‘You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,’ a visibly angry Donald Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office on 28 February. The meeting broke up after a few more minutes of shouting and recriminations, in which Zelensky questioned how anyone could seriously consider making a peace deal with Vladimir Putin without security guarantees for Ukraine, and Trump accused Zelensky of ‘gambling with World War Three’. A short time later, Zelensky left the White House without having signed a deal proposed by President Trump that would give the United States a stake in Ukraine’s mineral deposits as a type of repayment for US military aid already given to Kyiv. A few days later, the Trump administration paused military aid and then intelligence sharing with Ukraine – moves that certainly tipped the scales on the battlefield further in favour of Russia, but which were reversed ten days later.

The spectacular blow-up between Trump and Zelensky, between an American president and the leader of a nation that is heavily dependent on the United States for its military aid, has sparked a number of comparisons with previous episodes in US foreign relations, especially the South Korean situation of 1953. Specifically, commentators have compared Trump’s piling of pressure on Zelensky with the way in which presidents Truman and Eisenhower treated former South Korean President Syngman Rhee, and have pointed to Washington’s desire in both contexts to end wars on its own preferred timetable and terms.

In both cases, the United States rushed to the aid of a country attacked by (or with the material support of) its much larger neighbours. In both cases, American and international aid (in Korea’s case, including ground forces) prevented an outright victory for the aggressors and snatched a stalemate from the jaws of defeat, only to give way to a tussle over how and when the war should end.

In the spring of 1951, as the Korean War stagnated on lines running roughly along the 38th Parallel, where the conflict had begun, the American-led United Nations forces began looking for an armistice agreement that would bring the conflict to an end. This was anathema to Rhee, president of the Republic of Korea since its creation in 1948, who believed that no compromise with communists was possible, that the war was still winnable – and that, if only they were to be given the full complement of arms he desired, the Koreans could settle this themselves.

After two years of bitter negotiations and indecisive fighting, Rhee was forced to tacitly accept an armistice agreement that he refused to sign. Improbably, and with a few bloody exceptions, that armistice agreement has held for 72 years. While the two Koreas remain technically at war, generations of South Koreans have come of age in a de facto time of peace.

A few crude historical lessons have been drawn from the Korean case, especially the notion that there is a precedent for Trump’s decision to place pressure on Ukraine to accept a peace agreement against its will. The assumption is made that, just as Eisenhower created a stable peace on the Korean peninsula against the will of Rhee, Trump can do the same thing in Ukraine. When such lessons are drawn by amateur historians on X (formerly Twitter), they are hardly worthy of comment. When they are promoted by historians as prominent as Niall Ferguson, however, they are perhaps worthy of consideration.

It is clear that there are, in fact, some important parallels between Ukraine and Korea, though not ones that are likely to validate President Trump’s current approach or please his supporters. Eisenhower was able to convince Rhee to accept the armistice agreement, which kept the peace for more than seven decades, precisely because American security guarantees were included in the deal. Rhee had been seeking such guarantees from the United States from the moment the Republic of Korea was established in 1948. He advocated for them throughout the war. It was only when American policymakers finally accepted the fact that Rhee was willing to continue the war without them, possibly forcing the United States to continue the fight along with him or face a humiliating retreat from the peninsula, that Eisenhower finally gave in and offered Rhee what he had long sought: a mutual defence treaty.

A sizeable contingent of American forces has remained in South Korea since, as has a much leaner United Nations Command. ‘Fight tonight’ is the unofficial, though oft repeated, motto of these forces. Few familiar with the peninsula would support the assertion that the 1953 armistice would have lasted long without them or would last long if they were withdrawn. At the time, this appeared to be the price of peace. Over the last 70 years this alliance has gone from ironic to ironclad, with incalculable benefits to both South Korea and the United States as well as the region as a whole.

While the importance of dependable security guarantees is the obvious lesson from Korea that might apply to Ukraine, as a scholar who has studied Rhee’s political life, I think there is also a much less obvious conclusion to draw. With Trump’s ‘you have no cards’ claim ringing in my ears, I began to think about the cards that Rhee had available to him in his interactions with the United States in the early 1950s, and here is where the historical parallels between Rhee and Zelensky break down, but also become interesting.

Historically speaking, Rhee and Zelensky are not in the same league in terms of their experience in dealing with the United States. Before his showdown with the United States in 1953, Rhee had nearly 50 years’ worth of experience living with, learning from, and persuading Americans to see his point of view on Korea. Rhee came to the United States in 1904, received his BA, MA, and PhD from elite American universities, and spent years on the road giving the early 20th-century equivalent of TED Talks on US foreign policy towards Korea and why it was morally bankrupt, un-Christian, and decidedly un-American.

