Graham Allison
As President Donald Trump struggles to fulfill his campaign promise to bring an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, he and his team should review what another American president did facing a similar challenge seven decades ago. In his 1952 campaign for the White House, Dwight David Eisenhower pledged to end a bloody war that had claimed more than 3 million lives on the Korean Peninsula. Over the next six months, he actually did it. After winning the election but before he was inaugurated, he went to South Korea, overruled its leader, Syngman Rhee, who was determined to fight on to victory, and energized a process that concluded with the signing of the armistice on his 189th day in office. If Trump hopes to match Ike’s record, he has just 121 days left.
When Eisenhower became president in January 1953, the Korean War had been stuck in a stalemate for a year and a half. To remind readers of the history: 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.
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