Dark Parallels: The Ukraine War in Historical Perspective
"From really outstanding foundations the Americans forgot and then abandoned the ideas and principles that made them a people to be admired and copied. They entered the Old World to reform it but then got swallowed and broken by its enmities."
Article by David C. Hendrickson in The American Conservative
Dark Parallels: The Ukraine War in Historical Perspective
The manner of the United States' entrance into both World Wars should be a warning to us in how we respond to Ukraine.
War, perhaps more than any other human endeavor, brings with it historical memories and comparisons. In its fog, discerning its significance and direction is intrinsically difficult. War’s entire domain, as it were, is enveloped in falsehood. Only later do we stand much chance of discerning the real truth.
The Ukraine War stirs many memories, but the most dramatic is a comparison between today’s U.S. foreign policy and the outlook prevailing in the United States in the two years before American entry into the First and Second World Wars. President Biden’s policy is all-out economic war against Russia, with a strict red line against actual U.S. military involvement. That recalls some vital conjunctures in American history.
It is reminiscent in the first instance of Woodrow Wilson’s call for a League of Nations in 1916 and 1917, when he was still determined to stay out of the European war. In his “great utterance” before the League to Enforce Peace on May 27, 1916, Wilson said that America would join after the war in a new association of nations to keep the peace. The United States, in effect, would guarantee a future peace settlement.
This stance bears close comparison with President Biden’s policy of inviting Ukraine to join NATO at some future date, but with no commitment of U.S. military power in the here and now. The Allies responded to Wilson’s posture in the same way the Ukrainians have done in the present crisis: “Hello, Uncle Sam, there happens to be a war going on right now, raising the issue of aggression in the starkest terms, so don’t tell us what you’re going to do later on. Tell us what you’re willing to do now.”
In 1916, Wilson dreaded giving any commitments to the British, who pressed him to throw America’s weight behind a reasonable settlement. He still wanted to stay out of the European war. The Germans, when they unleashed unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, forced Wilson’s hand. Before he went to war, however, Wilson’s policy reflected the same weird combination of “no, we’re not intervening now, but yes, at some future date we will guarantee everything” that we saw, in the year before Putin’s War, in the Biden policy toward NATO expansion.
Another nice parallel to the Biden policy is the stance that Franklin Roosevelt adopted in the two years before American entry into the Second World War. Unstinting aid to the allies, non-involvement in the war. Those basic parameters were followed until December 7, 1941.
Those two examples, forgotten preludes to America’s entry into the two world wars, are disturbing because they suggest that one thing leads to another. They teach that the fervent desire to stay out of war may succumb in time to what Jefferson called “the chapter of accidents.” We’re just in Week One of the new world aborning, not fully conscious of all the tumbling dominos to follow. We’re all thinking about what Week Two will bring, but the dreaded question is what Year Two will bring. Clio, poor girl, is these days no longer sure of her pronouns but would still like to say, with Cassandra: You are in great danger, sir.
As part of my ongoing quest to win favor with the neoconservatives, I would also like to draw attention to another disturbing comparison: Hitler’s December 11, 1941, decision to declare war on the United States. The terms of the Triple Alliance binding Germany to Japan and Italy were defensive; Hitler was not obligated to join Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. When he did declare war, it was a huge relief to the Roosevelt Administration, which instantly telegraphed, with the delight of having been won over by a dark seducer: “Me too! War it shall be!”
American war planners knew in 1941 that Germany was the primordial threat, but American public opinion had resided for two years in the same anomalous state as we find today in Ukraine policy. Now, it’s total economic sanctions and no U.S. forces in the melee. Back then, it was all out aid to the allies, while staying out of the war. Even in November 1941, despite an ongoing quasi-war with German U-Boats in the North Atlantic, polls showed that 70 percent of the public still wanted to stay out.
No one knew it at the time, but Hitler had taken the decision all by his little lonesome. He didn’t consult anybody, just did it. Sound familiar? Pace the neocons, I think that there are tremendous fallacies in seeing Putin as a Hitler, mainly because he sees himself as an anti-Hitler, but one has to say that Russian decision-making in the last two months does look a bit like Der Führer’s. Was the Russian elite all lying when they said that the idea of a full-scale Russian invasion was a fantasy of the United States, that there was no way Putin would do something so foolish, that these projections reflected a big plot by the usual suspects? No, I don’t think they were. I don’t think that Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova saw it coming; that Russia’s Deputy Minister to the United Nations saw it coming; that the oligarchs saw it coming; that most of the Russian people saw it coming.
