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Armistices vs. Forcing a Surrender
I’ve been thinking of what kind of problems ensue when leaders try an armistice to end a war rather than insist on the enemy surrendering. I’m sure that experts can provide instances where it has worked well but consider these two important examples:
- WW 1 ended in an armistice between the western powers and Germany. For the next 20 years Germany moved from serious poverty to a major power in the world — and filled with notions of anger and revenge. This armistice ended when the biggest and most murderous war in history started.
- The Korean War ended in an armistice between Korea, China and the United Nations (mostly the Unites States). We are now faced with a rather putrid result in North Korea.
If North Korea starts another major war or major conflict then it seems we have every reason to agree with Douglas MacArthur that we should have gone in against the Chinese and settled things permanently. I’m not belittling the risks with that nor do I know enough to authoritatively criticize what the leaders were up against but I really do think that the Chinese Communists couldn’t stand up to us and Mao needed to be slapped down. It’s clear also that the Soviets were behind the whole thing, too — that definitely makes one wonder what to do. However, giving Mao a defeat and uniting Korea into a western-oriented government could well have been better.
Think about the arguments these days about how we shouldn’t have forced unconditional surrender terms on Germany and Japan. Also, with regard to the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant wanted a clear defeat of the South. These two conflicts generated some problems, I admit (Cold War and balkanization of the South) but we ended up with the major points being resolved and two good and worthy allies in Western Germany and Japan. Instead, WW1 ended up with the Germans fuming and filled with hatred and North Korea has caused mischief all over the world and is now a possible flashpoint for a major conflict or war.
Published in History
Nixon had little influence in the Eisenhower Administration. Eisenhower considered him wet behind the ears (Nixon was young himself in those days).
And Vice-Presidents in those days had no influence in an administration, a precedent established by George Washington. It was Jimmy Carter who changed that precedent, a precedent that stuck.
It would be more accurate to say that Nixon learned a lot as VP under Eisenhower, and his handling of the Korean War would have informed Nixon’s handling of Vietnam.
I have long thought the only resolution to the Arab/Israeli conflict will come this way — either annihilation of the Jewish state, or total surrender of the Arab Palestinians (obviously preferred). That’s why I find it so frustrating when we (the US particularly) frustrate Israeli forces just when they’re making progress, by calling for a “cease fire” and getting back to the (evanescent) “peace process.” I realize this is extremely impolitic talk, but in the Trump era, we get to have conversations we haven’t had before, right? ;-)
Agreed. But I do think they learn from the president they serve under and probably adopt many of that president’s attitudes, simply from being in Washington under that president. That’s my guess. Democrats tend to see conflict and betrayal between the president and vice president whereas Republican presidents work well with their vice president. We get the Democrat vision in our history books, and I don’t think it is accurate for Republicans.
I started thinking about this relationship with respect to GW’s actions vis-à-vis terrorism. His three-pronged strategy in 2003 looked very much like Reagan’s anti-communism strategy–go after the money, the leaders, and the ideology. No surprise–his father was Reagan’s successful vice president during those years.
That’s basically what led me to wonder if Nixon really wanted to get us out of Vietnam because the only other choice would be possibly World War III. Those were the Korean War outcomes Eisenhower had been looking at when Nixon served as his vice president. John Kerry walks around saying he single-handedly got us out of Vietnam. I think the truth is more likely that Nixon wanted to get us out and took advantage of political maelstrom stirred up by Kerry to do so.
Just a guess. :)
Last week sometime I caught a moment of a Fox News interview with one of our current generals who said something very similar, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. He said, paraphrasing, “A decisive clear win actually saves lives ultimately on both sides.” That is so obviously true when we look at the protracted wars in the last fifty years.
That factor was directly connected to the decision to use nukes against Japan. It wasn’t just that we would lose a million or more soldiers invading Japan. It was that they would lose 5-10 million defending it. Including a bunch of teenage girls being trained with bamboo sticks.
Me, too.
I believe it was MacArthur, and he wanted to create a radiation belt south of the Yalu. Wonder what the Japanese would have thought.
