Why a Grand Comprehensive Peace Settlement with Russia Would be a Major Strategic Victory for the West

Such an agreement would include a Korean War style armistice agreement ending the war in Ukraine and would effectively neutralize Russia's military alliance with Communist China

What follows are excerpts from a debate I had with a highly esteemed Russia expert and book author on June 27th who advocated the US go to war with Russia over Ukraine even if it meant the destruction of America.   

“Ukraine will not defeat Russia militarily in the absence of extraordinary U.S. intervention. If elected president, I will end the war by ceasing further U.S. support for Ukraine and negotiating a peace treaty with Russia that achieves a vital U.S. security objective: ceasing Russia’s growing military alliance with China.” Vivek Ramaswamy June 6, 2023

As I wrote in my last article, America First conservative Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been proven right about the war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive has demonstrated that Kyiv and its NATO backers have no way of liberating the newly annexed territories short of a direct war between Russia and NATO that would quickly escalate to the nuclear level threatening the very survival of the US. If the war in Ukraine escalated to a direct war between Russia and NATO, China would likely invade Taiwan and North Korea would likely invade South Korea to support their Russian allies.

Earlier today, NBC reported that former senior level US officials including Richard Haas, the longtime President of the Council on Foreign Relations, met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New York in April to discuss potential face saving diplomatic offramp for Russia to end the war in Ukraine. They then back briefed the Biden administration. Last month, Haas joined Charles Kupchan in writing an article in Foreign Affairs, entitled, “The West Needs a New Strategy in Ukraine.” In this article, they predicted a likely stalemate would emerge following Ukraine’s counteroffensive and recommended that the U.S. start laying the groundwork to propose a cease-fire in which both Russia and Ukraine would pull forces back from the front line, “effectively creating a demilitarized zone.” “A neutral organization — either the UN or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — would send in observers to monitor and enforce the cease-fire and pullback. Assuming a cease-fire holds, peace talks should follow.” I have praised their cease-fire proposal as it effectively called for a Korean style armistice agreement to end the Russo-Ukrainian war along the lines which I first called for in my Real War newsletter and subsequently in The National Interest over nine months ago. The Biden administration and its NATO allies are reportedly urging Ukraine to begin peace talks with Russia in the fall after its counteroffensive has ended.

Stephen Bryen, who serves as a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy, has written some excellent articles of late about the need to end the war in Ukraine and stop unilaterally disarming the US military by sending vast quantities of our weapons to Ukraine so we can refocus on great power competition with Communist China. Bryen goes beyond Haas’ prediction of a never-ending stalemate in the war predicting the collapse of the Zelensky regime perhaps in the aftermath of a new largescale Russian offensive as the Ukrainian counteroffensive peters out.

“By now anyone that can read has to realize that the best case for Ukraine is a stalemate, but the more likely case is the Kiev regime will collapse.  There are plenty of alternative scenarios, but just going on numbers it makes little sense for Kiev to keep playing the existential roulette wheel. ..No matter what Zelensky wants, he has crippled the US fighting capability in the rest of the world.”

It will take us 5-10 years just to replenish the $53 billion in arms Biden has sent to Ukraine thus far. As Bryen has stated, China continues to be the biggest winner of the war in Ukraine thus far with Ukraine as its biggest loser. The longer Biden prolongs the war in Ukraine, the less prepared the US military will be to fight and win a war with China and more importantly the less we will be able to deter a war with China from breaking out in the first place. Bryen revealed that the IMF has reassessed the size of Russia’s economy to nearly $5 trillion GDP in terms of Purchase Power Parity (PPP), or roughly the size of Germany’s economy, which is twenty percent larger than it assessed the size of Russia’s economy to be before the war began.

While the U.S. expends hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine, the U.S. is facing a clear and present danger and potential new Cuban Missile crisis over the establishment of a Chinese military base in Communist Cuba to supplement its spy base already located there. I was interviewed by Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network TV show to discuss this disturbing development a couple of weeks ago. A Chinese military base in Cuba would almost certainly include a nuclear bomber base and supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles. A single Chinese nuclear bomber armed with two hypersonic ALBMs with super EMP warheads could execute a comprehensive EMP attack from the Gulf of Mexico that could take out all of CONUS with ten minutes warning. We must not allow China to establish a military base in Cuba. We need to end this Ukraine war nonsense immediately and focus on Cuba. This threat will require the US to act to use all available means both diplomatic, economic, and potentially military measures to enforce the Monroe Doctrine and prevent Chinese nuclear bombers and hypersonic cruise missiles from being deployed ninety miles from our shores.

