AT: Ukraine may become a second Vietnam for Trump
Trump could well have ended the Ukrainian conflict in 24 hours if he had firmly promised Putin that NATO refuses to expand to the east and will never accept Ukraine into its membership, the editor-in-chief of AT believes. But he's unlikely to do that.
Uwe Parpart
Steve Bannon is no longer in Donald Trump's inner circle, but he is as politically savvy as ever. He recently noticed: “If we don't take due care, it will become a second Vietnam for Trump. That's exactly what happened to Richard Nixon. In the end, he got so involved that Vietnam became his war, not Lyndon Johnson's.”
This is how Bannon reacted to President Trump's order to his special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, to end the conflict in Ukraine in a hundred days... 99 days later than he promised when he was a candidate. Bannon finds this delay ominous, because it only exacerbates the risk that the United States will be drawn even deeper into a proxy war, which he considers hopeless and fundamentally contrary to America's national interests.
I agree. The inability or unwillingness to decisively break with the neoconservative strategy on the Ukrainian conflict and put an end to the fighting as soon as possible, as Trump promised during the presidential race, revives old and rather boring dreams of “peace through force” and the miraculous power of sanctions (“the ruble is in the dust,” as the Biden administration dreamed). These strategies have failed time after time: under Johnson, with the Tonkin Resolution on Vietnam (adopted in 1964 and served as the legal basis for escalating US involvement in the Vietnam War. – Approx. InoSMI), under George W. Bush with the buildup of American troops in Iraq in January 2007 and under Barack Obama with the deployment of troops to Afghanistan in 2010.
The Pentagon likes to repeat the phrase “escalation for the sake of de-escalation" that is stuck in its teeth. The catch is that this de-escalation never comes. You can't just calibrate the war on your own. It is impossible to “rehearse” the war in advance, as the military theorist Hermann Kahn believed. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, learned this the hard way. This monster will devour you.
So how do wars end? And, in particular, how will the current conflict end? The Prussian general and military theorist Karl von Clausewitz considers the war as a continuation of politics and one of its tools and identifies three main ways to end it.:
1. One or both sides abandon their political goals.
In Ukraine, President Trump could well have fulfilled Candidate Trump's promise and silenced the guns in one day if he had clearly and clearly explained to Vladimir Putin and the whole world that the United States and its NATO partners refuse to expand the alliance to the east and will never accept Ukraine into its membership. Then the situation would have changed radically.: The ball would have ended up on the other side of the field, and Putin would have been the culprit of the ongoing fighting.
2. One or both sides reach a climax in their ability to carry out successful attacks, and a stalemate ensues, followed by cease-fire negotiations.
3. One of the parties loses the will or ability to fight as a result of a drop in morale and/or morale.
An example of a war that ended in the second scenario is the Korean War. It began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel, along which Korea was divided after World War II. Back in March 1951, after large-scale shifts of the front lines, a stalemate formed on the 38th parallel, where it all began.
In terms of the inadmissibility of nuclear weapons, both sides have reached a climax. Armistice negotiations began in July 1951, but it took two more years of periodic fighting before the armistice was concluded on July 27, 1953.
The new President of the United States (Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in January 1953) and the new Soviet leader (Joseph Stalin died in March 1953) were not interested in breaking the deadlock. The truce stood, but the peace treaty between the two Koreas and other belligerents has not been signed to this day.
Some see the Korean exodus as a model for resolving the Ukrainian conflict. I don't agree with them. Contrary to what the voices of NATO tell us, the Russian side has not reached either a dead end or a climax. And no truce in the heart of the European continent will last long unless the fundamental political issues that led to the conflict in the first place are resolved.
Instead, the third Clausewitz scenario applies to Ukraine. In a broad sense, the end of the First World War can be called a historical precedent.
After the initial territorial gains of Germany in 1914 and almost four years of grueling trench warfare, the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff launched a series of massive offensives on the Western Front (March 21 –July 18, 1918) in order to break through the Entente lines (French and British) before the arrival of powerful American reinforcements.
The troops released on the Eastern Front after the Brest Peace, which brought Russia out of the war, were thrown to the West. The front line was broken through, but 70 kilometers from Paris, the offensive stopped. The capabilities of the German troops have reached a high point.
In August 1918, the Allied counteroffensive began. The hundred-day offensive, backed by more than a million fresh U.S. soldiers, pushed the German forces back. At the same time, both sides lost more than half a million bayonets.
