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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
I don't think that WW1 is a good analogy for anything going on in modern international relations. The fundamental fact about the international situation immediately before and (to a lesser extent) during WW1, which was well-understood by contemporaries, is the existence of multiple (between five and nine depending on how you count) Great Powers each of which was capable (both in terms of military power and institutional decision-making capacity) of acting independently in pursuit of its own interests, including forming and breaking alliances based on mutual interest. The only constraint on the of a Great Power is the possible opposition of other Great Powers.
@georgioz provides a long list of Great Power conflicts in the period between 1815 (the last great International Peace Conference where the then-existing Great Powers redrew the map of Europe and agreed ground rules among themselves) and 1914 - and critically not all of them are Allies vs Central Powers. You can argue about who much the UK/France/Russia vs Germany/Austria line-up results from choices made by statesmen vs. unavoidable strategic logic vs. shared values/culture, but we can see Italy and the Ottoman Empire choosing sides based on a (possibly wrong, but genuinely attempted) calculation of strategic advantage, as well as a (somewhat dysfunctional) decision-making process where the UK decides whether or not to honour the alliance with France and the guarantee to Belgium and join the war based on a calculation of its perceived advantage.
There is a reason why board games simulating pre-1914 real-world conflict tend to be multiplayer, but board games simulating post-1914 politics tend to be two player.
After Pearl Harbour, we see two models of the world, neither of which feature Great Powers. The "US hegemony" paradigm sees all states as either US clients or as rogue states. US diplomacy is more like managing troublesome vassals in Crusader Kings than, well, Diplomacy. The "United Nations vs Axis of Evil" paradigm sees the goodies as a grand alliance held together by shared values (NOT mutual interest) and where goodie countries nominally commit to not acting unilaterally in pursuit of their own selfish interests. The Axis of Evil tends to be treated as a single unified "them" even when it isn't. (Incidentally, this model provides an easy explanation of what went wrong with W's foreign policy - W thought that he was facing an Axis of Evil when in fact Iran, Iraq and al-Quaeda were different rogue states which happened to be annoying him at the same time).
Who are the plausible Great Powers nowadays? The US is still something more than one Great Power among others. China counts. Russia looks like a Great Power, but their ineptitude in Ukraine strongly suggests that they are a fake and gay Great Power. The UK and France probably still have the military power to be Great Powers (the Falklands war was the last time this was put to the test), but American hegemony is sufficiently real that (since Suez) the British and French elites think that they can't act without American permission, and accordingly neither country has the institutional capacity. (One of the reasons why British national-greatness conservatives supported Brexit was because they thought that this loss of capacity was caused by EU membership, but in fact the UK only joined the EU after we had realised that we had already lost Great Power status). India might be a latent Great Power but doesn't act like one. Germany and Japan have intentionally eschewed Great Power status. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are strategically irrelevant - the B and S in BRICS are there by diplomatic courtesy. The only other candidate as I see it is Turkey.
Nobody thinks Diplomacy is being played in Ukraine. The Biden administration think they are trying to talk sense into a nuclear toddler. The Europeans are passively choosing whether to contribute the the American strategy or not - it turns out that the British and French can't even give the Ukrainians missiles without American permission. The Russians think they are playing Twilight Struggle like the old times, but they are actually playing Panzer General, badly.
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I would not say that this was the major cause of the conflict. There are much more fundamental reasons. Let's go through some of them:
Demographics: after unification of Germany in 1871 it had population of 41 million people. By 1913 the population increased by 65% to 68 million. Population of France was 36,1 million in 1871 without Alsace-Moselle they ceded in the war, and in 1911 it increased only marginally to 39 million. French were scared of rapidly industrializing and growing Germany. But in turn Germany was scared of Russian Empire which increased from around 85 million in 1870 to around 160 million in 1910, and it also industrialized very rapidly.
The change in foreign policy of Russia and it's turn from the principle of Holy Alliance since 1815, where three Emperors of Russia, Austria and Prussia formed a coalition on monarchic principle against revolutionaries and other threats. This alliance got steadily weakened despite Russia supporting Austria in 1848 against Hungarian rebels only to be betrayed during Crimean War in 1853. Then with unification of Germany this soured further until Russia formed Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894.
Britain was in a bit of a pickle. You are right that they wanted to play continental powers one against another, but at the same time they were terrified of Russian expansionism. They had valid fears of Russia influencing Central Asia in so called Great Game - the primary concern was Russia expanding into India via Afghanistan, but also establishing Warm water port in East Asia. Brits viewed Russia with suspicion.
