On March 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump conducted a much-anticipated phone call to discuss a settlement of Russia’s war against Ukraine. According to the White House readout of the call, the two agreed that the war Russia started “needs to end with a lasting peace” and “stressed the need for improved bilateral relations.” Today, President Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “continue the effort to make a ceasefire work.”
What can history of U.S. involvement in the settlement of various global conflicts since World War 2 tell us about where the current Ukraine negotiations may go in the future? Prominent commentator George Will described the current U.S. strategy toward Russia as “turning U.S. policy 180 degrees, away from supporting democracies toward rewarding war criminals” – a richly-deserved and an entirely evidence-based moniker for Vladimir Putin.
But as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed: “Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.”
Momentous decisions the United States made on behalf of – or altogether without – some of its allies have shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades. As have occasional turns toward normalizing ties with authoritarians. Just ask the South Koreans, the South Vietnamese, the Taiwanese, and most recently, the Afghans.
On May 30, 1953, the President of the Republic of Korea Syngman Rhee sent a now-declassified letter to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, beseeching the American leader “to allow the Koreans to continue the fighting, for this is the universal preference of the Korean people to any divisive armistice or peace.”
President Eisenhower did not heed Rhee’s plea and on July 27, 1953, the representatives of the United States, China, and the (North) Korean People’s Army signed an Armistice Agreement.
Syngman Rhee refused to sign it, vociferously reiterating the same objections as he had three months earlier to President Eisenhower. Over 70 years later, the Korean Peninsula still remains divided, and nearly 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to protect its freedom from a totalitarian North Korea. (In another historical twist, North Korea is now fighting for Russia against Ukraine, as the Soviets did on behalf of North Korea during the Korean War.)
Two decades later, on January 23, 1973, President Richard Nixon announced that he had signed the Paris Peace Accords, winding down the nearly two-decade long U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. All U.S. troops left Vietnam two months later. The South Vietnamese did not hold out on their own for long and on April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army captured Saigon and the war was over.
During the 1970’s, President Nixon and his National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also worked hard to normalize U.S. relations with the PRC, much to the chagrin of America’s allies across the Taiwan Strait. On December 15, 1978, in an address to the nation, President Jimmy Carter announced a joint communique to establish full diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC. The “original Nixon” had been completed.
Fast-forward to February 29, 2020 and the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban, followed by our ignominious departure from Afghanistan in August 2021. In its wake, we left the Afghan people to the mafia-like rule of a designated terrorist regime.
This history is instructive today only because Ukraine finds itself in an unenviable position of being reliant on a superpower whose interests and values aren’t always neatly aligned, or can shift dramatically.
Starting with the Reagan Administration, but then especially since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy had rapidly shifted from containment of Soviet power to vigorously promoting democracy around the world, including in the post-Soviet bloc. The United States largely relied on economic and soft power tools to spread democracy and free-market capitalism around the world, or as G. John Ikenberry called it, “the grand strategy of liberalism.”
The West promised transitioning nations like Georgia and Ukraine it would firmly stand behind their popular quest for Euro-Atlantic integration. But the Russians had other ideas, invading first Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014, and then re-invading Ukraine in 2022. As a result, a fifth of those nations is now occupied by Russian forces.
The Ukrainians have fought bravely for their freedom, and there is an overwhelmingly convincing case that it is in the U.S. national interest to continue supporting them. What the current Administration ultimately believes on this issue is an evolving equation, with history as an imperfect guide.
