giving a vote to outsiders doesn’t improve anything.
It would be more honest to say that Ukraine should just surrender and let its territory be carved up by Trump and Putin. The Kiev “regime” was elected and is ruling under constitutional provisions. As for “peacetime norms,” if Putin gave a flying one about them, he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in the first place. Peacetime norms my ***.
NATO is the threat.
Yes, unfortunately.
The shooting war started with the support of the Biden Administration and lost support in the USA with the failure of Kamala Harris to succeed Biden.
Elections have consequences. So do wars. We lost this one.
I tend to agree, in theory. We shouldn’t have meddled in Ukraine. Or counteroffered the Russians with a better economic deal in 2013. Or should have given more support in 2014 or 2003. There have been many times the USA government made what I considered mistakes.
It’s frustrating to lose a war, I know. I’m not wild about it either. nor am I getting used to it as the losses pile up.
President Trump has a different take on foreign policy and we will see different outcomes going forward, as I’m sure you will agree.
I mostly read the thread … probably missed something.
I like analogies, but don’t see Korea as a good one. I think Vietnam is a great one because there was no exit strategy for us there or in Ukraine. I’m glad we are just wasting money and Ukrainian/Russian lives rather than ours at this point.
Europe has had plenty of time to stand on its feet, and I don’t think they even have a reason to try to keep Russia from taking a few more countries in the unlikely event some think they will. At least some on this thread think the Russian military is on par with Saddam’s. Why worry?
Hitler is dead. Neither Trump nor Putin resemble him in the least, and while I think the Red Army is better than most seem to think, it sure isn’t the Wehrmacht!
Certainly a WWIII that would be short and would test the upper limits of a lot of Geiger counters might provide something like “victory” to someone … and also probably create a new word to replace “pyrrhic” … a word hanging around since 279 BC is obviously denoting a concept we “moderns” are too advanced to comprehend.
If Trump can stop pouring money we don’t have into Ukraine, give Russia the boundaries that they had before Joe invited them in for more, and maybe get some minerals as a cherry topping, I’m having a celebratory drink!
It’s not a threat to Russia’s existence. It’s a threat to Russia’s plans to divide and destabilize its neighbors in central and eastern Europe and refashion them into client states similar to what they had been in the Soviet days and prior to that. And of course, to exploit them for its own purposes.
No, it would have quite the opposite effect from peace, unless by peace you mean the submission of much of the rest of Europe to Russia.
Wrong. The shooting war started when Russia started its program of invasion in 2008 and Obama/Biden signaled weak response from the U.S. It lost support due to people who were easily gulled by a propaganda machine that knew how to exploit existing internal conflicts and create mass hysteria about imaginary enemies.
You may have lost, but the war is still ongoing.
Ukraine had a better offer in 2013: A path to membership in the EU. When the President of Ukraine (one of the most corrupt politicians in Europe outside of Russia) tried to reneg on his promises to proceed down that path, the people of Ukraine protested. After killing a number of protesters he ran away leaving much of his stolen loot behind, and elections were held to fill the void. (Zelensky didn’t appear on the political scene until later.) Russia didn’t like that its plans to corrupt Ukraine had been thwarted, so invaded.
The European countries made a lot of mistakes in not providing more substantive help to Ukraine against the threat, which is a threat to all of them, some more than others.
There is a benefit to people who want to retain their freedom and sovereignty to fight against invasion. There is a benefit to the whole world if imperialistic invasion does not become an accepted new norm.
It’s not true that nobody cared. Opposition to that situation animated a two-term presidency–a very successful presidency. Those of us who are old enough to have been around in the 80s should be able to remember.
The problem now is that Russia is standing in other people’s corners. Russians aren’t the only ones who can play Stalingrad when their backs are against the wall.
All the more reason to make nuclear intimidation unsuccessful now.
The amount of money we don’t have that is poured into Ukraine is pretty small potatoes compared to the amount of money we don’t have that would be poured into other things that Trump wants to do.