One of the key moments where situation changed was when Russia lost war in 1905 to Japan, which turned its focus more on to the west in Balkans while negotiating alliance with Great Britain in 1907. This put Russia more directly onto collision course against Austria which also wanted influence in Balkans. There were some precursors such as Russia supporting Serbia in Balkan Wars at the expense of Austria. This solidified two competing blocks in Europe.
There were some crisis situations also concerning Germany, France and UK such as Agadir Affair. The conflict was brewing for some time.
I of course omitted many other things such as German naval rearmament, which however stalled before WW1 with Germans focusing more on the army, and thus it was not a direct cause of it, but it contributed to tensions. I still think WW1 was not inevitable. The collision course was there, but with a little bit more luck and/or more diplomatic skill or at least not outright incompetence during the July crisis, the world could have survived this period of tensions.
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Im fascinated by the transition period around the turn century as it is simultaneously remote and foriegn and yet at the same time immediately accessible in the sense that primary sourses are widely available and the seeds of our modern world for all its good and ill are immediately visible.
Mine is hardly a unique take (better historians than I have already written whole books on the subject) but i think that WWI was an inflection point, and the seminal tragedy of the 20th century. I say tragedy specifically because it is so hard to pick out any one cause or villian. Sure some might point to Gavrillo Princep, but he was less the cause and more the careless spark that finally lit the pile of oily rags. That the situation was allowed to progress to the point where a single idiot could plunge all of Europe into war for want of a sandwich was the real problem. It almost feels fated in a way. Everyone involved seems to have been making reasonable decisions and assumptions for the information they had available the problem (if one can call it that) was that the world is messy and complex and a lot of their information wad either incomplete or just plane wrong.
In contrast the opening of WWII might as well be a Saturday morning cartoon in its simplicity.
Sure there is the argument to be made that Britain could have avoided both wars simply by reneging on previous agreements with Belgium and Poland and renouncing the RN's role as guaranteurs of maritime trade/safety but I don't see how anyone remotely familiar with early 20th century British politics and culture would see that as a realistic option. In alternate history terms that is pretty close to an "alien space bats" type scenario.
Regarding Cooper in particular i find it interesting that his complaints about Churchill seem to mirror a lot of the longstanding complaints about him from the far left. IE that his stubbornness and devotion to outmoded/obsolete ways of thinking prevented him from meeting the socialists and anti-colonialists half-way and subsequently brought ruin to the nation. Of course the classical rejoinder from the trad-right is that it is precisely this stubbornness and devotion to "outmoded ways of thinking" that made him the man for the job.
A "reasonable man" would not have been able to credibly deliver a line like "we shall fight on the landing grounds".
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Always!
Color me skeptical, though, that you’re going to find anything revelatory on Twitter. It’s not a trove of forbidden knowledge. It’s entertainment, and edgy contrarianism is a costume like any other.
Now back to geeking out about long-dead men.
Wilhelm II’s Germany was well-armed, proud, and above all, young. He desperately wanted to move it from a second-tier power, beset by rivals on land and sea, to a hegemon. That meant colonial purchases, a massive naval buildup, and the quest for a reliable neighbor. He did alright on the first and really well on the second. Unfortunately, he ended up with Austria-Hungary.
I don’t know how you can look at that and think “America.” NATO stands in the UK position of sea dominance, commercial dominance, but limited appetite for intervention. It’s not in the German position of encirclement, and it doesn’t burn with the need for “a day in the sun.”
Conversely, American geopolitics is compatible with leaving Ukraine to Russia. That doesn’t generate a threat to the homeland, and it doesn’t violate any actual treaty. We haven’t done so because 1) we’re getting a decent return on investment and 2) we’ve got a bit of a complex about letting the bully get what he wants. That’s our job.
As I understand it, Trump could cut all weapons sales to Ukraine by revoking their ITAR license. I wouldn’t expect that to supersede any Congressional allocation of aid, but I don’t know what the proportions look like. Do I think he’d actually do this? No. Probably not. Well, it is Trump, and long-term consequences have never been his strong suit. The point is, he’s got leverage over our industrial contributions to the war.
