By Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem
Thursday, August 22, 2024
The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet
Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once
again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly
that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that
once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide
eruption of violence.
In this respect, democracies today are in a situation
similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was
not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary
limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but
rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and
conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by
democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or
later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the
1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.
***
It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than
of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a
legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is
restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle
East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with
relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no
military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources
Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly
a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the
first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and
Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite
its focus in Europe.
This, however, raises a more important question of
definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed
the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics
was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that
technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European
powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars
that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s
bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of
Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia,
and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its
invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the
central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by
implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in
the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European
diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early
20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a
European crisis into a world crisis.
This First World Crisis is easily demarcated in time.
There were several European wars from the 1870s onward, even between great
powers. Prussia first fought Austria, then France, and overcame both to
transform itself into Germany. Imperial Russia fought war after war against the
eroding Ottoman Empire, each of which ended at the negotiating table as other
great powers threatened war to restrain Russian ambition. In 1905, Japan fought
Russia directly, smashing it on land and at sea and thereby claiming its place
among the great powers. Multiple crises and smaller wars occurred from 1908 to
1913, including large-scale combat in the Balkans. Nevertheless, the true
beginning of the cataclysm was in 1914, when the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand in June led to multiple and reactive continental declarations
of war in August. The Ottomans and the Italians, who remained out of the war
for several months, were not decisive factors. It was, rather, the entrance of
other European powers — alongside the Japanese, who declared war in late August
1914 — that set off the First World War. Similarly, the end of the First World
Crisis was roughly between November 1918 and July 1919, spanning the 1918
armistice (Germany’s only option to stave off collapse and revolution) and the
adoption of the Versailles Treaty at the Paris Peace Conference. This treaty
contained within it the seedlings of the next world crisis, undoubtedly. But it
remains a clean historical-chronological break from the First World Crisis.
Perhaps as a result, we have come to expect a clearly
delineated presentation of historical events as if each were mostly isolated
from the others. This is delusional. The concentration of friction points and
eruptions of violence that defined the beginning of the First World Crisis, and
the seemingly tidy way in which the First World Crisis concluded in 1919, is
not the norm.
The Second World Crisis began quite quickly after the
first. Indeed, this demonstrates that the traditional, cleanly demarcated,
American-European historical periodization is not simply misleading but
deleterious to long-range strategic thinking.
The Versailles Treaty was an attempt to limit German
capacity for conquest. Alongside it stood the Washington Naval Treaty, one of
the first efforts at arms control in human history. But, for one thing, the
U.S. never formally joined the broader international system after the First
World Crisis ended, owing to Woodrow Wilson’s limited political talent and a
reflexive hostility to long-term binding commitments. For another, absent U.S.
coalition management, France and Britain lacked the geopolitical acumen to both
limit German resurgence and contain Soviet Russia.
It is this second issue, Soviet and German power, that
demonstrates the failures of the settlement of the First World Crisis. Russia
and Germany had been central to the European balance of power during the
previous two centuries. Any system had to address both the potential for German
dominance on the European continent and Russian territorial ambitions in
Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the Middle East. The Versailles Treaty did
not balance these concerns adequately, and it would not have done so even if
the United States had been a full party to it. Hence the settlement of the
First World Crisis was really a deferral of unresolved conflict.
The relative peace of the 1920s stemmed partly from the
sheer damage of the First World War. Britain and France lacked the capacity for
a major military campaign. The Soviet Union, despite its attempts to sweep into
Europe, was checked on the Vistula in 1920. While most Ukrainians were absorbed
into the Soviet empire, Poland and the rest of Central Europe were given a
two-decade reprieve from Soviet pressure. The Second World Crisis took shape
for a decade before exploding.
The first signs were in Asia. Japan’s civilian government
increasingly lost control of the armed forces. The result was the Kwantung
Army’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the creation of the puppet Manchukuo
government. Sino–Japanese rivalry exploded in 1937 with Japan’s attempted
lightning offensive against Republican China. This initiated an eight-year-long
war that broke the Japanese Empire. Indeed, one can draw a direct line from the
decision of the Japanese military to expand the war in China in July 1937 to
the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 to Japan’s defeat and occupation in
1945. Japan discovered, despite early victories, that subjugating a country of
China’s size took far more time and resources than it could hope to expend.
Another war, for additional resources, was thus probable, whether against the
Americans or the Soviets. Never mind that this would simply create additional
enemies. Ideology caused Japan to drive Asia into calamity. The Second World
War began on July 7, 1937, near Beijing, not in Poland two years later.
Europe’s descent into horror, meanwhile, began not with
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany but with Mussolini’s Mediterranean
adventurism. The Italian dictator was indisputably the most talented of the
Axis’s political leaders, with an instinctive understanding of diplomatic
questions and the balance of power — Stalin’s intransigence, often mistaken for
strategic patience, did not approach Mussolini’s intellect.
Yet the Duce’s diplomatic skill was not matched with
political prudence derived from a sound grasp of Italy’s military and economic
constraints. Mussolini’s regime pursued an Italian version of Weltmacht from
the 1920s onward. Its first step was the “pacification” of Libya — a brutal
colonial war that saw the large-scale use of concentration camps and attacks
against civilians to bully the local population into submission. Mussolini
clearly recognized the risks that Hitler’s European ambitions posed to Italy:
Bandwagoning might be effective for a time, but Italy would eventually be
subjugated by a Germany that dominated Europe. The result was a series of
negotiations and diplomatic arrangements between Italy and the Western Allies,
culminating in the Locarno Pact, that should have formed the basis for a
reasonable coalition against German expansion. Mussolini’s ambition, however,
grossly outstripped his prudence, resulting in the Abyssinian Crisis, which placed
Italy and the Allies at odds in 1935. In turn, Spain collapsed into civil war a
year later, creating a proxy battleground for Germany, Italy, and the Soviet
Union.
