Playbook for intransigence
If President Zelensky is at all reminiscent of President Rhee of South Korea (and he is), he will remain intransigent until Ukraine receives a security guarantee.
I wrote about this after the Oval Office mêlée. From various biographies of Eisenhower:
Rhee [President of South Korea] vociferously opposed the armistice. He wanted Korea unified and all Chinese forces withdrawn from Korea. Koreans filled the streets of Seoul and other cities throughout South Korea to demonstrate. Most South Koreans supported President Rhee’s stance that an armistice should not be concluded until North Korea was liberated. Rhee was intransigent.
[In 1953] Walter Robertson [Assistant Secretary of State] and General Clark [Commander of United Nations forces] were conferring daily with South Korean President Rhee, threatening him with an American pull-out if he did not cooperate in the armistice, promising him virtually unlimited American aid if he did. Rhee resisted the pressure, helped by reports from the [United] States that seemed to indicate a near revolt by Republican senators against their own Administration. [Republican Senator for Vermont] Ralph Flanders had said that Robertson and Clark were putting ‘us in the position of threatening the Korean government with an attack from the rear while the Republic of Korea Army were attacking the Communists at the front’. [Republican leader in the Senate Styles] Bridges and [Joseph] McCarthy believed that ‘freedom-loving people’ should applaud Rhee’s defiance of the armistice… On July 5, the acting majority leader, Senator Knowland blamed Eisenhower for a ‘breach’ with Rhee and announced his support for Korean unification before any armistice agreement was signed. Despite the clamor, Eisenhower insisted that Robertson and Clark be firm. They were, and ultimately persuaded Rhee that it was futile for South Korea to try to go it alone. On July 8 [15 days ahead of the Korean Armistice Agreement being signed], Rhee finally issued a public statement promising to cooperate.
Most important:
But had Rhee not made the highly provocative move... South Korea would not have received a security guarantee with the US – that otherwise at that point had not been settled.
What’s a plan for a security guarantee that might just be acceptable to Russia, and would adequately do the job?
I’m not advocating for any US (or NATO) troops on Ukraine territory. A ready-made plan, that learns from Korea but adapts for the present day: https://artofthedeal.org/ukraine/FRUKUS
*
President Trump’s negotiating team (much as I’m rooting for them to succeed) are repeating the same sequencing error that Eisenhower (as a new Republican President) made in his first three months of office.
To get an invaded country to go along with relinquishing territory (to bring a war to heel), history indicates that you need to put a security guarantee in place first – or the President of the smaller invaded country simply cannot go along with it.
