It’s starting to feel like 1953 again, this time in Ukraine. That year is when the Koreas and their allies agreed on an armistice, at last, after three years of bloodshed. Fighting sloshed up and down the Korean Peninsula during the year-long war of movement (1950-1951). The North lunged across the inter-Korean border in 1950, driving South Korean forces all the way to the Pusan Perimeter, a tiny enclave at the peninsula’s southeastern tip. It looked like South Korea’s defenders might be driven into the sea. Then, after firming up the perimeter, U.S.-U.N. forces mounted an ambitious flanking landing at Inchon. They cut off and mostly wrecked the North Korean army before making their own lunge northward toward the Inchon River, which marks the Sino-Korean frontier. Then a host of “Chinese People’s Volunteers” poured across the Yalu, sending the U.N. army fleeing southward.

Then, then, then. Up and down the peninsula warfare raged.

Finally, stasis set in as the fighting front stabilized along the 38th parallel. South of the peninsula’s “narrow neck” along the 38th, Korea is a maritime theater susceptible to sea and air power such as that boasted by U.S.-U.N. naval forces. There, carriers and surface warships can control events in concert with ground forces. North of the narrow neck, though, the peninsula widens, and the terrain grows rocky, mountainous, and forbidding, largely setting air and sea power at nought.