If Trump can channel Eisenhower on Ukraine, he will be able to claim that he has achieved the peace “deal of the century.”
As the obstacles to President Donald Trump’s promised immediate end to the killing in Ukraine mount, and skeptics argue he doesn’t have the diplomatic tact required to create a sustainable peace, it’s worth going back to Ike. Having included in his 1952 campaign a prominent pledge to bring a quick end to a bloody war that had claimed more than 3 million lives on the Korean Peninsula, Dwight David Eisenhower went to South Korea after winning the election; overruled its leader Syngman Rhee, who was determined to fight on to victory; and initiated a process that led to the signing of the armistice on his 189th day in office. If he hopes to match Ike’s record, Trump has just 124 days left.
When Eisenhower became president in January 1953, the Korean War had been stuck in a stalemate for a year and a half. In a nutshell: the war had begun in June 1950, when Kim Il-Sung’s North Korean forces launched a surprise invasion of South Korea, advanced rapidly, and were on the cusp of taking control of the entire peninsula. President Harry Truman ordered General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. troops stationed in Japan to come to the rescue. The Americans rapidly stopped North Korea’s advance, beat it into retreat, and liberated Seoul. Without much thought about the likely consequences, MacArthur’s forces continued their march across the 38th parallel into North Korea, seized the capital Pyongyang, and were advancing toward the Chinese border. For China’s leader Mao Zedong, this posed an unacceptable threat. On November 1, MacArthur was shocked to find a 300,000-strong vanguard of the Chinese army assaulting American and allied forces. In the weeks that followed, what MacArthur and his fellow commanders had dismissed as a “peasant army” not only halted the allied advance but forced them back past the 38th parallel. Despite a U.S.-led counteroffensive, the war soon bogged down in a stalemate, though thousands of combatants continued dying each month.
Reflecting on this history, it is difficult not to hear echoes of what has happened in the past three years since Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. In February 2022, Russian forces launched their attack, advancing rapidly before stalling on the outskirts of its capital Kyiv. Then in a remarkable feat of courage and determination, Ukrainian fighters with arms and ammunition from the United States and Europe unexpectedly pushed the Russians back to retake about half of the land Russia occupied in its initial offensive. By November, eight months into the war, the rival armies found themselves stuck along a line of control that has not moved substantially since. What American military analysts call Russia’s “lava” advance has been seizing roughly 100 square miles of Ukrainian territory a month in the Donbas. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy long insisted that Ukraine will fight on until it recovers every square inch of its territory. U.S. president Joe Biden and a number of his European colleagues pledged to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” But while he refuses to say so publicly, Zelenskyy and his colleagues know that they are losing on the battlefield and have not been able to identify a feasible path to a better outcome.
Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to end the war in Korea struck a chord in a nation that had concluded that it made no sense to continue sending Americans to “die for a tie.” To fulfill his promises, he forged a deal that left Korea divided—but with a peace or “armistice” that was sustainable and gave South Korea an opportunity to build a new nation. As Trump is now trying to forge a sustainable peace, he can find clues from Ike’s leadership in moving from stalemate to peace.
Negotiations between the United States (operating under a U.N. flag), North Korea, and China to end the war began in July 1951—just a year after the war began. After several months of starts and stops it was agreed that the troops would essentially stay where they were, dividing Korea near the 38th parallel. Yet as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sensed growing American discontent with casualties, he advised Mao to set a “hard line” in negotiations.
The delegations soon deadlocked on the issue of prisoner of war (POW) repatriation. The United States had captured 170,000 North Korean and Chinese combatants; China and North Korea had around 70,000 Koreans and Americans. Mao was determined to reach an “all-for-all” exchange. U.N. Command, however, had several reservations. Truman believed that POWs should not be forced to return to Communist China or North Korea against their will, especially because many were South Koreans and Nationalist Chinese who had been forced into service by the communists. The North Koreans and Chinese, and their Soviet sponsors, found this unacceptable. So, while the negotiations dragged on, so too did intense fighting for another year and into election season in the United States. While the Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson essentially supported Truman’s position on Korea, Eisenhower made this a major issue in the campaign. He pledged to use his authority and skills as a military commander to quickly end the war.
After winning a decisive victory and before inauguration day, Ike “went to Korea” to set the train on the track. When South Korean leader Rhee presented to Eisenhower his plans for a new offensive to seize the North and reunify the country, Ike simply said: “no.” After the death of Stalin in March 1953, Eisenhower recognized that declining Soviet support for the war presented an opportunity to conclude an armistice that he believed was good enough for the United States. In the negotiations that followed, that meant repeatedly overruling his ally—including threatening to cut off fuel from the South Korean army if Rhee attempted to fight on after the United States signed an armistice. When in the closing days of negotiations Rhee orchestrated a prison break of over 25,000 POWs held by U.N. forces, throwing the talks into chaos, Eisenhower warned him that “your present course of action will make it impractical for the UN Command to continue to operate jointly with you”—a threat to leave him on his own, unless he fell in line.
At the same time, Eisenhower also employed pressure to win concessions from the North Koreans and Chinese. The South Korean army expanded. The United States removed constraints on Chinese Nationalists located in Taiwan conducting attacks on the Chinese mainland. And most significantly, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, used India to signal to the Chinese and North Koreans that “in the absence of satisfactory progress, we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean Peninsula.” This was a thinly-veiled threat to use nuclear weapons against both North Korea and China if the war was not brought to a rapid end. Finally, recognizing that his objective was not simply to end the war but to achieve a sustainable peace, Eisenhower crafted a Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and South Korea that included a continuing presence of U.S. troops in a joint U.S.-South Korea command. Almost eight decades on, 28,000 American troops remain stationed there.
While each situation is unique, when analyzing analogs for illumination it is useful to consider both similarities and differences. A key factor in the resolution of the Korean War was the death of Stalin, who had continually pressured the North Koreans and Chinese to continue the war. Since the United States is not a direct party to the conflict, it has much less influence in Ukraine than in Korea, and while the Korean Peninsula was divided before the war, Ukraine was not. Perhaps most notably, by the time Eisenhower entered office, negotiations to end the Korean War had been ongoing for years, whereas negotiations for an armistice in Ukraine have not yet begun.
The similarities, however, are also intriguing. A new president, determined to be a peacemaker, comes to office unencumbered by the legacy of the war and is thus able to make a sharp turn. That president has standing to make concessions without being criticized for being weak on communism or failing to win, and new personnel enable the administration to think more radically. On the campaign trail, promising to end a war was a winning message with an American electorate that was tired of the killing and did not care much about the details.
What was key to Eisenhower’s success, and will be key to Trump’s if he is to emulate him, is that the president took the lead himself in a direct, focused effort to close negotiations. If Trump can channel Eisenhower, using his authority to strike a deal that, while not ideal for either side, prevents another outbreak of war and allows Ukrainians to start rebuilding their country, he will be able to claim that he has achieved the peace “deal of the century.”
About the author: Graham Allison
Dr. Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught for five decades. Allison is a leading analyst of national security with special interests in nuclear weapons, Russia, China, and decision-making. Allison was the “Founding Dean” of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and, until 2017, served as Director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which is ranked the “#1 University Affiliated Think Tank” in the world.
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