I don’t think they got their ICBMs together until the 90’s. Anybody remember Loral Space and Hughes Aircraft, and bags of $100 bills going to the White House?
We didn’t have them yet, but that would have been the perfect situation for neutron bombs. They send 60 divisions over the border. Pop a few bombs over them and no more 60 divisions, just a big, spread-out, ammo dump.
Do we have them now? I thought Carter axed that program.
Good point, although I think it might have been in the 80’s, under Reagan. But I wonder if we do have them, covertly.
Thanks to leftists, we have neither enhanced radiation weapons (neutron bombs) nor robust nuclear earth penetrators. The latter would be required to take out things like underground Iranian Nuclear facilities and NorK artillery tunnels.
They are still nuclear weapons causing blast damage, thermal destruction and radioactive fallout. The idea that they kill people and leave buildings intact is a profound misunderstanding of how enhanced radiation weapons function.
Not sure I agree with that. Jimmy Carter, who started the current trend, was a Democrat. Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s VP, actually got along well. There was some acrimony between the two after they left office.
I have a theory why the VP has been given more influence within an administration. It took nine to ten years, but the passage of the 25th amendment gave the vice president some additional authority, though it’s never been exercised, can’t be exercised except in extreme circumstances, and in subtle ways caused presidents to regard their VP’s differently. Also, a president in effect nominates the vice president, in a sense appoints him.
I have noticed the media has been attempting to sow division between Trump and Mike Pence, but it’s still in Trump’s and Pence’s interest to keep good relations.
I feel a bit stupid for it but I hadn’t considered the Korean mess from this angle before, thanks for an excellent post and making me think from a different viewpoint Larry.
The only moral way to fight a war is through total war.
I have regularly argued that the reason there is an Israeli-Arab conflict is because Israel is averse to actually winning a war so comprehensively that the Arabs realize they have lost, and then stop fighting.
Instead, Israelis want to be nice (and very much want to be seen to be nice), so we always act with great acts of mercy (seen as weakness) in the heat of victory.
The problem is that with a fundamentally unproductive culture, the overwhelming bulk of Arabs/Moslems can do nothing but fight. More particularly, any country controlled by Arabs/Moslems can do nothing but fight. There is not a single Arab/Muslim country that shows respectable economic activity beyond resource extraction.
Islamism has sent the non-resource economies into a savagery death spiral. Consider the retrograde of Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Lebanon.
Bush was obviously a believer in the principle that “actions speak louder than words.” I used to believe that, but Bush certainly convinced me that this principle is wrong. I have switched over to “a lie can spread around the world faster than the truth can get its pants on.”
I just want to say (even though I completely blew any credibility I might have had on this subject in my comment that posted too fast without checking my dates on China’s having a nuclear arsenal) that I agree completely with Larry’s contention in this post. I did not make that point clear in my previous comments.
It’s a pet peeve of mine with our conduct of foreign policy–half-baked, indecisive conclusions to conflicts. Here is a list of longstanding territorial disputes that are bad situations just waiting for the right match. And it leaves too many people in limbo.
As does Larry, I sympathize with world leaders’ fears of starting World War III–especially in the case of Eisenhower and the Korean War, certainly Ike had seen enough of war–but there is a lot truth in the old axiom that current war started in the last one.
Sorry to not be on hand for the great comments here. Thanks to all. I’m traveling and spending time with friends and not having a good time with Wi-Fi.
MacArthur was not a cold blooded killer and I suspect that he was posturing for the enemies. But, he seemed to be more in the force surrender camp so it’s hard to know how far he would be willing to go.
Nuclear weapons as evil versus fire bombing considered to be OK is a leftist Cold War narrative (Soviet inspired) that is anti-American at its core.
Yes, good question.
I guess that I’m willing to accept the notion of surrender terms at this point in my understanding.
But, clarity is the most important thing. As Reagan expressed it, “We win, they lose.” (And they know they lost.)
In college I took a class entitled “War, Law, and Ethics.” It was an interdepartmental course taught by a law school professor, a theology professor, a philosophy professor, and a visiting professor who was a Marine Corps colonel (he may have been the law professor too, memory is hazy). It was a very highly respected class at Notre Dame back in the day.