Austria-Hungary was not particularly an albatross around Germany’s neck except of its own making; absent the German blank check, it’s unlikely Austria would have full-on invaded Serbia as opposed to making demands which would have been considered reasonable upon review by the Russians. It was nowhere near as militaristic as Germany and while Franz Joseph was and old, out of touch emperor, he died in 1916 and was succeeded by Karl I, who likely would have given the needed reforms to keep the Slavs happy(Franz Ferdinand would have done the same thing).
Austria as a powder keg is foreseeable mostly in hindsight; a reasonable observer would have expected Franz Joseph’s successor to calm tensions.
Everyone goes on and on about the German blank cheque and completely ignores that the French did the exact same thing about a year before. They told Russia explicitly that they were prepared to back up Russia in a general war over a future Balkan crisis (one happening every few years at this point). What is that if not a blank cheque?
The French had decided they didn't particularly mind war, Germany hardly deserves more blame than France.
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I don’t disagree.
To be clear, I’m blaming reckless German policy, such as giving a blank check. There’s a quote from the German ambassador to A-H along the lines of “there is no way we actually benefit from this relationship.” But the other options all sucked, so Germany really doubled down on a weak hand. They’d have been much better off continuing Bismarck-style defensive politics like everyone else.
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Because I think America/NATO actually achieved what Germany (according to its modern defenders) was trying to achieve, peace through unquestioned dominance on the continent of Europe. America doesn't view itself as aggressively expansionist, even as NATO expands, because its military actually is so dominant that it seems only natural that other countries should want to join our military alliance. So America is definitely not like Germany if the comparison is "young upstart power with something to prove", but America does seem similar to Germany in its view of a peaceful world order, i.e. everyone should just do what we want.
But hey, I'm just getting into this stuff for the first time, my curiosity having been sparked by the much-maligned Twitter. Maybe there is no analogy to be made, but I appreciate getting informed pushback from people who know a lot more about this than I do!
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This is the sort of enthusiasm that keeps me here with a smile at times like now.
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I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.
Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).
My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.
So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.
Strudlhofs Gone Wild!
The image of the hilariously-named Hotzendorf and Bechtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Frättling und Püllütz just absolutely HOUSING pastries and getting flaky crumbs all over the draft ultimatum to Serbia is sadly ahistorical. It doesn't stop me giggling over it, though.
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This analysis, of course, leaves out the context that Russia is, specifically in Eastern Europe but to a lesser extent in the Middle East, also an expansionist power seeking to unify various countries into a Russia-headed power block. Russian intervention in Syria wasn’t driven by concern about Syrian independence, it was driven by Syria accepting Russia as a hegemon. And Russian intervention in Ukraine has also, largely, been driven by trying to force Kiev to take orders from Moscow.
Russia and Syria have been allies for decades, the Russians have a naval base there and a lot of Syrian officers were trained in Moscow.
If the Philippines asked the US for help combatting terrorists, Islamists, rebels and various foreign-backed proxies, that would be perfectly reasonable and acceptable, given their longstanding ties and the US's pre-existing bases there.
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The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson. Stupid and incompetent all the way. When you are dealing with a power that needs to be contained after a flare you have two options - first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace.
Due to Woodrow Wilson's influence - he was so stupid that thought that league of nations is a good and viable idea the winning powers took the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism, a german state that was not weakened enough to not subvert them, leaving sizable German minorities in their neighboring countries, a huge internal vacuum because of the revolution and a huge vacuum in the east due to the collapse of the russian empire. It was a recipe for disaster.
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You're correct that 'peace without victory' was an utterly unworkable ambition, but compounding this sin the US then largely acted to undermine attempts to enforce German debts at the same time it called in the debts owed to the US by its allies. Part of this was buying too much into Keynes' doomsaying book, and part was early cold war posturing and power balancing, but at the end of the day Versailles was hardly excessive or vindictive and it was eminently reasonable that France should seek reparations having borne all the destruction while the war's loser got off comparatively lightly. It was modest compared to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany had enforced on Russia the year prior (german gains in land and population here far outstripped what they lost in Versailles) , and should be seen partly in reaction to the 3B franc indemnity imposed by Germany on France in 1871. Per Stephen Shuker, it's likely Germany ended up paying no net reparations at all, having paid its immediate bills with American loans that were subsequently defaulted on in the Great Recession. Contra Keynes, who believed that Germany could not afford the ~2B marks per year for 30 years, Mantoux estimated German rearmament spending as exceeding that seven times over for each each year between 1933 and 1939.
