HOW TO END A WAR LESSONS FROM KOREA

It took two years of negotiations for an armistice to be signed between the UN, North Korea and China. Even then, an official peace has never truly broken out. Is this the bleak blueprint that may be followed today?

- WORDS: DR ROBERT LYMAN

The only thing harder than starting a war is ending it, especially in the absence of the prospect of an outright military victory. Such was the experience of Korea in the two years between July 1951 and July 1953, with Washington determining that the right thing to do was to wind the conflict down to a close rather than to seek victory in North Korea by physical conquest. The next challenge was to persuade the communists likewise, to seek a settlement. Settling on an end to the war with a still-divided Korea was not what either Kim Il-sung or Syngman Rhee - the respective leaders of North and South Korea - wanted, but in Washington's view it was the only way to end the fighting in a war for which victory was now accepted by most Western policymakers as an illusory objective.

What drove the Americans to the negotiating table was the realisation that they could never win a conventional war with China - even if they wanted to fight one - without the expenditure of vast human and material resources. Likewise, an ongoing war in Korea could risk a war in Asia that might prejudice the security of Europe where, it was commonly thought, the next communist blow would fall. There was simply no political commitment in Washington at the time for a fight with China, despite the acceptance in Washington that communist China was an enemy of the USA. Nor was there a desire to win the war by using any of America’s arsenal of 369 atomic bombs.