Insofar as they did see it coming, as they began to do towards the end, I think they feared it more than welcomed it. This is one more item in the index of the folly of the venture, this big surprise sprung by Putin on his people, because the reason those characters didn’t see it coming was that it looked just plain incoherent and crazy on its face. We’re going to de-Nazify Ukraine, but not occupy it. We’re going to smash all resistance, yet not kill civilians. We don’t mean to hurt anybody, but we’re going to win the war and then get out.
Putin has given some acerbic critiques of America’s 2003 Iraq War, but on the fantasy quotient of “total victory, no occupation” his Ukraine War would appear to share the crooked expectations that attended America’s ill-starred war in Iraq. If in the unlikely event he proves to be a genius rather than an idiot—he knows Ukraine a lot better than the Americans knew Iraq—it is unlikely to alter the conclusion that he has committed a crime.
We cannot know the scale of Ukraine’s resistance. Whatever it proves to be, it will show yet again that what an occupying army does is basically a function of the defiance it meets. All victorious armies, Clausewitz says, would prefer that the enemy offers no resistance; when it does, previous intentions evaporate. The invader finds itself doing all sorts of odious things that it did not intend, but which the press of necessity (the alternative is losing) seems to command.
Similar pressures will operate on the makers of American foreign policy. After you’ve been humiliated, there is a limit to the humiliation you are willing to suffer. After you’ve shown that your word is not your bond, you face strong pressure to show that it is. Speaking of historical parallels, something like that logic held sway in the chancelleries of Europe on the eve of the Guns of August in 1914. Everybody was operating under the cloud of having previously not supported their allies with the resolution demanded by them. That, along with “use it or lose” thinking by the military staffs, provided a great impetus to the ensuing conflagration.
Both of those factors are in play today. A war in the Pacific, for instance, would immediately bring into sharp focus the need to hit Chinese bases before China hit American bases and carriers. English historian A.J.P. Taylor called the 1914 dynamic “war by timetable,” focusing on the German Army’s precise schedules for mobilization, but the inexorable compulsion was the commanding necessity to destroy the enemy before he annihilated you. This is an inherent but extremely explosive aspect of America’s worldwide military commitments. Without quite announcing it, the United States has created a Doomsday Machine, with built-in escalatory features, on America’s ragged geopolitical frontiers.
Of these various historical parallels, the two which should most hold our attention are the American postures in 1916-1917 and 1940-1941. At both moments, there emerged a gigantic gap between what Americans wanted for the world and what they were actually prepared to do. Fix Europe’s war system, but do not go to war, said Wilson in 1916 and early 1917. Defeat the Axis, said Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1941, but stay out of the war. The logic of events meant that the gap would somehow get closed. As it was, it got closed in the traditional way. The United States went to war.
One of the great pleasures of historical study is that it allows students to cast away the sorry stupid world in which they live, and instead enter the domain of lost civilizations that contain episodes of outstanding human endeavor and accomplishment. John Hale, the sublime historian of Renaissance Europe, wrote that the scholars of the Renaissance, with all the great texts from antiquity now available to them, wanted to live in that time, not their own time. They found in that extinct world possessions of far greater interest to them than they found in their own. “Whatever there was to do, in philosophical speculation, political action or cultural achievement, appeared to have been done, and done with a supreme vigour and accomplishment, among a people whose history not only had the clarity of distance in time but the wholeness of a completed cycle, from obscurity through world empire to barbarian chaos.”
We will one day have our historians who chart the descent from world empire to barbarian chaos, but they are unlikely to look back on our besotted age for models of statesmanship, on the odd chance they still use that word. Instead, they will find in the early 21st century the unwholesome effluvia of all the old sins, especially the bitter ethnic hatreds that, from time immemorial, have thrown human beings into the pit. Our greatness occasioned our fall, they will say; it was a wonder it lasted so long. From really outstanding foundations the Americans forgot and then abandoned the ideas and principles that made them a people to be admired and copied. They entered the Old World to reform it but then got swallowed and broken by its enmities.
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