Sally Marks' Myths of Reparations identifies two main failures in the allied prosecution of Versailles. The first was enforcement as you mention, but the second was the failure to make it clear to the German people (who again, had lost a colossal war escaping most of the destruction) the psychological reality of their defeat: “An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany briefly, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay”.
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You are projecting post-1945 American hegemony back into the past.
We can argue about whether or not Woodrow Wilson was bad, but he definitely wasn't "the" bad guy because he wasn't a first-tier player. The European Great Powers went to war with each other without taking American policy into account, because they thought the most likely scenario was a short war of maneuver and there was nothing the US could do to affect the results of one. Even had they expected a long war, they would have (correctly) assumed US neutrality absent an exceptionally stupid provocation by the Central Powers.
The first meaningful opportunity for the US to meddle in WW1 (apart from selling materiel to the Allies on normal commercial terms) is when Bethmann Hollweg asks Woodrow Wilson to convene an international peace conference on the basis of status quo ante in December 1916. By this point the bloodiest battles of WW1 (Verdun and the Somme) had already been fought. And Wilson doesn't take the bait at this point - he correctly realises that neither side wanted a status quo ante peace in 1916. (Bethmann Hollweg was trying to maneuver out of situation where German domestic politics would force the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which he opposed on the mostly-correct basis that if it worked it would bring the US in).
The first time the US actually meddles in WW1 is the publication of the Fourteen Points, which happens after the February Revolution in Russia, at which point the messy collapse of Tsarist Russia is already priced and can be added to the "harms of WW1 definitely not Wilson's fault" pile.
I always like Clemenceau's (possibly fake) quip about Wilson's laundry list - "four more than God."
I so want it to be true. ;-)
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OP wasn't addressing what Wilson did before he decided the US needs to enter the war, he was addressing what he did after the war ended.
And Monzer's point remains the same: Wilson wasn't a first-tier player who had the agency to overturn the preferences of the rest, and many of the factors that led to the nature of the end of WW1 (such as breakup of empires into smaller nation-states, but with ethnic mixing) were already baked in.
Wilson was The first tier player and he overrode his allies desires for more realpolitik based solution.
A good summary can be found in the The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles chapter in the Kissinger's Diplomacy
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The plan doesn't really have to be complicated: call Putin and negotiate a cease fire and peace talks, maybe threaten to join in if he doesn't come talk, maybe concede Crimea, whatever sweetens the pot. Classic art of the deal.
There already were some accords before Boris Johnson was sent to blow them up. I'm sure you could actually get Putin to be reasonable in his demands if you treat Russia like a GP, which is ultimately what this war is about.
What a peace looks like now is a good question, but here's my proposal:
First of all, what exactly does Ukraine get out of this plan? It looks like something you might sell to them if it looks like Russia is going to turn it into the Puppet Republic of Malorossia in not-too-distant future.
But more importantly, what's the point of this plan? If you're a good Christian, then saving human lives might be the answer, but if you're a godless power projection optimizer in the mold of Bismarck and Kissinger, then drip-feeding Ukraine various arms and armor as long as possible is by far the better option.
The only thing you lose as the US is some surplus military equipment. In return you get to test various cool stuff against an actual army, you keep Russia busy, the NATO reinvigorated, the EU divorced from Russia. Why stop right now? Let Russia and Ukraine exhaust each other as much as possible. Then you can hit two birds with one stone during the peace talks:
The only risk is that you might miss a black swan that causes Russia to implode before you can react. Ukraine cannot really implode like this because it's already on life support.
This is my functional model of the end result of this war if nothing gets negotiated first. So yes, the main thing Ukraine gets is it's territory integrity back to some degree, security through some military guarantee, and conditional entry into the European socio-economic sphere.
Seems a lot better than meat grinding the rest of your population for less.
But to answer you, what I'd want most out of peace is stability in Europe and normalized relationships between powers so further conflict is made unlikely first, and self determination second.
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Crimea has been under Russian occupation since 2014. I doubt that Putin has been losing sleep over the possibility of a counter-invasion by Ukraine which would not be contrary to international law, but would be so after Ukraine formally conceded Crimea.
Putin may be an autocrat, but I think it is very possible that his position of power is strong enough that he can de facto surrender in Ukraine without losing his job and possibly his head. That might have an option after his Blitzkrieg had failed in 2022, but to tell the mothers of dead Russian soldiers that their sons have died so that Russia can keep Crimea seems like political suicide.
