Make The Ukraine Truce, Then Cut Europe Loose

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Exactly 177 days after being sworn to office, America’s greatest peace president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, announced that the demolition derby on the Korean peninsula would be halted, and that an armistice would prevail henceforth—which armistice remains in place to this very day.

 Unfortunately, Ike’s truce in the hot war never got translated into a permanent peace treaty or normalization of relations between the two Korea’s or between the US and Red China.

Moreover, there is no mystery as to why. To wit, Washington falsely claimed it was fighting a noble war against the spread of world communism—so what became the Empire domiciled on the banks of the Potomac was not about to recognize a communist government in the north or abandon its puppet government in the south.

And we do mean puppet government. Shortly after the peninsula was arbitrarily split in two by FDR, Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in January 1945, the US military installed Syngman Rhee as president in the area south of the 38th parallel. However, that particular Korean patriot was living a comfortable life as an ex-pat in the United States at the time, and had been for most of the 41 years since 1904 when he had first come to the US to study at Princeton. Accordingly, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place that he would have been chosen by the Korean people to run what became a brutal tyranny propped up by Washington.

Despite his best intentions, Eisenhower was hemmed in by the crusading anti-communism of the deplorable Dulles brothers at the CIA and State Department and most especially by the so-called China Lobby promoted by Henry Luce of Time-Life. The latter attracted a noisy cadre of red-fighters in Washington including VP Richard Nixon, Senator William Knowland, Senator Joe McCarthy and Rep. Walter Judd, among numerous others, and they were not about to countenance the normalization of relations with the winner of the Chinese civil war—Mao Tse-tung.

So the line of military contact was frozen in time, and the US proceeded to heavily arm South Korea and champion its independence from the communist regime in the north and Red China on its flank.

Yet in the hindsight of history, what in the world did the death of nearly 45,000 US servicemen and another 35,000 wounded, some of which are still receiving VA medical care and disability benefits even today, contribute to the homeland security of America? And that’s to say nothing of the 1 million Korean combatants killed on both sides of the war and 2-3 million civilians whose lives were also snuffed out.

Needless to say, neither Red China nor Red Korea was a military threat to the US at the time. Nor actually was Stalinist Russia, which, in any event, had cautioned North Korea against crossing the 38th parallel.

Still, Washington launched down a path after 1953 of standing up a permanent artificial nation south of the demilitarized zone, and then armed it to the teeth and brought it under the US military umbrella. The value of those expenditures over the last seven decades easily amounts to $500 billion in present day dollars, meaning the US military/industrial complex has been in clover for 75 years selling weapons to a government that would otherwise not exist or arming upwards of 100,000 US troops stationed at times in Korea and Japan that would otherwise never have been mustered.

Then again, since there was self-evidently no gain to North American military security from Washington’s creation, maintenance and protection of South Korea, the conclusion is inescapable that Washington has spent upwards of a half trillion dollars for exactly what?

So far as we can tell, all those taxpayer funds have gone to insuring that South Korea’s 52 million citizens today have a tad better living standard at $33,000 per capita than do the citizens of Shanghai at $27,000; and also a bit more democratic freedom than their now equally prosperous counterparts across the Yellow Sea.

At the end of the day, that’s really what all this Cold War huffing and puffing, blood and treasure and occasional risk of nuclear confrontation has been about for the last 75 years. To wit, a slightly higher chance of being arrested for political dissent in Shanghai than in Seoul.

Nor is that any kind of contrafactual exaggeration. Had Washington been astute enough to allow the Koreans and Chinese to settle their own differences in June 1950, undoubtedly Korea would have ended up a satellite of China, meaning that the peninsula would have gotten a late start toward modernization during Mao’s time, but would have come bursting out of the starting blocks as part of Mr. Deng’s global export machine after 1990.

And, no, we are not overlooking the horrors of the Kim II Sung/ Kim Jong II/ Kim Jong Un crime family that since the late 1940s has tyrannized the people of the north and recently brandished nuclear arms toward the west. In fact, that’s just our point: We do not believe for a second that the austere tyranny of the Kim’s would have lasted 70 years had Ike been able to get a proper peace treaty, thereby leaving Korea to the Koreans and the Chinese, who most surely would have come to some practical modus vivendi.

After all, there is a long history of Chinese suzerainty on the Peninsula dating back to Korea’s status as a tributary state to China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Therefore, even if in the absence of Washington’s political machinations, money and arms, Korea had ended-up as the 23rd province or 6th autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, the homeland security and liberty of US citizens from Miami to Seattle would have been no worse for the wear.