U.S. leaders have forgotten all the Cold War rules including the lessons of the the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as well as the usefulness of spheres of influence to avoid unnecessary conflict such as the ones codified in the Yalta Agreement of 1945 which was adhered to by both sides until 1999 and along with US rough nuclear parity with the Soviet Union kept the nuclear great power peace for over half a century. The Biden regime refuses to discuss or recognize a Russian sphere of influence over any of the former Soviet republics. Meanwhile, the US continues to attempting to exert a sphere of influence over the entirety of North and South America, virtually the entire Pacific region including the South China Sea, all of the European NATO member states and, since 2014, over Ukraine, which if it had not attempted to do so Putin would have never invaded Ukraine in the first place.

Here is my latest proposed sphere of influence proposal designed both to neutralize the Sino-Russian military alliance as well as to minimize the chances of a direct military conflict with Russia and China that would inevitably escalate to the nuclear/super Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) level with nation-ending ramifications for America and its treaty allies in both Europe and the Western Pacific.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has proven an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine causing it to lose thirty percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population, one quarter of whom are unemployed as well as fifty percent of its energy infrastructure. The war has also resulted in it becoming the poorest country in Europe. The longer the war continues, the greater the price will be in terms of hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian dead, more of its cities and infrastructure destroyed and hundreds of billions of dollars more in postwar reconstruction costs. We will never be able to rebuild Ukraine without some kind of peace agreement ending the war. Ukraine would emerge from an armistice agreement stronger and more secure. NATO would emerge more secure as well.

The longer the war continues, the greater the risk will be that it will escalate into a full-scale world war between Russia and NATO. If it does, it will quickly escalate into a nuclear war which the US has no chance of winning. Russia has over four times more operational nuclear weapons and 225 times more ground-launched Anti-Ballistic Missiles than the U.S. has. Russia’s massive national missile defense system is capable of shooting down up to 1,000 US nuclear re-entry vehicles. The Russians have super-Electromagnetic (EMP) and nuclear superweapons the US has never had and has no plans to develop. Russia could likely knock out most US early warning satellites, communications, and critical infrastructure with a super EMP satellite at the press of a button and our Nuclear Command, Control and Communications (NC3) might be unable to recover.

As I noted in the book “Catastrophe Now—America’s Last Chance to Prevent an EMP Disaster”, which I co-authored, one of our top generals recently stated Russia could destroy half of the US strategic nuclear arsenal with only five warheads and 100% of America’s reserve strategic nuclear warheads with another four warheads. Russia has spent the last seven decades preparing to fight and win a nuclear war against us. If we fought a nuclear war with Russia, the survival of the Russian leadership would be assured in their underground nuclear command centers in the Urals which are 3,000 feet underground, reportedly capable of withstanding direct nuclear hits. Polish President Andrzej Duda recently revealed he has requested the US deploy nuclear weapons on Polish territory and train Polish military personnel to use US strategic nuclear delivery systems. How would Russia respond to a US nuclear deployment on its borders for the first time in history? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merely for potentially hosting US nuclear delivery systems offers a major clue.

Supporters of increased US military assistance to Kyiv fail to articulate what US national security interest is at issue in Russia’s ongoing border dispute with Ukraine. President Ronald Reagan was unwilling to take military action to liberate East Germany let alone Eastern Europe so why should we risk sacrificing the lives of 275 million Americans in a futile attempt to free five million Ukrainians from Russian control, most of whom are ethnic Russians anyway living in a swath of territory the size of a Baltic republic? Wouldn’t it be better for the US to implement a Korean War style armistice agreement ending the war in Ukraine to prevent World War III with the Sino-Russian alliance and save the lives of up to ninety percent of our citizens who would likely perish in a Russian nuclear/super EMP attack on the US homeland?

My colleague responded by taking the absolutist position that it wouldn’t be worth preventing America from being incinerated by a Russian nuclear attack because if we agreed to a peaceful agreement leaving Russia in control of any Ukrainian territory we would be giving in to Russian nuclear blackmail and that it would be better for us all to die with our principles still intact. I replied that such an agreement would not be giving in to nuclear blackmail, let alone appeasing Russia if it was in furtherance of the most vital US national security interest--namely saving the US and its allies from being incinerated by nuclear missile/super EMP attack. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and the US has no security commitments committing it to aid it or defend it. Accordingly, Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine is ultimately nothing more than an out of area mission that has nothing to do with US or NATO security. An armistice agreement would not cede any territory to Russia. It would just be a permanent cease-fire in place. The US would not recognize any of Russia’s ill-gotten territorial gains as part of an armistice. The US, UK and France would guarantee Ukraine’s permanent neutrality outside of NATO which would represent a much greater security commitment than we are providing Ukraine today.