(And who knows how plebiscites in the oblasts might turn out, once the people who fled Russian occupation are allowed back. Both sides have incentives to engage in ballot-stuffing by sending their citizens to stay there long enough to vote, and the records of who was living there in 2013 could have been tampered with by either side.
Guarantees are not the deterrence you think they are, historically. Also, they are just a precommitment to start a war in certain cases.
Say you are Estonia. If someone invades Poland, that means that under Article 5 you are obliged to go to war (along the US and most of the West) to defend your fellow NATO member.
This might seem like a bad deal for Estonia, and indeed it is not clear how many NATO countries would honor the obligation. But with NATO membership, they get something in return: If they are invaded, Poland is also obliged to come to their aid.
The EU guaranteeing Ukraine would leave Estonia in the same position of having to fight if Ukraine gets invaded, but without (a) any reverse obligation to Ukraine (b) support from the US or the UK, who happen to have the largest nuclear stockpiles in NATO.
Now, I like Ukrainian independence, and support sending them weapons for as long as they care to fight and die for it, but absent mutual obligations (e.g. NATO), I am opposed to starting WW3 lite (between EU and Russia, without US/UK) over it.
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So, neither the EU (which would have to vote unanimously) nor Putin would agree to your plan. A more realistic peace proposal would concede most of the occupied territory to Russia and see Ukraine (which will then not be in an active conflict) join NATO so Putin can't come for the next slice in a few years. Of course, neither Ukraine nor Russia would likely agree to that.
Or perhaps start with a ceasefire, where both sides can dig in, making future conquests more costly. (Obviously swap the occupied part of Kursk for a piece of occupied Ukraine.) Then again, a frozen conflict a la Korea might be hard to accomplish because both belligerents are very unevenly matched here.
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Ukraine already has that. What else you got?
I am duty bound to inform you that you are allowed to read the rest of the sentence, or indeed, the rest of the post.
And yet, duty bound or not you didn't rebut the point of what had already failed.
*The accords you claim already existed were non-viable due to Russian demands even before the Bucha Massacre was recognized, and conditional on Russian demands for Ukrainian disarmament to levels below what Ukraine has already since lost in the war- i.e. an inability to defend itself- while demanding a Russian veto on external security assistance by non-Russian providers- i.e. that other actors like the EU would not be able to act in a crisis.
*The end of sanctions on Russia will not occur because the sanctions are themselves a mechanism of European transition away from Russian energy imports on grounds of national security following Russia's attempted energy blackmail.
*Russia has no credibility has a military guarantor of Ukraine's security as it is currently on the third continuation war of violating Ukraine's neutrality.
*Russia has already rejected the applicability of neutral administration of the Russophone oblasts both in the form of annexation and in its previous positions during Minsk agreements positions of previous agreed upon neutral parties.
*As there is no reason to believe there would turnover of territory, by consequence the destination of most reconstruction aid would be in the areas most heavily damaged- the areas Russia holds- amounting to a subsidy / reimbursement to Russia of the costs of Russian conquest. If there was no cross-control spending, the provision would have no role as both powers would simply spend on reconstruction of their own areas regardless.
*Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was already conducted when Ukraine was on a much less involved level of EU association despite existing treaties.
Your terms of peace are non-credible because they rest on provisions that Russia has already broken or insisted on poison pill sub-provisions that lead to this conflict.
Peace requires concessions on both sides, and I think a European guarantee is enough of a deterrent.
Both sides' declared conditions are mutually exclusive, I tried to cleave from both of them somewhat fairly.
Formal borders sans Crimea restored and an end to military occupation seems like it goes without saying, formal schedules for returning Ukraine to normal administration are left as exercise to the reader.
If Putin is interested in clay instead of all of his declared war goals, peace is a non starter, but I believe him when he says his concerns are related to security of Russia and Russians more than rote imperialism.
So far your concessions are largely unilateral in light of how Russia has approached or poison-pilled various equivalent standards before.
A peace treaty doesn't depend on what you think is enough of a deterrent, it depends on what others think is enough of a deterrent. The typical-minding of other actors perspectives and interests to your own is why your proposals will not be credible to the actors that matter.
Are you trying for fairness, or functionality?
If you are trying for functionality, your sense of fairness has neglected the functional failures that already occurred as a result of equivalent terms in the past, failures which you are expecting previous victims of to subscribe to again.
It not only requires saying, but categorial opposition to this has been the starting position for the Russian position for over two years now, with no provided reason for why they would drop the position and un-annex regions now given that a cease fire or frozen conflict- a BATNA to a treaty- would let them retain territory well beyond formal borders sans Crimea.
