How wars end… and why Ukraine’s may drag on

Steve Bannon, no longer in Donald Trump’s inner circle, but no less politically savvy for it, remarked recently, “If we aren’t careful, it [Ukraine] will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war, not Lyndon Johnson’s.”

Bannon reacted to President Trump’s tasking of his Special Envoy for Russia and Ukraine, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, with ending the Ukraine war in 100 days … 99 days later than candidate Trump had bragged. To Bannon, that’s an ominous delay that will only heighten the risk of the US being pulled deeper into a war he believes is unwinnable and isn’t in America’s national interest.

I agree. Failure to act swiftly on a ceasefire, and failure to make a clean break with the neocon Ukraine/Russia strategy candidate Trump promised brings back into play the tired old peace-through-strength fantasies and magical sanctions (“ruble to rubble”) of the Biden administration; strategies that failed for Johnson in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, for George W Bush with the January 2007 surge in US forces in Iraq, and for Barack Obama with the 2010 surge in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon’s fashionable catchphrase is “escalate to de-escalate.” The trouble is that de-escalation never comes. You can’t fine-tune war. You can’t “game” it the way military game theorist Herman Kahn thought, and Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara found out the hard way. The monster will overwhelm you.

How do wars end? In particular, how will this war end? Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz sees war as an instrument of policy and identifies mainly three ways it ends:

1. One or both sides abandon their policy objectives.

In the case of the Ukraine war, President Trump might well have achieved the goal of candidate Trump of silencing the guns in a day if he had clearly and credibly stated to Vladimir Putin and the world that the United States and its NATO partners abandon eastward NATO expansion and will never make Ukraine a NATO member. The shoe would

then have been on the other foot, making Putin the guilty party for any continued hostilities.

2. One or both sides reach the culmination point in their ability to carry out successful attacks and a stalemate ensues, leading to ceasefire negotiations.

3. One side loses the will or ability to fight as a result of the collapse in public and/or military morale.

An instance in which a war ended based on the second scenario was the Korean War. It began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel at which Korea had been divided after World War II. As early as March 1951, after massive shifts of the front lines in the intervening period, a stalemate had developed at the 38th parallel where it all started.

Both sides had reached culmination points on the proviso that no nuclear weapons were to be used. Armistice talks commenced in July 1951, but it took another two years and intermittent fighting before an armistice was concluded on July 27, 1953.

A new US president (Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953) and a new Soviet leader (Joseph Stalin died in March 1953) had no interest in breaking the stalemate. The armistice held – but until today no peace treaty between the two Koreas and the other warring parties has been signed.

Some have suggested that the Korean outcome is a model for the war in Ukraine. I disagree. Contrary to what some NATO voices would have us believe, there is no stalemate and no culmination point on the Russian side. No armistice in the heart of the European continent will have lasting value unless the fundamental policy issues that led to war in the first place have been settled.

A war’s end, according to Clausewitz’s third scenario, is applicable to Ukraine. The historical precedent, broadly, is the end of World War I.

After nearly four years of attrition warfare with little movement of the frontlines after initial German territorial gains in 1914, the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff launched a series of massive offensives on the Western Front (March 21 – July 18, 1918) aiming to break Allied (French, British) lines before the arrival of large American reinforcements.

Troops no longer needed on the Eastern front after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took Russia out of the war, were deployed to the Western offensives, and breakthroughs were achieved. But 70 kilometers away from Paris, the assaults ground to a halt. German forces’ capability had culminated.

An Allied counter-offensive started in August 1918 (”Hundred Days Offensive”), reinforced by over a million fresh American troops, which pushed German forces back. Both sides had suffered over 500,000 casualties.

But German manpower reserves were now exhausted. By September, Ludendorff told the Kaiser that an armistice had to be sought. Newly appointed Chancellor Prince Max von Baden (October 3, 1918) wrote to US President Woodrow Wilson on October 4 to seek armistice terms based on his Fourteen Points.

