We don’t yet know the precise approach that the incoming Trump administration will take to negotiating peace in Ukraine, but we do know that an attempt by Washington to force an end to the conflict is almost definitely coming. Underlining the strategic challenge in the Pacific, the president-elect has consistently called for an end to the conflict and the significant drain on U.S. military resources that it represents. And although there is much to criticize in Trump’s rhetoric about the war, he is responding to a genuine problem: Washington needs peace in Ukraine in order to focus on other global challenges, particularly the rise of China.
But if American policymakers are hoping to cut a deal to end the war and promptly pivot their attention to the Pacific, they may be disappointed. If a peace or ceasefire agreement can be reached in Ukraine, it will almost definitely be based on the current line of de facto territorial control. This is unlikely to satisfy either party. Russia’s significant but failed attacks on Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa at the outset of the conflict indicate that Vladimir Putin’s objectives were larger than solely creating a land bridge between Donbass and the Crimea. In his statements about the war, Putin has also frequently questioned the validity of Ukrainian sovereignty and the separate identity of its people. This indicates that he has goals that are unlikely to be satisfied by an occupation of a mere 20 percent of Ukraine’s land.
Likewise, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly stressed the need for the complete restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, including Crimea. Only after Trump won the U.S. presidential election did Zelensky admit that Kyiv may need to cede de facto control over territory to Russia as part of a negotiated agreement. This tactical shift toward emphasizing that the territory will be won back by diplomacy will not necessarily last among Ukraine’s leadership, particularly as public sentiment remains opposed to territorial concessions.
A poll held in October this year by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology indicates that 58 percent of respondents are unwilling to offer territorial concessions in return for peace, and a separate Gallup poll in November found that only roughly a quarter of Ukrainians support territorial concessions in return for peace. These data points could be the seeds of a future revanchist challenge to the new negotiated status quo which, as Ukraine’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba recently warned, could reignite the conflict and endanger Europe’s security once again.
If the United States wants to create a solid foundation for peace in Europe to enable its much-discussed “pivot to Asia,” any peace settlement has to include mechanisms to prevent future challenges to the settlement that might flow from Ukrainian and Russian dissatisfaction. In crafting such a settlement, the Trump administration can learn from a surprising place: the history of the early Cold War in Asia. Between the emergence of the Iron Curtain in 1947 and the resolution of the Korean War in 1953, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations carried out a pivot from Asia to Europe. And they did it despite budgetary constraints, divisive domestic politics, and the outbreak of a major war in the region from which they were trying to disengage. Facing the problem of how to cut back their commitment to Asia while ensuring that instability there would not suck the United States back in, they crafted policies that the Trump administration can learn from today.
The Pivot to Europe
Before North Korea broke through the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea in 1950, the Truman administration was trying to disengage from Asia. Part of the reason was economic. The return of the U.S. economy to normalcy following World War II had not gone entirely smoothly, with concerns about both inflation and the deficit making substantial increases in defense spending unpalatable. There was also political pressure to cut overseas commitments, stemming both from a perceived need to focus on domestic concerns that had been neglected due to the war and a growing belief that sustained high defense spending and taxes it required would undermine the free market and the American way of life. These difficulties reinforced the perception that the United States was overstretched globally and that it would need to cut its commitments to regions of lesser importance to U.S. security interests.
Facing these pressures, Truman administration policymakers decided to prioritize Europe over Asia. Both had been major theaters of World War II, and the U.S. had a substantial military presence in both. But looking forward, the administration viewed the maintenance of stability and pro-American regimes in Europe as more essential to U.S. interests than in mainland Asia. It was also the region facing the starkest challenges, both from Soviet expansionism and from economic shortages, which American policymakers feared would increase the appeal of Communism. The result was a “pivot to Europe,” visible in policies such as the founding of NATO and the Marshall Plan.
At the same time, the pivot involved the administration seeking to disengage from mainland Asia. The Truman administration had long been skeptical of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and with the defeat of the Japanese, the main reason to tolerate their perceived incompetence and corruption vanished. After the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the administration explored recognizing its government and signaled that it would recognize Taiwan as a sovereign part of China.
This disengagement was embodied in a famous speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in which he announced that the U.S. did not view the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, or mainland Asia as a whole as part of its “defensive perimeter” and would not defend them. With a ramping up of engagement in Europe and a disengagement from Asia, the “pivot to Europe” was set.
The Korean War Interrupts the Pivot to Europe
But then Kim Il Sung intervened. By ordering the invasion of South Korea, the North Korean leader upended the Truman administration’s calculations. Even as American policymakers wanted to pivot their attention to Europe, they also felt that they could not ignore naked aggression in Asia. Soon, American soldiers would be fighting in Korea – and the U.S. Seventh Fleet would be in the Taiwan Strait to act as a deterrent to any Chinese designs on Taiwan, which the United States had so recently foresworn any interest in defending.