And as one of the readers is the Russians, this turns any formal schedule into a frozen conflict scenario. Which is the same scenario that led to the 2022 invasion as Russia deemed a frozen conflict with no viable path to NATO membership insufficient to meet its desires vis-a-vis another continuation war.
Putin is interested in the clay because many of his claimed war goals were false or lost already.
The Russophone regional populations were not categorically endangered until Russia created and enforced a separatist conflict with external interventions, NATO expansion was accelerated instead of countered, the Ukrainians were not a false nation seeking Russian liberation, and the Ukrainian government was never a Nazi regime.
The clay is what allows Putin to justify to himself, his partisan supporters, and his historian that he 'won' in some meaningful sense.
Do Russian diplomats really read this forum? News to me.
In any case your model of the motivations of the belligerents is not the same as mine so I don't really think we can reconcile the reasoning for any of this.
I will say however that taking the current declared terms from both sides as immutable gospel as you do here is absurd. Diplomacy never works like that.
Do Russian diplomats need to read this forum for your proposals to be unworkable because of poor modeling of the interests and concerns of participants?
Sure we can. We can work to justify the models based on key actor behavior, contexts that the proposed models will work within, and past iterations.
For example, you made a concession that if Putin is interested in clay instead of all his declared war goals, then peace is a non-starter. I noted that it is impossible for Putin to achieve all of his declared war goals, and that in lieu of those he has significant interest in the clay in order to declare victory. You have not disputed these points on all of Putin's war goals. If Putin has many interests in the conflicts, and many/most have fallen away, then the reason to continue the conflict remains the rest- which includes the clay.
This is a synthesis, not a refutation of your model, and thus allows the conversation to reach your own conclusion. Putin cares about the clay, and thus peace is hopeless.
From this point, we can discuss what that means for reasonable peace talks (which have a purpose even when an adversary has no interest in fulfilling them), assumptions of terms they can be approached with, and so on.
Fortunately I am not arguing on the immutable gospel of declared terms, but rather past iterations, interests, and incentives... which is how diplomacy routinely works, absurd as that may seem to you.
Moreover, you seem to be trying for a flawed reasoning of what is or is not considered subject for negotiation. Just because initial declared terms are 'never' final terms doesn't mean all parts of initial terms are subject to concession. Plenty of terms are not subject to trading way short of total capitulation- which is not the context Russia is faced with in the timeframe being alluded to. As such, the basis by which currently held Russian territory would be traded away with requires justification rather than going without saying, particular in light of past Russian policies in regards to frozen conflicts and relevant historical analogs to broad-front indefinite cease fires.
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I find my question unchanged.
Are you under the impression that the EU is or ever has been guaranteeing the independence of Ukraine militarily?
They get transitive Article 5 NATO protection under my plan, they just don't get to trigger it themselves or host NATO bases and are bound to formal neutrality as part of the deal.
No, just that such a guarantee isn't worth very much.
What the hell more do you want than dual GP protection? Nuclear weapons?
Acknowledgement of reality. A peace deal now without hard guarantees is just a pause, a frozen conflict so more can be taken in the future.
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If you want to compare historical wars with the present situation in Ukraine, I would suggest the Mexican-American war as a better template. Mapped over to historical events…
The United States —> Russia Mexico —> Ukraine Texas —> Crimea/DPR/LPR
I’m a bit short on time, but try to read the Wikipedia page and draw the comparisons. To me at least there are many similarities.
The annexation of Texas was largely downstream of first Spain, then newly-independent Mexico encouraging Americans to colonize the mostly-unoccupied-except-Native-Americans region (land grants happened elsewhere in the American West as well). For reasons involving language/culture barriers, a proto-fascist dictatorship, and, yes, slavery, Texas declared and won it's independence from Mexico, puttered along as a recognized independent state for a decade before US annexation, and the actual Mexican American war kicked off over the exact borders of Texas.
I don't see that many parallels here. Did Ukraine encourage Russian settlement in Crimea/Donetsk? I don't think the Spanish Empire fits in the place of the USSR here. And the US was actually pretty reluctant to annex Texas at the time because it would change the antebellum balance of slave and free states. Texas had formal relations with other major powers, and there was some discussion with the British about border guarantees as an alternative to American annexation, although IMO the close ties there probably made that a non-starter.
