As of this writing, the United States government is trying to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine, three years after Russia invaded. Although some progress has been made, it’s been a rocky road, marked by verbal tussles and continued bloodshed. Probably more obstacles lay ahead. After all, it took two years of negotiations before the armistice was agreed on that ended the Korean War in 1953. Still, it is now possible to imagine the shape of a negotiated settlement.
Observers of the Russo-Ukrainian War have long expected a Korean solution, as my colleague Stephen Kotkin notes. That is, an agreement like the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, which divided the peninsula into two states, North and South Korea, with a demilitarized zone (DMZ) running between them. That division continues to exist today, over 70 years later. In Ukraine, it is hoped that, while Russia will keep some of its conquests, most of Ukraine will be free and independent.
Armistices are not self-enforcing, however. Neither are treaties. The ancient Greeks were realists about treaties and often put a time-limit on them, e.g., the Thirty Years’ Peace or the Ten Years’ Peace. Armistices and treaties depend on the willingness of the participants to enforce them. American experience with treaties in the twentieth century has been mixed. In Korea, peace has survived but only with the continued presence of American combat troops in South Korea, today, about 25,000 soldiers. Both sides remain committed to reunification, the North much more aggressively so. North Korea is a nuclear state, constantly threatening reunification by force, and continually engaging in intimidation, espionage, and small-scale violent incidents. No peace treaty to end the Korean War was ever formally signed. Still, the armistice holds.
America’s experience after World War I was less successful. An armistice ended the war on November 11, 1918. There followed a series of pacts among the belligerents, most famously the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the result of that year’s Paris Peace Conference, a gathering in which the United States played a prominent role. Its delegation was led by President Woodrow Wilson, the first sitting American president to travel to Europe. Wilson left his stamp on the peace conference, whose treaties carved up part of Germany and most of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the name of national self-determination. Yet the U.S. Senate, abhorring entangling alliances, refused to ratify it. Nor did the United States join the capstone of Wilson’s work, the League of Nations. Wilson hoped that the League would resolve international disagreements by negotiation. Without America, however, its efforts were stillborn. Had the U.S. remained engaged in Europe it could have stopped any German attempt at revenge, but the two leading European Allied powers, Britain and France, emerged wounded from the slaughter on the Western Front. They folded in the face of renewed and repeated German expansion in the 1930s until finally drawing a line in the sand, too late. The result was World War II, which began on September 1, 1939, and did not end until the United States was drawn in.
The United States and the Soviet Union played the leading roles in winning the war in Europe, with significant help from Britain, Canada, and others. Afterwards the United States conceded much of Europe to the Soviet Union, including part of Germany, but it also forged a powerful new order in western Europe. Its finishing touch was NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the alliance that emerged victorious from the Cold War after 1989. The USSR lost its allies (the former members of the Warsaw Pact), and much of its territory and population. Russia emerged diminished, divided, and dispirited. NATO was triumphant; Germany was reunited. Now, nearly 35 years later, NATO continues to exist, but it depends on American funding and American arms. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the European members of NATO have come close to disarming themselves.
Not so Russia. Like Germany after the First World War, Russia is bent on regaining at least some of its lost empire. Vladimir Putin has been in effect the dictator of Russia throughout the twenty-first century. Thanks to cunning strategy, a taste for bloodshed, a military buildup and a ruthless policy of subversion and aggression, Putin has managed to wrest back small pieces of the former Soviet empire. His greatest success was the bloodless conquest of Crimea in 2014, followed by a long-running war in eastern Ukraine, supposedly an indigenous effort by Russian speaking Ukrainians but really a Russian-directed operation. Finally, there came the out-and-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin won a swathe of territory in that invasion but at a huge cost in blood and treasure. Heroic resistance on the part of Ukraine, whose civilians and civilian infrastructure have been mercilessly attacked by Russia, in violation of the laws of war, has prevented further Russian gains.
As in Korea, so in Ukraine the United States can negotiate a compromise solution. Trump’s clever plan to force Ukraine to share its mineral resources with the United States would lead to the placing of American workers in that country. (The United States exacted much greater tribute from Britain as the price of American support in WWII: gold, scientific know-how, military bases, and the beginning of the end of the British Empire.) As part of the deal with Ukraine, European troops, say, British and French, would patrol a DMZ. There is still a large presence of U.S. troops in NATO countries bordering Ukraine, including over 10,000 in Poland. Together, these soldiers represent an adequate presence to deter further Russian aggression in Ukraine.
They are enough to deter aggression, that is, if the United States continues to remain engaged in Europe. But will it? There is war in the Middle East too, affecting American interests. Meanwhile, the rise of China is the most significant geopolitical fact of our lifetime. China is a global economic rival and a geopolitical threat to American power not only in East Asia but also in Latin America. The United States needs to respond but it faces domestic problems. These include political division, unabsorbed immigration, the decay of civic education, a decline in industry, a surplus of aged population and booming health care costs. Above all, there is the out-of-control national debt of $36 trillion. The debt-to-GDP ratio was 98 per cent in 2024, almost as much as the high of over 100 per cent at the end of World War II. Today’s U.S. simply doesn’t have the resources to fight everywhere in the world where trouble breaks out.
To make things worse, there have been long-simmering disputes between the Americans and Europeans. The latter, along with Canadians, concede that they don’t pay their fair share of the cost of defense, but they long since decided to prioritize butter (the welfare state) over guns (NATO), while indulging, at least in the elites, in the delights of anti-Americanism. Since Trump and Vice-President Vance have made noises about pulling back American commitments to Europe, several European states have promised to increase military spending. Promises, promises.
Putin knows all this. The Americans will entice him with offers of support against China, which covets the Russian Far East. They will promise to lift sanctions or, as needed, threaten to strengthen them or to rearm Ukraine. In the end, Putin will agree to terms, because of the burden of the war on Russia. But Putin and his successors will scrutinize the DMZ with patience, ready to attack Ukraine again at the first sign of western weakness. Meanwhile, Russia will engage in subversion within Ukraine to try to get a more pliant regime in power.
Can a negotiated peace in Ukraine survive? Yes, but it will be up to the Ukrainian people, and to the West.
