Ukraine and the Realities of Peace Treaties

By Michael F. Duggan

Disclaimer: This idea was suggested to me by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous.

Wars are either decisive or not, and most of the great peace treaties of modern history are not what they purport to be.

In his magnum opus, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume observes that in order for justice to prevail in the law, there must be a condition of approximate equality between the parties involved.  This concept translates seamlessly into the negotiations that end wars: in order for there to be a genuine diplomatic resolution to conflict, there must be relative parity between the belligerents.  Even with Western military hardware and economic assistance, this observation does not bode well for the Ukrainians.

In the real world, there are two kinds of peace settlements: there are formal acknowledgements of victory and defeat in which the victors divvy up the spoils and the losers take what is given to them (e.g. the Treaty of Paris (1783), the Congress of Vienna (1815), Yalta (1945), Potsdam (1945)), and there are diplomatic bargains to end the hostilities between more-or-less equal adversaries in which both sides achieve some or all of their war aims. The second of these rarely if ever happens (Westphalia? (1648), Utrecht? (1714)). Rather, closely-matched adversaries often fight wars that bog down into a stalemate and either peter out or else one side capitulates and the winners dictate the peace and divvy up the spoils (Versailles (1919)).  In addition to the two kinds of treaties, there are also tenuous ceasefires, like the truce that halted hostilities in the Korean War without a genuine resolution, but let that go. 

The Yalta and Potsdam conferences are especially telling: the two, relatively-equal victors divided the spoils, not on the basis of morality or the fair consideration of the smaller nations involved or as the result of the give-and-take of good faith negotiation, but on the basis of where the Allied armies were when hostilities ended. Because pf this, historian Robert Dallek has called the Yalta conference “the most overrated event of World War II.”1 

Some of the summits between the United States and Soviet Union during the 1970s achieved mutually acceptable results because of relative parity and the looming omnipresence of the nuclear standoff and the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.  These were not peace treaties, and insofar as they dealt with the Arab-Israeli wars, they were inconclusive. But they achieved important arms control agreements.  The gentlemen’s agreement that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning hot is the paragon example of diplomacy making a dangerous crisis go away by allowing both sides to come away with something they wanted.2     

By contrast the Paris Peace Accords (1973) that ended the American-Vietnamese War was a delaying action, a surrender that allowed the United States a modicum of face saving cover over a lost war.  Anybody who doubts this need only recall images of the U.S. departure from Saigon two years later.  Likewise, the Malta Summit (1989) that ended the Cold War was followed a decade later by a 25-year expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s western borders in spite of early promises of “not one inch eastward.”3   

So what does this mean for the war in Ukraine?  The situation there may be summarized as such: the Ukrainians are understandably determined to defend their nation and retain its prewar borders even though the odds of the throwing the Russians out of eastern Ukraine are small at this point.  Putin is committed to winning in Ukraine—“winning” presumably defined as the annexation/consolidating the Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and some adjacent areas, perhaps some of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast, and a land corridor between the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas (greater autonomy—but not independence—for the Donbas region was a provision of the Minsk II agreements, which Ukraine chose not to enforce).4 

Given that a Ukrainian victory seems unlikely and that the war aims of the two nations are fundamentally incompatible, we may conclude a number of things:

  1. Massive infusions of Western weapons and economic aid to Ukraine could conceivably turn the course of events against Russia. More likely they will only prolong the conflict and will result in greater casualties and destruction on both sides.  What has sprung up is a proxy war on the part of the U.S. and NATO countries in which (as others have suggested) some brave Western commentators appear to be willing to “fight to the last Ukrainian.”5
  2. Negotiations ending in a treaty that is mutually agreeable is an impossibility short of the most extreme unforeseen circumstances. 
  3. If Russia wins, a part of Ukraine will be annexed as a Russian-speaking “East Ukraine” vassal state, or else absorbed as a part of Russia.
  4. Even if defeated, the Ukrainian government will remain in power in Kyiv—it will not be overthrown by the Russians (I would argue that this was not the Russian goal)—it will govern over a truncated, Ukrainian-speaking “West Ukraine.”  Postwar West Ukraine will be in bad shape economically and in terms of destroyed property and infrastructure.  Migration of the displaced and impoverished will therefore persist long after the war.
  5. What we can look forward to is a long, bitter, and dangerous war that is already dividing the world into camps.                  

If we accept a realistic great powers/sphere of influence interpretation of events, as I do, then the time to cut a deal with Russia guaranteeing a fully intact, geopolitically neutral Ukraine was probably in 2008 when Russia announced that a westward-leaning Ukraine was a direct threat to its national security.  It is too late for such a deal now.

As long as there are large and powerful nations, there will be spheres of influence in which the interests of the local power trump those of outsiders.  This harsh geopolitical fact is a lesson that was forgotten or unlearned by the U.S. foreign policy establishment during the years of unchallenged American hegemony of the post-Cold War period.  It seems that that era is waning.  The sooner that the U.S. foreign policy establishment accepts these realities, the better things will be for this country and for the rest of the world.  Perhaps then we can focus on the problems of the environment that threaten us all.   

Notes

  1. Regarding the European military situation in 1945 as determining the postwar spoils, see George Kennan, American Diplomacy, (1951), 85-86.  On Yalta being an overrated event, see Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace (2010), 59.
  2. See generally Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight (2008).
  3. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
  4. https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR0SS8VTATcFljPJSXtX2JDJ4mTyumnell0jjjGoYV9VLrgUwiAaF4cDV08, https://www.wionews.com/world/ukraine-failed-to-comply-with-the-minsk-agreements-putin-informs-biden-434964
  5. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/washington-will-fight-russia-to-the-last-ukrainian/