The idea that Ukraine will cease to exist if we agree to an armistice with Russia, is a myth. An armistice with a US security guarantee for Ukraine would ensure a strong, secure, and independent Ukraine inside the EU. Of course, it would not be an ideal outcome from the Ukrainian perspective, but it would not be a real loss for the West either. In fact, it would be a strategic victory for the West to have prevented Russia from conquering 88% of Ukraine’s prewar controlled territory if indeed that was ever Putin’s goal.  Having Ukraine as a buffer state between Russia and NATO would work both ways. It would satisfy Russian security concerns while securing NATO’s front-line states from potential Russian military occupation of their border regions at the same time. U.S. leaders must start thinking strategically and put America’s national security interests first if we are to have any hope of our great country surviving the decade let alone the final 19 months of the Biden presidency. Once the armistice has been signed and implemented, the US would begin negotiations for a permanent peace deal with Moscow with reciprocal concessions just like Ronald Reagan did with the Soviets to manage a peaceful end of the Cold War giving General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev the confidence to collapse the Soviet Union without worrying the US would exploit the collapse to expand NATO eastward.

Supporters of Biden’s proxy war of choice against Russia in Ukraine argue that we must continue the war to weaken Russia militarily or else Putin’s next target will be Moldova or even the Baltic republics which are NATO members ostensibly under the US nuclear umbrella. While Russia certainly has the military capability to conquer much more of Ukraine’s territory, Putin has clearly chosen not to, opting not to launch a new Russian offensive to date with the 200,000-300,000 troops Russia has mobilized on Ukraine’s borders. If Putin doesn’t have an interest in occupying Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv which sits only 50 miles from the Russian border, what makes neocon pundits think he wants to invade and occupy eastern Poland and the Baltic republics let alone invade Central Europe?

Militant supporters of Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine such as Rep. Adam Smith (D-CA) argue that we must fight the Russians in Ukraine, or else we will have to fight them here at home. However, this argument lacks any evidentiary support whatsoever. Putin opted to unilaterally withdraw all Russian troops from three out of eight Russian-occupied Ukrainian oblasts including Kyiv in early April 2022 when he didn’t need to after hammering out a tentative peace agreement with Ukraine to withdraw from six out of eight Russian-occupied oblasts in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality as well as its partial disarmament and military demobilization. These facts are not in dispute. They were published in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine written by Fiona Hill, a staunch supporter of Biden’s proxy war against Russia and confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Such a deal would have been far more favorable for Ukraine than the 88% of its pre-war controlled territory which is the most Russia would allow it to keep as part of a peace agreement today.

Putin offered to withdraw all Russian troops from 93.6% of all Ukrainian controlled territory from February 25^th to September 20, 2022.  What dictator bent on the conquest of Europe let alone Ukraine would unilaterally withdraw from one-third of the territory Russia occupied mere weeks after it had conquered it when he didn’t have to? Then, Putin withdrew Russian troops from Kharkiv oblast in the face of the Ukrainian counteroffensive late last summer, suffering almost no casualties rather than defend it. The truth is that Putin has on interest in conquering additional Ukrainian territory outside of the remaining quarter of the Donbass region or else he would have used the hundreds of thousands of mobilized Russian army reservists on Ukraine’s border to do so by now.   

My Russia expert colleague boasted that the aggregate GDP of NATO’s 31 member states was thirty-six times larger than Russia’s (actually it’s only ten times larger in PPP terms) implying that NATO was far stronger than Russia and thus could risk a direct war with Russia without undue concern. He also stated that Russia was militarily incapable of conquering more Ukrainian territory. However, you cannot believe Russia is too weak to take control of more Ukrainian territory while also claiming that Russia poses a major threat to NATO and yet that is exactly what neoconservative supporters of Biden’s war in Ukraine are claiming in what seems to be an exercise in cognitive dissidence. If you claim Russia is unable to take additional Ukrainian territory, what’s the point of continuing to unilaterally disarm the US military and shipping vast quantities of our weapons, missiles, rockets, artillery, and munitions to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against a country which poses us no threat?

