How the War in Ukraine Might End

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Original Article: How the War in Ukraine Might End

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Hein Goemans grew up in Amsterdam in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, surrounded by stories and memories of the Second World War. His father was Jewish and had hidden “under the floorboards,” as he put it, during the Nazi occupation. When Goemans came to the United States to study international relations, he recalled being asked in one class about his most formative personal experience of international relations. He said that it was the Second World War. The other students objected that this wasn’t personal enough. But it was very personal for Goemans. He recalled attending a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Amsterdam by Canadian forces, in May of 1985. Many of the Canadian soldiers who took part in the liberation were still alive, and they re-created the arrival of Canadian troops to liberate the city. Goemans remembers thinking that the people of Amsterdam would be too blasé to attend the commemoration, and being moved that he was wrong. “The entire city was packed with people by the roadside,” he told me recently. “I was really surprised at how deeply it was felt.”

Goemans, who now teaches political science at the University of Rochester, wrote his dissertation on war-termination theory—that is, the study of how wars end. A great deal of work, Goemans learned, had been done on how wars start, but very little on how they might conclude. There were, perhaps, historical reasons for this oversight: the nuclear armament of the United States and the Soviet Union meant that a war between them could end human civilization; not just some dying, but the death of everything. The study of war during the Cold War thus gave rise to a rich vocabulary about deterrence: direct deterrence, extended deterrence, deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial. But the Cold War ended, and wars kept happening. Goemans saw an opportunity for an intellectual intervention.

In his dissertation, and in his subsequent book, “War and Punishment,” Goemans laid out a theory of how and why some wars ended quickly and others dragged brutally on. The war in the title was the First World War; the “punishment” was what leaders in Germany, in particular, feared awaited them if they brought home anything less than a victory. When Goemans’s book came out, in 2000, it was the first modern full-length study devoted entirely to the problem of war termination, and it helped launch the field.

Traditionally, Goemans writes, wars were thought to end because one side surrendered. “Until the vanquished quits, the war goes on,” as one author put it, in 1944. But the empirical record showed this to be at best an incomplete account. It usually took two sides to start a war, even if they had different culpability, and it usually took two sides to end it; the vanquished may accept the terms that were proposed last week, but what was to keep the winner from inventing new terms? The classic example from the First World War was the Bolsheviks’ refusal, in the wake of their seizure of power in Russia, to continue the fight against Germany; proclaiming “neither war nor peace,” they simply left the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. “Literally the vanquished quit,” Goemans writes. But the Germans, instead of accepting this, kept advancing into Russia. Only after the Bolsheviks agreed to even harsher terms than had been proposed just three weeks earlier did the Germans agree to their exit from the war.

More recent theoretical literature had acknowledged the two-sidedness of war, Goemans writes, but here...