By late October/early November, Baden’s quest for armistice terms had de facto morphed into seeking terms for surrender. With the Kiel mutiny of the sailors of the High Seas Fleet on October 29, joined by soldiers’ revolts and fraternization with socialist and communist revolutionaries in most major German cities, including the capital of Berlin, the homefront had collapsed and continuation of the fight on the Western front was out of the question.

All that remained was the hard task to draw the armistice line and establish the military disposition until a final peace settlement could be reached. On November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to Holland. Baden resigned and turned the chancellorship over to socialist parliamentary leader Friedrich Ebert. The Empire was no more.

At the armistice talks in a railroad car in the Compiegne Forest, the harshest conditions were now imposed by the Allied delegation led by Supreme Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch: German forces were to withdraw from all occupied territories (and Alsace-Lorraine) behind the Rhine River, the Rhineland would come under Allied military occupation and German forces throughout were to be disarmed.

In Clausewitz’s terms, loss of the will to fight had subjected Germany entirely to the will of the victor. At 11 am on November 11, the Armistice went into effect and the guns fell silent.

Imposition of the harshest conditions upon Germany in the subsequent Treaty of Versailles (1919) ensued. It was the wrong way to make peace. Within 20 years, another world war broke out between the same parties with slaughter on a grander scale by an order of magnitude.

The end of World War I holds strong similarities and lessons for the Ukraine situation and the potential end of the war there. The culmination point of the Ukrainian forces was reached approximately halfway through their attempted summer counter-offensive of June through November 2023.

Russian forces in the southern (Zaporozhe) and central (Donetsk) sections of the front line had created extensive defensive infrastructure, including ditches, trenches, artillery positions, and landmines. Ukrainian progress was painfully slow and high in casualties and lost equipment. And Russia, at all times, maintained air superiority. By mid-September, progress had slowed to a snail’s pace. By mid-November, offensive operations petered out.

Since December 2023/early January 2024, Ukrainian forces, having lost some of their best units, have been on the defensive. Meanwhile, the methodical war of attrition conducted by the Russian forces is exacting a high toll on men and machines. Heavy steamroller-style, Russian brigades at full strength move forward against Ukrainian under-strength ones.

There are increasing numbers of incidents of the collapse of fighting morale at the company and up to the brigade level. Desertions on the Ukrainian side are high (100,000 since 2022), and new recruits are ever harder to find as literally millions of Ukrainian men of military service age have fled to points west, to Poland and other Eastern European countries, but mainly to Germany.

While Ukrainian “reports” see much higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian, those reports are most certainly false. The Russians are not conducting highly mobile risky operations, but rely heavily on massive artillery and air bombardment, then conduct relatively small-unit infantry attacks.

Sure, they have casualties, but it’s a stretch to assume they are larger than the Ukrainians. The bottom line is that the Russian manpower reserves exceed Ukrainian ones by 4:1.

This picture does not yet add up to the collapse of German forces’ ability and will to fight in October/November 1918. But it’s headed in that direction and any significant Russian breakthrough could rapidly translate into a rout.

Under these circumstances, a pre-condition for Trump to be the peacemaker is the necessity for him to assure Putin that Ukraine will never be offered NATO membership. That’s the principal incentive for Putin to even come to the table. Threatened coercion through added sanctions, as Trump has mooted, is a dud and was not even commented on by the Russian side.

The serious negotiation is over the armistice line and conditions. To assume that – as in the case of the Korean stalemate – the line of combat contact is the appropriate one is wrong. Putin can achieve his political goals by continuing to grind it out. Trump and NATO cannot.

Most likely – and from the standpoint of a Clausewitzean analysis when military defeat is nigh – Ukraine will have to cede control over the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative regions and over the currently Russian-controlled parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhe oblasts and withdraw from the Kursk salient in Russia.

On the basis of such an armistice, a subsequent peace agreement that can last will have to be embedded in a wider new European security structure of the kind that appeared possible at the time immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union but was not executed and instead gave way to relentless NATO eastward expansion, the principal cause of the Ukraine war disaster.

Uwe Parpart is editor-in-chief of Asia Times.