In any case, the aggregate GDP of a military alliance does not win wars. History is replete with examples of stronger military powers defeating and conquering much more wealthier nations. In addition, given that Russia is in a military alliance with Communist China, the aggregate GDP of Russia and China combined is not that much less than NATO’s, massively reducing the West’s economic edge. Rather, nuclear, super EMP cyber and conventional military power wins wars and by the end of next year the Sino-Russian military alliance will likely have up to six times more operational strategic nuclear weapons than the US has and up to ten times more ready to fire/on alert strategic nuclear weapons than the U.S. possesses. Then, they will have nuclear supremacy over the US just as the US enjoyed nuclear supremacy over the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. If the US had let the Soviet Union build six times more strategic nuclear weapons than we had during the Cold War then the US would living in a world dominated and controlled by the Soviets right now. Unfortunately, most NATO militaries are a joke today. Germany, once a great power which boasted an order of battle which included 315 army divisions during World War Two, can barely deploy a single brigade sized expeditionary force to Eastern Europe right now.

He also quoted Napoleon Bonaparte stated, “In war the moral is to the physical as three to one." However, morale does not win modern wars as the German blitzkrieg that forced France to sue for peace after only six weeks of fighting from May-June 1940, using a new way of warfare, proved. The French Army had high morale at the start of the conflict by all accounts, but it didn’t help them stop German tank columns. High morale would prove even less effective against Russia’s “escalate to de-escalate” nuclear employment strategy.

He then criticized Reagan as “establishing a peace of self-deception” and implied that the collapse of the Soviet Union was faked. For a time, I too believed that the collapse of Communism was faked and that the Soviet nomenklatura retained control of the former Soviet republics. The only reason the Soviets would have wanted to collapse the USSR was either if it maintained covert control of the former Soviet republics or if it wanted to focus on a policy of economic and military convergence with the West as Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn stated in his books, “New Lies for Old” and “The Perestroika Deception.” I believe that one of the main reasons that Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev chose to deliberately collapse the Soviet Union was to “erase the image of the enemy” in the mind of NATO leaders to induce them to unilaterally disarm their countries of their military might. Most important, it was to get the US to unilaterally disarm itself of 95 percent of its nuclear arsenal which is exactly what we did starting with George HW Bush’s decision to slash the size of the US nuclear arsenal by forty percent in August 1991 before the Soviet Union had even finished collapsing thereby achieving what even a full- scale Soviet nuclear first strike could not have without war.

However, over time that assumption was proven incorrect, beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. I replied that peace is what Ronald Reagan achieved and it led to the entire collapse of the mighty Soviet Empire. If he had chosen war with the Soviet Union, the US, NATO and our Pacific allies would not exist right now, and neither would Russia and the world would likely have a billion less people. That said, the US absolutely needs to quadruple the size of the US nuclear arsenal and increase the size of our ABM force by over 100 times. We should spend as much as it takes to harden the US electrical power grid against EMP attack which would cost an estimated $50 billion.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I believed that Putin was hellbent on establishing an Imperial Russian Confederation consisting of twelve of the former Soviet republics. However, Putin’s withdrawal from northern Ukraine in April 2022 proved he doesn’t want to re-establish the Soviet Union much less conquer more than 13.6% of Ukraine’s prewar controlled territory. Even if its true he wanted to, the consensus in the West is that Russia is too weak militarily to do so.

Ultimately, U.S. leaders should pursue a policy towards Russia that is in the US national security interest, not Zelensky’s. The US can secure the best peace deal possible for Kyiv utilizing America’s substantial diplomatic might. Russia will not attack Ukraine again so long as Ukraine’s permanent neutrality outside of NATO is assured given that was almost the entire reason Putin invaded Ukraine in the first place. Putin is satisfied having achieved most of the objectives of Russia’s special military operation last summer having established a land bridge to Crimea after which Russia offered a cease fire to end the war, declaring the remaining objectives of its special military operation could be achieved diplomatically as part of a negotiated compromise peace settlement. Accordingly, he would most likely give up his last aspiration of the remaining 24% of the Donetsk region which Ukraine still controls in exchange for Ukraine’s permanent neutrality.