Despite this, the war in Korea didn’t change the basic sense that Truman – and later Eisenhower – had that Europe was more important to the U.S. than Asia was. Echoing arguments made today about the need to defend Ukraine in order to uphold U.S. credibility, they viewed defending South Korea as necessary in large part so that its fall would not inspire communist aggression elsewhere, particularly in Europe. This also meant that there were limits to how far U.S. policymakers would go to defend South Korea, just as there are limits today to how far Washington will go to defend Ukraine. This became evident when the Truman administration rejected General Douglas MacArthur’s push to expand the war to the Chinese mainland, which the administration thought would have made the European theater dramatically less secure. As General Omar Bradley famously explained, to do so would have meant fighting the “wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
As a result of their focus on Europe, the Truman administration placed a high priority on ensuring that the Korean War would end in a durable ceasefire, despite the fact that neither party would achieve their goal of reunifying the peninsula under their own leadership. They also sought durable stability across the Taiwan Strait, a goal that was again complicated by the existence of two revisionist regimes disillusioned with the status quo.
Part of the solution to the problem came through the paradox of what we might call “disengagement through entanglement.” Washington attempted to actually intensify its ties to both Chang Kai-shek’s Taiwan and Syngman Rhee’s South Korea. Eisenhower signed bilateral security treaties with South Korea in October 1953 and Taiwan in December 1954. But it included in these treaties conditions and constraints that barred either regime from engaging in revanchism and restarting conflicts which might suck Washington in. Chiang agreed to halt attacks on the mainland, and Rhee ceded operational control over his military and agreed to Washington having a veto on offensive action against the North. With the conflicts defused and these constraints in place, the United States was then able to move its attention elsewhere.
In return for foregoing revanchist objectives against their communist adversaries, both states received significant amounts of military and economic aid as part of the final security agreement. They also came under the umbrella of U.S. military deterrence. When China sparked several crises in the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s by bombarding Taiwanese islands, Washington not only publicly considered the use of nuclear weapons and sent air and naval forces to the region as a deterrent, but also provided logistical support to Nationalist forces on the frontlines. Chiang had given up his dream of uniting the mainland, but in return he benefitted from the protection of the U.S. military. Facing that might, Mao eventually backed down.
American policymakers had achieved their dual goals of deterrence and constraint, stabilizing the theater that they viewed as a second priority and thus being able to focus attention on their first. Ultimately, the victory would prove fleeting, and the United States would end up fighting another land war in Asia. But next time it would be in Vietnam, not Korea or across the Taiwan Strait. These latter two have remained more or less stable to the present day, a testament to the U.S. success at stabilizing them. And the way in which they did it could have lessons for Trump.
Lessons for the Trump Administration
What might “disengagement through entanglement” look like in Ukraine? One crucial difference is that Washington is highly unlikely to give Kyiv any guarantee that it will come to its direct military aid in the event of a renewed war with Russia. Zelenskyy’s wish to join NATO is likely to be unfulfilled. But given Ukraine’s vulnerable situation, it will hardly be in a position to turn down a deal with the right combination of incentives and constraints. By offering one, Washington can achieve the balance of deterrence and entanglement necessary to freeze the conflict.
To reach a durable deal, both Russia and Ukraine must eschew any future hostile action aimed at altering the territorial status quo. Ukraine will not be required to formally cede the land conquered by Russia, but it will have to use diplomatic avenues and not force to pursue its reintegration. In return for its restraint, Ukraine should receive sizable levels of military and economic aid aimed at rebuilding the country’s military and economy and providing a future deterrent to renewed Russian attack. Offensive action by Ukraine will nullify the agreement and lead to the withdrawal of future U.S. aid.
As part of the deal, Russia should receive sanctions relief, but sanctions will be reimposed in the event of renewed Russian aggression. In the event of such an attack taking place, aid to Ukraine should ramp up significantly, providing an additional deterrent to Moscow.
Finding the means of paying for aid to Ukraine will be difficult but not impossible. Europe should be enlisted to fund part of the aid package, but the United States must pay for its share as well. Indeed, a peace agreement provides an opportunity to reset the conversation among the American public and Congress about aid, which many have grown weary of providing. Rather than being asked to fund an indefinite commitment with no clear end goal, Americans will be asked to pay for a concrete agreement that could bring stability to Eastern Europe for a generation. The more realistic and sustainable the agreement, the easier it will be to justify the expense.
Given that the alternative is another destabilizing conflict in which the United States would inevitably become implicated, even skeptics of supporting Ukraine ought to realize this isn’t such a bad deal after all. These skeptics have different motivations, with some urging that the United States should focus its attention on China and others weary of overseas commitments altogether. But as Truman and Eisenhower realized in the 1950s, freezing a conflict in place is ultimately much more sustainable and desirable than allowing it to erupt again, when the costs it will impose on the United States are much higher. For both an incoming president who boasts of pursuing “peace through strength” and for his advisers who have their eyes on both China and the forces of domestic isolationism, it would be the wisest, cheapest and most sustainable course.