Throughout these crises, and alongside Japan’s
increasingly brutal war in China, the Allies pursued a policy of strategic
abdication. Appeasement, once again, is only part of the story: It refers to
the British tactic of granting Germany territorial gains in Europe with the
expectation that they would become the foundation of a long-term settlement.
But British appeasement would have been impossible absent French strategic
miscalculation and political timidity.
It is not that France was unwilling to fight. In 1939 and
1940, French society and the French political leadership were prepared to feed
the bulk of their military-age male population to the meat grinder to defeat
Germany in a positional war akin to the First World War. Rather, it was French military
policy that was at fault. France refused to consider options beyond strategic
defense via the long-term buildup of artillery-centric forces, which, it
imagined, would allow it to pulverize the German army with firepower. There was
no contingency plan that included a limited offensive into Germany with
mechanized forces or even with motorized infantry and mobile artillery.
Moreover, even with fanfare around the Little Entente in Central and Eastern
Europe, there was no French desire to resist Germany independently. Thus
France, refusing to fight alone and refusing to construct a military policy of
flexibility and adaptation, condemned itself to a cataclysm, using English
demands to accommodate Germany, as a psychological excuse against independent
action.
***
What might we learn from this pattern of events? History
does not repeat itself, at least not with any degree of precision, yet there
are similarities between the course of events over the past century and the
present situation.
We are in the midst of a Third World Crisis. There was no
formal negotiation or settlement that ended the Cold War, no analogue to the
Versailles Treaty and its surrounding agreements that can be identified as
foundational to a post–Cold War order. The situation nonetheless changed
rapidly enough between 1988 and 1992 to mark an obvious watershed. Germany was
reunited and joined NATO. The USSR shattered into Russia and a number of
smaller surrounding states, the most important, by virtue of its geography, population,
resources, and historical memory, being Ukraine.
Germany’s post–First World Crisis irredentism is well
known. Even before Hitler, the German army and foreign office were set on
restoring Berlin’s status as a great power, likely through a series of limited
wars against Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and potentially France, and
ideally through a coalition that balanced between the Central European powers
and the Soviet Union. Germany never accepted its defeat in 1918. It wanted the
world to return to June 1914, with some small modifications, and see the four
years of bloodletting as no more than a tragic mistake.
Moscow took a very similar view of the collapse of the
Soviet Union. It never accepted the end of the Cold War. This was due not to a
German-style Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) but rather to
Russia’s failure to accept post-1991 realities — and a failure by the United
States to press those realities upon it. Even as the Soviet empire fell apart,
Mikhail Gorbachev viewed German unification as a reset that would return Europe
to the 1945–48 balance of power rather than as the beginning of a new system
that would include an integrated Euro-Atlantic security space and an entrenched
American strategic presence in Eurasia. This view necessarily rejected the existence
of NATO and the independence of the Eastern European states. Boris Yeltsin,
despite his bizarrely productive relationship with Bill Clinton, maintained the
same view. Vladimir Putin does as well. It is not only Ukraine but also the
Baltics and Belarus that are nonexistent in Moscow’s view.
Nor does Russia accept as legitimate NATO’s presence
beyond the former inner German border. This explains why it delusionally sees
Germany as partly an American proxy that remains under “occupation.” The
current war in Europe is akin to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 — except that,
unlike Czechoslovakia, which was sold out by major powers, Ukraine has stood
its ground and is fighting it out against a much larger foe.
Just as the Sudetenland crisis was not the first major
strategic incident involving a revisionist power in the 1930s, however, recent
Russian expansion began long before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In 2008,
Russia waged war on Georgia on largely manufactured pretexts. The Kremlin
seized the opportunity that Ukrainian instability presented in 2014 and
snatched Crimea. If the history of the Third World Crisis is written by a
Ukrainian, the author may well date its genesis to February 2014 or, with equal
validity, to 2008 or 2004.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine has taken a form similar to
Japan’s conquest of China in the 1930s. In both cases, the offensive power
initially had a strategy of incrementally eroding the sovereignty of the target
state and seizing opportunities for sharp escalation. Just as Japan assumed it
could swallow China rapidly in 1937 but instead became mired in a brutal
attritional war, so did Russia find itself bogged down in Ukraine in 2022. The
greatest difference, of course, is relative size — Japan was far smaller than
China, while Russia is far larger than Ukraine in territory, population, and
GDP. Nevertheless, in both cases, the aggressive power faced unexpected
obstacles. Japan chose to expand the war, first against the Soviet Union and
then against the United States. Russia has yet to take such a step.
The most striking difference between the previous world
crises and the present situation is that the largest revisionist power at
present, China, remains out of active participation in wars for now. But its
military preparations and stated willingness to employ force ought to be taken
at face value.
The United States therefore faces a choice not between
rearmament and appeasement but between courage and cowardice. Rearmament is
critical and will likely come in the next five years — even if, much as it did
in the British case before the Second World War, it comes too late to prevent
systemic war. Like France, the United States can lock itself into a restraint
paradigm that defers conflict in the absence of allied support and military
capacity, thereby guaranteeing a much larger clash later. Or it can push now,
demonstrate its capacity, and solidify one of Eurasia’s three regions in a
long-term contest for supremacy.
Either way, war is coming.
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