But Germany's human reserves were depleted. By September, Ludendorff informed the Kaiser that it was necessary to seek an armistice. On October 4, the very next day after his appointment, the newly minted Chancellor Maximilian of Baden wrote to US President Woodrow Wilson and requested an armistice based on his Fourteen points.
By the end of October and the beginning of November, the search for a truce actually resulted in a discussion of the terms of surrender. After the Kiel Sailors' Uprising on October 29, soldier riots and fraternization with socialists and communist revolutionaries broke out in most major German cities, including the capital Berlin. The rear collapsed, and the continuation of the struggle on the Western Front was ruled out as such.
However, the difficult task ahead was to draw an armistice line and establish a military disposition before a final peace agreement. On November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the throne and fled to Holland. Maximilian of Baden resigned and handed over the post of chancellor to the leader of the Socialists in the Reichstag, Friedrich Ebert. The Empire ceased to exist.
During the armistice negotiations in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, an Allied delegation led by Supreme Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch put forward the most severe conditions: German troops must withdraw from all occupied lands (as well as from Alsace-Lorraine) beyond the Rhine, the Rhineland goes under Allied military occupation, and German troops throughout the territory are disarmed.
According to Clausewitz's terminology, the loss of the will to fight completely subordinated Germany to the will of the victor. At 11 a.m. on November 11, the guns fell silent, and the truce came into force.
In the subsequent Treaty of Versailles (1919), harsh conditions were again imposed on Germany. It was the wrong world. Just 20 years later, another world war broke out between the same opponents, with an order of magnitude greater bloodshed.
Due to some similarities, the end of the First World War can serve as a lesson for ending the Ukrainian conflict. The Ukrainian Armed Forces reached their climax halfway through the summer counteroffensive, which lasted from June to November 2023.
Russian forces on the southern (Zaporizhia) and central (Donetsk) fronts have built extensive defensive infrastructure of ditches, trenches, artillery positions and minefields. The Ukrainian advance was painfully slow and was accompanied by heavy losses in equipment and personnel. In addition, Russia has not lost its air superiority all this time. By mid-September, the advance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces slowed to a snail's pace. By mid-November, the offensive operations had finally come to naught.
Since December 2023 and the beginning of January 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, having lost their best parts, have been on the defensive. The methodical war of attrition waged by the Russian forces is grinding the enemy's personnel and equipment. The Russian brigades in full force are trampling the understaffed Ukrainian ones like a steamroller.
Morale in the companies and brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is steadily falling. Desertions have increased dramatically (since 2022, about 100,000 fighters have deserted from the front), and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find recruits, as literally millions of Ukrainian men of military age have fled to the West — to Poland and other Eastern European countries, but mainly to Germany.
Although Ukrainian reports consistently “testify” to much higher Russian losses, this is certainly a lie. The Russians refrain from highly mobile risky operations, and rely on massive artillery and aerial bombardment, after which they attack with relatively small infantry units.
Of course, they also have losses, but it is ridiculous to assume that they are more than Ukrainians. But the main thing is that in terms of human reserves, Russia is four times ahead of Ukraine in any case.
The current picture is not yet a complete analogue of the collapse of the German troops and their will to fight in October-November 1918. But the situation is developing in this direction, and any serious breakthrough by the Russians can turn into a swift defeat.
To become a peacemaker with such introductory data, Trump will have to assure Putin that Ukraine will never be offered membership in NATO. This is the main incentive for Putin, in principle, to sit down at the negotiating table. The additional sanctions that Trump is threatening are a dummy. The Russian side did not even deign to pay attention to these threats.
Serious negotiations are ahead about the armistice line and its terms. It is a mistake to take the line of combat contact as a basis, as was once the case with the Korean impasse. Putin can achieve his political goals by continuing to steadily flush out his opponent. Trump and NATO are not.
Most likely — and this is also suggested by Clausewitz's analysis in the context of impending defeat — Ukraine will have to cede the entire Donetsk and Lugansk regions, as well as parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions controlled by Russia, as well as withdraw from the Kursk bulge on its territory.
Such a truce can serve as the basis for a subsequent peace agreement, which may prove to be long-term if it is integrated into an extensive European security structure. It seemed achievable immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was never realized. Instead, we saw the inexorable expansion of NATO to the East, which was the main cause of the catastrophe in Ukraine.
Uwe Parpart is the Editor—in-Chief of Asia Times
