Ironically, what are arguably the two bloodiest and most costly battles in American military history—Cold Harbor (1864) and Okinawa (1945)—were fought within months of the war's end.
In the Battle of Cold Harbor, from May 31st to June 12th, Robert E. Lee's final victory, Union troops launched repeated hopeless assaults against fortified Confederate positions, resulting in 12,788 dead from the Northern forces and 5,287 for the greatly outnumbered Southern troops.
Eighty-one years later, overwhelmingly superior U.S. naval, air, army, and Marine forces commenced the bloodiest battle of the entire Pacific War, from April 1st to June 22nd, against the long-prepared entrenchments of the Japanese Imperial Army on the island of Okinawa, resulting in a decisive U.S. victory—but at a 35% casualty rate, and over 12,000 dead American servicemen.
These shocking American losses would be a critical factor in President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki six weeks later, rather than launch the planned invasion of Japan's home islands.
What’s the cautionary lesson for today’s policymakers to derive from these two epic battles? It is that even well-trained and motivated armies enjoying great numerical superiority, are in dire peril when attacking an enemy who holds well-prepared defensive positions.
These reflections come to mind as the world follows the unfolding offensive by a relatively small Ukrainian army against a steadily growing Russian army defending fortifications they have been preparing for nearly a year.
The widespread Western belief that this Ukrainian effort can be crowned with victory within reasonable time—“victory” as defined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky's stated goal of evicting Russia from “every inch “of his country as a precondition for negotiations—is but one of several contradictions overhanging the West’s ever-changing strategy in the war.
President Zelensky's disappointment at NATO's decision to deny his country a timetable for admission to the alliance—a decision he described as “unprecedented and absurd “—is understandable, since he knows the plight of his ground forces.
Further underlining Ukraine's peril was President Biden’s startling public admission at the recent NATO Summit in Vilnius that the U.S. and its allies were “running out of ammunition“ to send to Ukraine, using that as an apparent justification for his decision to give Ukraine the cluster bombs that are banned by many countries.
The NATO summit and its painfully constructed final communique—giving enthusiastic but ambiguous assurances to Ukraine—is additional proof of the unreality of NATO’s frequent claims of rock-solid unity regarding a war, which has become increasingly unpopular among the restive populations and fragile governments of its European members. Any one of these could move to bring to the whole enterprise to a grinding halt, as was demonstrated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan's successful delay of Sweden’s intention to join NATO.
To these festering tensions, which may intensify as the war drags on, must be added earlier NATO initiatives that have either boomeranged or failed. These include the sanctions which were supposed to cripple the Russian economy, but that also have done much damage to already reeling European economies. The international isolation of Russia also may have backfired: Authoritarian regimes have taken advantage of the West’s fixation with Ukraine to leverage their own, sometimes nefarious, goals at our expense.
Economic giants China, India, and Brazil continue their brisk trade with Russia. In the Middle East, autocrats in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are in the driver's seat, and closer to home, Mexico’s president has described America’s “moral decay” and turned a blind eye to China's supply of chemicals to the cartel's burgeoning fentanyl factories.
Finally, European leaders, aware of President Biden's political and physical vulnerabilities, surely have noted that other credible U.S. presidential candidates have expressed doubts about his level of support for Ukraine, thus raising the possibility of again being left in the lurch by a U-turn in American policy, such as happened with Afghanistan.
So, what is to be done?
History and consensus military doctrine show that the current offensive against the Russian fortifications cannot succeed in any significant way, because the Ukrainians do not have the requisite manpower. This leaves a stark choice between escalation and negotiation.
The former risks catastrophe and the latter brings stalemate; but the latter at least has the redeeming virtue of ceasing the death and destruction that have been visited upon Ukraine and its people.
The Minsk Accords of 2014-2015 came close to delivering a workable compromise for Ukraine’s precarious status between East and West. There is a good case for reviving the agreements. Korea and Vietnam taught us that negotiations are conversations about bad options; the result in those cases left both sides dissatisfied, but the war did finally end.
William Moloney is a Senior Fellow at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute, who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his Doctorate at Harvard University.