Here, people can feel free to discuss all manners of wars which may or may not have ended depending on how technical or pedantic you want to be. On the subject of the Korean War…
Whether North and South Korea might be in a frozen conflict has little to no bearing on whether the US and North Korea are.
My position is simple: in the real world, wars often start without declarations and end without a formal peace treaty. Wars start when the shooting starts (give or take some antecedents or escalation from the initial incident) and end when the shooting ends (likewise with some wiggle room).
However, if someone wants to claim a war hasn’t ended until there is a formal peace treaty (a technicality), I think it’s only fair to hold them to the same standard for the start of a war. If there was no declaration of war, then there never was a war and thus no need for a peace treaty.
IMO this is one of the many ways we have inadvertently enabled Trump over the years. We went from war being a thing needed to be declared and had formalities associated with it, to a thing that doesn’t need to be declared formally but still needed congressional approval, to the president going to war just because he thinks its the right thing, simply by calling it something other than a war.
But it’s ok though. Any elected POTUS will always be cowed by the awesome responsibility of starting a war. It’s not like the US will ever elect some kind of demented fascist psychopath who would start a major war on a whim
Except that’s just not true. In the real world, ending a war is a lot more difficult than starting one. That’s because declaring a war over, by both sides, implies that both sides have set aside their difference and that the underlying reasons for the war have been resolved, and that’s incredibly difficult to do. Many countries would rather have an endless state of war than concede some point they’d been fighting for.
For a war to end, the combatants have to agree on a shared reality - “the border passes here” or “this country has a right to exist” - and as you have have noticed, stuff like that is kind of hard for people, and the longer they fight, the harder it gets.
In a world where international law has no effective and neutral police force, the technical declaration or war, or not, doesn’t really change matters.
If Country A wants to attack Country B’s interests it is free to do so. International punishment for this comes from Country B’s military or economic might, or from treaty obligations other countries C through M may owe Country B. Or anyone else who may just choose to jump in on B’s side for their own selfish reasons.
As @Alessan said, a continuous de facto state of simmering multilateral war is far more the norm. Both today and for most of history.
It’d be nice to get “back” to a clean world where there were no simmering wars, no long-standing grievances still being carefully nurtured, and there was enough commonality of purpose all across the globe that no lawless, imperialist, or revanchist regime could find allies anywhere.
But it’s hard to get “back” to someplace we’ve never been.
To make a peace, the governments of the two sides need to be able to offer something the other side values enough that the other side will abandon the sunk cost fallacy over the blood and treasure already expended. And whatever you’re offering needs to be affordable to you. Both economically and politically. The economic difference between peace and frozen conflict can be slight, while the benefits so diffuse as to provide no political value. For sure full active combat is far more expensive than frozen conflicts or long lasting ceasefires with only desultory violations. But the incremental savings from there to full legal peace are comparatively trivial.
If either government is shaky, or its populace is being stirred up by revanchist firebrands, the political cost of a settlement becomes prohibitive. Sorta paradoxically, it’s easier for authoritarian regimes to enter wars, and also to exit them. Once El Honcho makes up his (why always “his”?) mind.
Though my thought was, why didn’t the US declare war on North Korea ? It’s seems a pretty straightforward “one country we don’t like invades a country we do like” situation. That would traditionally involve a declaration of war. Was it a domestic US political thing?(I.e. Congress might not have voted for war?) Or simply a legacy of traditional western racist attitudes (i.e. civilized European countries deserve a formal declaration of war. Non-white counties in other continents do not)
Also did any of the other countries in the UN coalition actually formally declare war on North Korea?
So… the Korean War. Still a war, or not? I vote not.
One possible explanation could be that the US did not recognize North Korea as a country.
While the Trump regime’s conduct is outrageous, the idea that US military intervention, up to and including combat operations, in other countries requires a formal declaration is ahistorical. The US has a history of conducting such operations without a declaration of war, going back into the 19th century at least. I daresay on this point @Alessan is closer to the truth: declarations for war, at least historically, were reserved for nations perceived as “civilized”. Nations deemed lesser or uncivilized did not necessarily get the same consideration.
Not unlike western notions of sovereignty, only perceived “peer” nations really get the benefit of it. For those deemed “other” such notions are applied only as a cudgel against them for supposedly failing to adhere to “civilized” standards (eg: for failing to declare war themselves as an example of their lawlessness and justifying their dehumanization and subjugation or, in the case of sovereignty, their failure to maintain a monopoly on violence being used as a justification to invade and occupy them).
Declarations of war have been very rare since the end of WWII; it’s not just an American thing. The practice has fallen out of fashion. And there’s always been detractors of the concept, with arguments ranging from “it’s stupid to warn people you are going to be attacking” to “if you’re going to be civilized about things then don’t start wars in the first place”.
Refusing to call it a war is probably more significant, politically and psychologically; it’s an aspect of the increasing tendency in the US to think we can just assert reality to be what we want and the world will be compelled to obey. “We make our own reality” and all that.
The UN charter calls upon its members to renounce war as an instrument of national policy, except in self-defense. Guess how broadly self-defense gets construed these days.
Re. Korea, I thought that for years Pyongyang insisted that the government in Seoul was nothing but a sock puppet for the USA and that any peace treaty had to be solely between the DPRK and the USA. Is that still the case? (And doubtless the DPRK defines “peace” as the withdrawal of all US forces from the peninsula).
What really puzzles me is that when the guerrilla war Viet Kong phase of the war in Vietnam largely ended and the fighting was taken up by uniformed NVA soldiers, why a general state of war against North Vietnam didn’t break out, beyond some bombing raids and mining Hanoi harbor.
Only Congress can declare war. The NVA took over the war after the Tet offensive in 1968. A huge anti-war sentiment had emerged by then, enough so that Johnson announced soon after that he wouldn’t run for re-election. The Democrats controlled Congress but were in the midst of a civil war, when Kennedy and McCarthy running on antiwar platforms. A vote declaring actual war would put people on the record as supporting the president and prolonging the war.
Obviously, Nixon won and did prolong the war. That produced an ironic response: The War Powers Act of 1973.
It provides that the president can send the U.S. Armed Forces into action abroad only by Congress’s “statutory authorization”, or in case of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces”.
I’ll pause the post here so everyone can have a good long laugh.
