‘Asia Times’: The lack of a wider new European security is the principal cause of the Ukraine war disaster

Trump running the risk of following previous presidents’ failed ‘peace through strength’ formula in Ukraine, writes Uwe Parpart, the Editor-in-chief of ‘Asia Times’.

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.

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.

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.

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, 1918 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.

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.

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.

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.

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