I see a little bit of what you are suggesting, but I think it plays almost equally well in reverse: with
independence from Spainthe fall of the Iron Curtain, Western ideals were invited into the region, setting up an inevitable conflict with caudilloSanta AnnaPutin in ways that lostMexicothe Russian sphere of influence huge swaths of territory and riches in ways that might have been salvageable. Was Texas independence, or the broader Mexican Cession, truly inevitable? Maybe, but Santa Anna didn't seem particularly interested in keeping them (edit: except by force), and Texas wasn't even the only rebellious Mexican province in 1835.In a way? How far are we willing to go back here?
The whole comparison with Mexico kinda breaks down as soon as you figure in the fact both Russia and Ukraine are broken pieces of the Soviet Union modeled after its internal politics.
If we introduce temporality into this discussion then it actually crippled the Texas=D/LNR and Mexico=Ukraine, and it becomes Texas=Ukraine and Mexico=Russia. The proximate relevance of 2022 Ukraines relationship with Russia is the 2014 Crimea and Novorossiya adventure, not the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union or the slavification of the Pale Of Settlement from god knows when to god knows when. 1991 Ukraine did not exhibit the same hostility to its parent patron as much as the Texans did the Mexicans back in 1991, but it certainly does since 2014. The animating force of hostility against Russia is the disregard for the internal motivations of the Ukrainian polity, and that fuckup is Russias own doing. Sticking with a Belarus model of relationship cultivation is yielding dividends in Hungary and maybe Romania in this year of 2024, and nothing indicates 2014 Ukrainians were especially lured to the liberal pieties of the West. Texas would not have seceded from Mexico without the change in political status quo, and in fact it brought in plenty of Anglos specifically seeking to escape the US diktats. Perhaps if Putin didn't fuck up his Ukraine adventure we would see Carlsonstan set up as an antiliberal tradcon utopia.
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Thucydides Trap historical metaphors tend to fall into the trap of ignoring relevant actors, the issues of when national advantages get conflated with national strategies, and incompetent leaders.
The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion (where ancient Sparta and Athens were by far the regional leading leaders of coalitions with limited agency) and general proposer propensities (the Thucydides Trap is most often raised in realist schools of theory, which are currently framed in bipolar conflicts), it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors. These actors not only have their own agency (France was a major military power in its own right, and there's a reason France-British rapproachment coincided with the rise of torpedo speed boats that the Royal Navy couldn't have stopped from throttling channel trade), but their presence and potential drives decision making of the key actors (Germany's WW1 strategy prioritizing a westward rush due to expectations of Russian mobilization; modern Eastern European lobbying to expand NATO in the post Cold War).
This matters to your Russia-American metaphor because the roles in the current era really aren't analogous to either WW1 or Thucydides Trap due to the relevance of other actors. The US is not the actor who felt a need to pre-empt a specific threat (the German allusion to WW1), nor was it trying to displace a hegemon / at risk of being displaced as a hegemon by Russia in Ukraine.
The model also struggles to recognize how doctrine and strategy interact, and yet don't substitute for eachother, and how a doctrine predicated on a form of offense can lead to bad strategy and unwise conflict. In WW1, Germany was caught up in what was sometimes referred to as the cult of the offense- the idea that with elan and alacrity and modern military planning you could blitz the enemy to submission much faster and cheaply than a methodical campaign. This, in turn, would let you fight greater opposing forces, since you could knock out some (say France and thus Britain) early enough to focus on the rest (Russia). There was reason to believe this was possible- German offensives had beaten the French before, and would again nearly 30 years later- but this is a tactic that became a strategy by necessity. This was because the Kaiser German military context kept getting worse and worse, because the willingness to aggressively push personal interests at the expense of others created coalitions that wouldn't have formed had other actors felt at risk. The greater the potential coalitions became, the greater the appeal of the cult of the offense to negate that disadvantage. By WW1, German planners largely thought Russia was a massive threat that would take their full focus and thus couldn't be faced with France at the same time... hence the intent to knock out France first. But doing so required going through Belgium, which is what got Britain into the war that it otherwise would have likely sat out on. The Germans took a calculated risk, but boy were they were bad at math because not even they recognized the implications of the technologies available, and that their own strategy built on past success was putting them in a bad strategic context.
