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?