I wrote a paper saying that the atomic bomb drops were fine, but the fire bombing wasn’t. My NROTC instructor learned of this and wasn’t much pleased.
I’m more mature now, and it’s clear to me now that both were necessary for a proper victory. Additionally, I no longer believe that the Westphalian/Western model for war is moral. For instance, I do not believe that belligerent non-combatant lives are more valuable than the lives of our soldiers. The Westphalian/Western style of war likes to refer to the “just war theory” but in fact the westphalian model presumes that wars are unjust and the product of a ruling class vanity or ambition.
I disagree. Wars are always waged with the approval or tolerance of the people ruled by those waging the war. It is the responsibility of every single citizen or subject of the warring party to resist an unjust war. That is, each individual must choose whether the war waged on their behalf has a moral cause. If not, they are obliged to resist that war to the utmost.
For example, when I was in Iraq, we made every effort to show the people that we would do everything in our power not to hurt them. The fanatical Muslims, many were emigrating from Chechnya, Somalia, Syria, etc., could come into a city of 70,000 with only a dozen people, very publicly execute a few families, and gain complete support from the rest. The people of Iraq knew that opposing us meant only that we would leave them mostly alone, whereas opposing the al Qaida flavor of the week resulted in very bad consequences to them and their family. If you were in Iraq in that situation, who would you be more likely to support?
Total war is the only moral way to fight. If you cannot justify a total war, then you cannot justify the war at all. People need to be held responsible for those they allow to rule them, and we should have a policy that we will not allow one American to die to save non-combatants that are not actively resisting their rulers so long as war is waged against us.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Let me take Vietnam as an example. I have no doubt that there was a moral cause for that war. Or at least for some war in that place and time. There was one faction of the US population (call it the “Jane Fonda” faction) that believed there was no moral cause and, in fact, believed that the North Vietnamese communists were the good guys. The Jane Fonda faction believed in using violent resistance to the US government in opposition to the war. I suppose that is “resisting to the utmost,” but I can’t support that kind of resistance; at least, not in a democracy.
Another faction (including me) believed that there was a moral cause, but the half-hearted approach to fighting guaranteed high US casualties and, eventually, a lost war. Your approach, Skyler, would have called for all out war instead of the half-hearted approach. But…
The faction that supported the war as it was being fought was concerned that an all out war would have triggered the Chinese pouring across the border (as in Korea) and, perhaps, a nuclear response from China and/or the USSR. That group, which included LBJ and Nixon, thought that a war of attrition had a chance to succeed. I thought they were idiots for that, but I did understand the fear of escalating the war into a nuclear superpower confrontation.
So I don’t think it is ever as cut and dried as you make it sound. Both the moral casus belli, and the strategy, depend on the circumstances and the alternatives available.
I can accept that once started the wrong way, it can be hard to switch to fighting the right way, and then things get complicated. In the case of the Vietnamese war, bad decisions got us into the war in a bad way. There was no declaration of war and no consensus from the people that a war was necessary.
But that’s the point. It never should have started unless we could have justified total war.
Never underestimate the willingness of the American people to accept any number of casualties, so long as they think the war is just and that we intend to win.
I agree that support or opposition for war among the populace is a complicated thing. You’re never going to have complete consensus.
However, I also agree that, if the leadership is going to put troops in harm’s way, it should be committed to total victory, as a matter of moral rectitude. This is what I found totally unconscionable about Obama’s approach to conflicts in the ME. And Bush (I and II) was only slightly better. Either all-in or all-out. None of these half-measures. Weakness invites aggression and gets (more) people killed.
Amen. Neither Bush had any idea at all how to fight a war, though W Bush seemed to be learning a little after he got rid of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is a very smart man, but along with that other smart guy, Cheney, a fool about how to win a war. You can’t win a war with special forces. Special forces are to supplement a large army or to conduct raids or reconnaissance missions that are small in scope. W. Bush’s reliance and expansion of special forces showed that he wasn’t too serious about ending the wars.