With less than half a year left in office, the Moon Jae-in government is in a hurry to sign an end-of-war (EOW) declaration with North Korea in the hopes of setting up a permanent foundation for a peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula.

It’s important to establish what an EOW declaration is and is not. Perhaps counterintuitively, there is little precedent for an EOW declaration actually ending a conflict: Formal peace treaties between two or more states are what have historically ended wars. 

A peace treaty with North Korea would be a difficult and