In doing so, Rhee learned one of the most fundamental truths of US politics: there is nothing more American than accusing the federal government of incompetence, ineptitude, and, yes, corruption. The more Rhee ‘exposed’ the failings of American policy, whether it was regarding the appeasement of Japan prior to 1945 or the appeasement of communism after 1945, the more a certain type of American loved him for it. Rhee built a constituency of American supporters for Korea’s independence using these methods, and the political pressure they brought to bear on the Truman administration was a big part of the reason why the United States, after the Second World War, suggested the joint occupation of Korea to the Soviet Union in the first place.

Going over the head of US leaders to speak directly to the people was the ‘card’ Rhee had to play. Indeed, it was basically the only card he had to play, and he played it over and over again. He played it in March 1945 when he accused the late President Roosevelt of selling out Korea to communism at the Yalta Conference – a false claim that many Koreans still believe to this day. He played it again during the three years when the United States and the Soviet Union jointly occupied the Korean peninsula after 1945. He was so vociferous in his condemnation of US and Soviet actions on the peninsula that American diplomats expressed a desire to their own military occupation authorities that Rhee be retired from the scene – a suggestion that carried more than a hint of menace. Rhee played his card again in June 1953, when he ordered that 28,000 Korean communist prisoners of war be released into South Korea instead of handing them over to a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, as United Nations and communist negotiators had agreed. US General Mark Clark would claim in his memoirs that Rhee’s actions delayed the armistice agreement by nearly two months at a time when UN forces were taking about 900 casualties a day.

Decades later, it would become public that officials in Washington had developed plans to remove Rhee from power (Plan Everready) and seriously considered implementing them, but several factors held them back, chief among them Rhee’s popularity with the American people, including several congressmen.

Here is where the comparison between Rhee and Zelensky becomes interesting in a different way. The same ‘card’ that worked for Rhee – leveraging popular American support for his cause – is available to Zelensky. That he has not played it is hardly surprising, given that, until two weeks ago, there was no need for him to do so. American support for Ukraine has been generally popular, even if it was often less popular than the Ukrainians were hoping for. It has also been bipartisan. Just over two years ago, Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress in which both Democrats and Republicans gave standing ovation after standing ovation as Zelensky described his country’s resistance to Russia in terms of supporting an American-backed global order. Not all that long ago, leading Republicans, including the current Secretary of State, were speaking of Ukraine’s struggle in the exact same terms and comparing President Zelensky to Winston Churchill.

President Zelensky could rightly ask the American people: what has changed? He could also, to borrow a leaf from Rhee’s playbook, claim that the United States is in no small measure responsible for what has happened to Ukraine. The US was one of the four powers that signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, offering security guarantees to Ukraine in return for its transfer of nuclear weapons to Russia. In a full-blown Rhee-style attack, Zelensky would accuse the Trump administration of appeasing Russia, highlight the US failure to enforce the Budapest Memorandum, proclaim Ukraine a better embodiment of American values at the moment, and encourage the American people to live up to these values by holding their leaders accountable to them.

Such a strategy would be incredibly risky. It is true that the American people are divided on Ukraine (although, they were no less divided on Korea), and Zelensky has only a fraction of the US contacts throughout the country that Rhee had. Yet one thing unites Americans then and now: they know who the aggressor is in 2025, just as they knew who it was in 1953. Americans were divided on Korea in 1953, but were nearly unanimously anti-communist. Americans might be divided on Ukraine today, but they are almost uniformly anti-Russian. Only four per cent of Americans say they support Russia in a recent poll. President Trump badly wants a peace deal to end the Ukraine War, and does not particularly care how he gets one or how durable it is. Yet, if his policies are seen to contribute to a Russian victory – which is possible – the American people may well consider this a defeat for the United States in general and for President Trump personally. That might be a sobering thought for a president who does not seem to consider the geopolitical consequences of a Ukrainian defeat on their own as being all that important.

It is far from clear that Zelensky will play this ‘card’. It is even less clear whether he should. It is a hand you only play when you’re desperate and out of other options. If he does, many in America and beyond will rally to his cause, but he would also place in jeopardy future US support for his country and for his government, just as Syngman Rhee did every time he played it. It would be one momentous gamble, but President Zelensky would not be the first to take it.