Graham Allison: “To end the Ukraine War, Trump should think like Ike”
To End the Ukraine War, Trump Should Think Like Ike
As President Trump struggles to fulfill his campaign promise to bring an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, I advise in my latest for The National Interest that he and his team should review what another American president did facing a similar stalemate seven decades ago.
In his 1952 campaign for the White House, Dwight David Eisenhower pledged to end the war in Korea that had claimed more than 3 million lives. Over the next six months he actually did it. After winning the election, Eisenhower energized a process that concluded with the signing of the armistice on his 189th day in office. If President Trump hopes to match Ike’s record, he has just 121 days left.
While Ukraine is not Korea, lessons from Eisenhower’s success in fulfilling his campaign promise offer clues for Trump. As in Korea, when Eisenhower became president, rival Russian and Ukrainian armies are stuck along a line of control that has not moved substantially for years. A new Republican president, determined to be a peacemaker, is less vulnerable to criticism from critics on his right and thus has more flexibility to make concessions without being accused of being weak.
Most significantly, Ike took the lead himself in a direct, focused effort that required repeatedly overruling South Korea’s leader Syngman Rhee and left half of Korea under the control of the adversary—but forged a peace or “armistice” with a security framework that made it sustainable and gave South Korea an opportunity to build a new nation.
If Trump can channel Eisenhower, using his authority to hammer out an agreement that neither Zelenskyy nor Putin will like but that will end the killing, prevent another outbreak of war, and allow Ukrainians to start rebuilding their country, he will be able to claim that he has achieved the peace “deal of the century.”
Professor Allison is Founding Dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, co-progenitor of “Applied History” as a discipline, and author of the incredible Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (which in 2018 got me interested in geopolitics in the first place).
Prof. Allison was a close external advisor to Jake Sullivan during the Biden administration – so the above is quite some statement.
I’m a humble (informal) student of Professor Allison’s. It’s gratifying to have Harvard’s leading statesman come to the same conclusion I outlined (in some depth) ten months ago:
https://listeningto.org/ukraine/win-the-peace/
In May last year, I even wrote: “The worrying thing today, 2.25 years into the war, is that we are in 1952 in our analogy, not yet 1953 (when the Korean Armistice was finally signed).”
Please share: https://x.com/EdwardMDruce/status/1905714415540023308
Philip Tetlock (author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction) at least recognises the foresight:
