By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
An invading army surrounds a European
city, cuts off its supplies, bombards it, and demands surrender.
Is it 1346? 1631? 1870? 1941? Or 2022?
The answer is any of the above, and all of
the above. The Russian siege of Mariupol is shocking not because it
is unprecedented, but because it is so traditional — a form of war that is
grinding, brutish, and all too typical in European history.
If you refer, say, to the siege of Vienna,
the next question is, which one? The siege of 1485 (during the Austro-Hungarian
war), 1529 (during the first Ottoman attempt to take the city), 1683 (during
the second), or 1945 (when the Soviets drove westward at the end of World War
II)?
The Hundred Years’ War featured countless
sieges. Henry V, the English king of Shakespeare fame, conducted more than two
dozen from 1417 to 1419. Joan of Arc became a legend at the Siege of Orléans
and was captured at the Siege of Compiègne.
“No form of land-based combat has been
more commonplace than the siege, through the sweep of human history from the
earliest known wars to the investment of Leningrad in 1941–1944,” Paul Lockhart
writes in his compelling new history of military technology, Firepower.
During Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of
Ukraine in 2014, then–secretary of state John Kerry said that he was behaving
“in a 19th-century fashion.” The truth is that Putin is behaving in a
19th-century, 20th-century, and 21st-century fashion. He is confirmation of the
fact that progress is not inevitable, and peace and order are fragile. Human
nature means that remorseless and power-hungry men will always be with us, no
matter how advanced we believe we have become.
Russia’s operation in Mariupol, the
strategically located port city on the Sea of Azov, has been blatantly
bloody-minded. It hasn’t even made a pretense of honoring basic decency, let
alone the modern rules and norms around warfare. The Russians have cut off
food, electricity, and medical supplies and have been reducing the freezing
city to rubble.
By some estimates, 80 percent of the
residential buildings in the city have been damaged. The Russians, notoriously,
shelled a maternity ward, and a theater and a school where people were
sheltering. Authorities have been forced to bury the accumulating dead bodies,
wrapped in carpets or bags, in a mass grave.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has
said that the siege of the city is a “terror that will be remembered for
centuries.” It certainly deserves to live in infamy, although it’s hardly a new
phenomenon.
The Prussians — cynical empire-builders
like Putin, but considerably more competent — besieged Paris in the
Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Starving Parisians ate cats and dogs, and when the
siege dragged on, the Prussians shelled the Left Bank of the city, forcing
people to flee, killing civilians, and hitting hospitals. The Prussians
eventually prevailed, and proclaimed William I the German emperor in the Palace
of Versailles in 1871, a stark humiliation for the French.
Although much of Europe has left behind
this kind of machtpolitik, neither Russia nor China has. Putin’s brutalizing of
Ukraine is a reminder of how essential it is to support the Western order — the
alternative is so much worse. It is a reminder of how human affairs can easily
slide backwards — the history of civilization is of folly, catastrophe, and
decline, as well as of enlightenment, achievement, and progress. And it is a
reminder that when a nation is determined to rule by blood and iron, hard power
is the only deterrent and recourse. If anything saves Ukraine, it will be
missiles, drones, and artillery, not norms or treaties.
No matter how much we wish it were so,
Vladimir Putin is not a figure from the European past. He is a man of its
present, and if not met with clear thinking and resolve, of its future as well.
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