Stated differently, there is nothing in the US Constitution which empowers Washington to be in the business of spreading, underwriting and militarily guaranteeing democracy around the world. And as a hard boiled matter of military security, the only thing which is required even now in 2025 is an invincible triad nuclear deterrent, which costs about $75 billion per year by CBO’s reckoning, and a Fortress conventional defense of the the North American coastline and airspace, which would likely cost a few hundred billion more.

But what it wouldn’t require is the globe-spanning US Navy and America’s current vast air and land-based expeditionary forces to bolster entangling alliances and unnecessary commitments like those to South Korea.

This all brings us to the news of the day, which is that the Trump administration is well down the road to a peace deal on Ukraine. If accomplished in the next 100 days, as hoped, it might even beat Ike’s accomplishment with respect to stopping the Korean War he inherited from Democrat president Harry Truman.

Unconfirmed plans being reported by the independent press in Ukraine, which is to say the USAID, indicate that there could be a ceasefire by April 20 that would—

• freeze Russia’s steady advance at the current lines of contact.
• ban Ukraine from joining NATO.
• Require Kyiv to accept Russian sovereignty on annexed land in the Donbas, Crimea and the rim of the Black Sea.
• Require Ukrainian troops to leave Russia’s Kursk region, where they launched a counteroffensive in August.
• Install a contingent of European soldiers, not American troops, to police a demilitarized zone.
• Request the EU to assist Ukraine in its reconstruction efforts, which may cost as much as $486 billion over the next decade according to a German think tank.

We think the Donald and Vlad Putin could knock out an agreement along these lines in a matter of a few days at some oasis in Saudi Arabia, with Zelensky cooling his heels in a staff tent off to the side.

But if the long run result is not to be another costly “ally” stood up in a make-pretend nation and armed to the teeth by the US military-industrial complex, the Donald needs pay close heed to General Eisenhower’s failure after he made the truce in Korea. To wit, today’s equivalent of the China Lobby is the vipers nest of neocon warmongers domiciled among the think tanks, NGOs, Deep State agencies, state-funded media and the military/industrial complex’s handmaids section of the US Congress.

They will bring unbearable pressure on the White House to turn the resulting Rump of Ukraine into another kept “ally” and endless trouble spot along yet another DMZ. But Trump must give them no quarter, and do so by taking a leaf from the wise old Senator, George Aiken of Vermont, who advised LBJ in 1966 with respect to the Vietnam War to “declare victory and go home.”

That is to say, after the peace treaty is signed, the Rump of Ukraine should be left to its own devices, including finding ways to make neighborly nice to the Kremlin. So there should be no puppet regime in Kiev, no informal ally, no militarized proxy, no arms dump for the US military/industrial complex on the doorstep of Russia.

In fact, give Zelensky his sinecure and luxury getaway in Costa Rica and its damn likely that his successor politicians in Kiev will find the ways and means to get along with their neighbor and to rebuild the charnel house Washington made of their country based on their own resources and such philanthropy as can be obtained from the rest of the world.

In short, Washington needs to just plain cut its losses and go home. Moreover, despite his self-evident faults Donald Trump currently has enough credibility with the American public to declare the abysmal failure of the UniParty in its pointless Ukraine adventure to be a “victory”, attested by the fact that the Rump of Ukraine could likely retain 75% of its former territory.

Even more importantly, an Aiken-style “victory” in Ukraine would also be an excellent opportunity for the US to get out of NATO and to end all of Washington’s far flung bases and commitments in the entirety of Europe. That is, bring the 65,000 US troops still in Europe home because they should never have been there in the first place, and most especially after the old Soviet Empire disappeared in the dustbin of history 34 years ago.

And as for Europe’s status after a Ukraine Peace Treaty and a US withdrawal from NATO, we doubt that Vlad Putin has any interest in occupying Poland or bursting through the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin. But the European countries have a GDP of upwards of $20 trillion or 10X that of Russia’s $2 trillion. If they can’t provide for their own defense on that— even if it means shaving their bountiful Welfare States a tad—then whatever may transpire is on them.

Ike stopped the hideous slaughter in Korea, but unfortunately did not end the war. If Trump really wants to go down in history as the Peace President, he now has a wide-open opportunity to truly end America’s latest unnecessary war and become the Peace President that even the great General Eisenhower never really was. US Troops In Europe

1. Germany: 35,068
2. Italy: 12,405
3. United Kingdom: 9,949
4. Spain: 3,212
5. Turkey: 1,778
6. Belgium: 1,105
7. Netherlands: 425
8. Greece: 368
9. Poland: 216
10. 10.Romania: 133

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.