As the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu wisely stated in The Art of War, “Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. Next best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy.” Before his untimely death last summer my friend and mentor, Dr. Peter Pry, who served who served as the longtime Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security,  and I came up with a strategy to defeat the Sino-Russian alliance without war before his tragic and untimely death, and he tasked me to do everything I could to promote it to save our great country. He advocated dividing or neutralizing the Sino-Russian military alliance which poses the greatest existential threat the US has ever faced by making peace not war with Russia.  

Dr. Pry warned that President Joe Biden was “playing with nuclear fire” by fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. This is a strategy the US has never actually attempted or implemented. Communist China has always been the main enemy since the collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago. The US could have co-opted Russia in the 1990s to prevent them from allying with Communist China in the first place, but foolishly chose not to, opting to treat Russia as an enemy instead and expand NATO to Russia’s borders in 1999 for the first time in history.

Instead, US leaders from President George W. Bush to Barack Obama decided to build up Communist China into the most powerful nuclear superpower enemy trillions of dollars in unilateral free trade money could buy. By the end of next year, the PRC will likely have three times more operational strategic nuclear weapons than we have. Yet, the US still has no strategy to divide and disrupt the most powerful enemy military alliance the US has ever faced and are instead pursuing a foolish, dangerous, and reckless proxy war against Russia in Ukraine which has served to push the world’s mightiest nuclear superpower even closer into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s waiting arms.

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler deluded himself into believing the Soviet Union would collapse like a house of cards after the Germans invaded the USSR. That didn’t work out well for him. US leaders have allowed themselves to be misled that because Putin has tied the hands of the Russian military and forced them to fight a limited war of attrition in Ukraine, that means Russia is weak. However, the truth is that Russia has been strengthened from its invasion of Ukraine overall both economically and militarily.

It would be unwise to underestimate the threat Russia poses to the US and its allies. Rather, US leaders should start thinking worst case scenarios as Dr. Peter Pry taught us to do to ensure the safety, security and survivability of the US and its treaty allies.  It’s hard to believe that Putin hasn’t already attacked the US and its allies catastrophically. With the US destruction of Russia’s Nordstream pipelines, the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship Moskva, the assassination of a dozen Russian generals and the tens of thousands of Russian troops we helped the Ukrainians kill, the US has given him every reason to nuke, EMP or massive cyberattack the US and its NATO allies.  A more irrational Russian leader would have nuked the US and our NATO allies a year ago or, at minimum, dropped a few nukes on Ukraine to force their surrender. Putin may be a brutal and murderous dictator, but he has proven to be a rational actor compared to the joker occupying the White House today.

Russia is stronger than the US is overall militarily right now under Biden and much more capable than the US is in terms of winning a nuclear or super EMP war against us. Any direct war the US fights with Russia and China would be virtually guaranteed to escalate to the nuclear/EMP level within a few weeks. Russia and China would only invade and occupy the US militarily if we provoke them into fighting a war we cannot win. US leaders should abandon its reckless and dangerous policy of liberal hegemony which seeks to expand America’s sphere of influence all the way to Russia’s and China’s borders and adopt a less provocative national security strategy. Such a strategy should match America’s limited military capabilities and be inherently defensive, drawing an invisible red line around our treaty allies (with the exception of Eastern Europe which is not a vital US national security interest). However it would be much more judicious when it comes to provoking unnecessary conflicts with the Sino-Russian military alliance and risking the destruction of the Western world over the fate of countries of lesser strategic consequence to us.

Why not take Russia off the geostrategic chessboard between the US and the PRC with a truce ending our Cold War with Moscow that transforms Russia from China’s most powerful military ally to a neutral player to give us a fighting chance to win America’s Cold War against Communist China? Sadly, the US has failed to follow Sun Tsu’s sage counsel to divide and disrupt the enemy alliance and thus gravely weaken our true enemy, Communist China, without the need for the blood of a single US military serviceman to be shed.

Recent Media Interviews:

June 28th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network to discuss the Wagner Group mutiny and whether it was a Russian false flag operation to give Putin plausible deniability for a rogue nuclear strike from Belarus against NATO. Here is a link to the interview.

June 29th—Interview with Dr. Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies to discuss Vivek Ramaswamy’s excellent new peace plan to end the war in Ukraine and split the Sino-Russian military alliance. Here is a link to the interview.

July 4th—Interview on RT’s Crosstalk program with Peter Levelle to discuss whether Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine is becoming a forever war and the prospects for negotiating a peaceful end to the conflict. Here is a link to the interview.

© David T. Pyne 2023

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster." He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.