This matters to your modern example because Russia was/is in the thrall of its own version of the cult of the offense. Call it the cult of the asymmetric spook. Putin had enough success with small-scale unconventional / special operations that it not only became a Russian advantage, but the entire Russian strategy for Ukraine. The reason so many people publicly doubted the pre-invasion American warnings was because it would be monumentally stupid to go up with a force like that with what Russia had assembled. But Putin was convinced his special military operation successes in the past would work again, and lo and behold when it didn't the strategy crashed and burned.
By contrast, the American comparison to this metaphor isn't Germany in WW1, but far closer to... America in WW1, where the American center of power was never at meaningful threat, and potential threat-rivals devastated themselves while the American political debate was how much favoritism to show the generally favored side without actually entering the war.
Which goes to the final point, leader competence.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but WW1's Kaiser Wilhelm was a certain kind of an idiot- an aggressive idiot. Aggressive foreign policy got him results he otherwise wouldn't have had he been more passive, but who also created the foundations for the coalition that would encircle him, and the willingness of everyone to not only fight back but to help others keep beating his forces up well after the initial bloody nose. Wilhelm's incompetence wasn't just in choosing a bad war, but in the choices that led to Germany's isolation in Europe leading up to this, and the strategic options available to him as a result of his shaping of the local international environment to a point where allies were mercurial at best.
From this position- where the military facts were against him, and the coalitions surrounding him, and victory hinged on a trump card succeeding without issue- Wilhelm then doubled down on a weak hand.
This matters to your example because, again, the historical analog here isn't the US to Germany, or even the US to Britain, but Russia to the worst aspects of WW1 Germany.
That people will take him seriously, not literally. And/or pay attention to other things that he's said in the past, such as his conditional willingness to further supply Ukraine if Russia doesn't agree to reasonable terms, various formulations of which Russia has to date rejected as unreasonable.
Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?
Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984; by Jack Snyder. Here is a summary
The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War; by Stephen Van Evera. Here's a link to a summary... and of some other military history education sources.
Here is a thesis from an American Airforce officer on the Cult of the Offense as it applies to airpower.
I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.
To follow on @Dean's point on wars of conquest being too expensive to be profitable, there was also increasing traction among politicians and economists that the costs of holding foreign territory started outweighing the trade/taxes accrued from said territory. I don't have the specific literature, but Adam Smiths economic treatises regularly castigated colonial adventures as foolish, with no economic case for them due to the high frictional costs of maintaining economically leaky endeavors.
As technology improved and accessibility to said technology extended beyond European borders, the strength of relative threats diminished the European technological advantages severely. There is no point keeping a garrison in Hong Kong if the Chinese can attack strongpoints with artillery instead of swords. There is no point in keeping a Kabul FOB if the Taliban can overrun adjacent ANA positions with a text message and plink potshots eternally at US troops without consequence, etc etc.
The last major power to engage in a colonialist land grab (outside of Putin) was funny moustache man, and all his lebensraum would have lain fallow if he did not have a cooperative population working it maximally for his advantage The Russians slow worked under an ostensibly beneficial communist system simply because the communist system had unworkable incentives, theres no way they would have functioned as a slave people to faraway teutons.
Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.
I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.
Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.
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Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.
We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.
In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.
The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.
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Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.
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I would strongly (and warmly) recommend reading up on it. More than a specific historical context, the Cult of the Offensive is a mindset that can be observed across periods of time, and is an example of a strategic paradigm that can simultaneously be logical (because premise can be true and valid) and illogical (because the consequences of adopting the paradigm include negative externalities that make it illogical to embrace).
Rather than scandalous, the more relevant point is 'too expensive to be profitable.'
The British and American formal empires fell because of scandal. The sense of self of what it meant to be 'civilized' precluded arbitrary and extreme uses of force, and political-ideological senses of legitimacy and democracy asserted self-limitations that, eventually, led them to no longer want to militarily enforce rule and so negotiate exits.
That negotiation- and the experience of other conquerors- was in the context that insurgencies were increasingly cheap and bloodily effective and incurring huge costs. Starting with post-WW2 military surpluses, but then expanding with the Cold War military-industrial complexes, advanced and effective and relatively portable weapons made armed resistance a real and feasible thing. The AK-47 is perhaps the hallmark of a cheap and effective peasant-usable weapon, and further advances in explosives and communications and plenty of safe support zones made supplying insurgencies very easy for anyone who either sympathized with a target, or wanted to counter an aggressor. These costs could be economically ruinous and politically disruptive.
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Nationalism. There's a belief that there exists a set of people who are Germans/Czechs/Poles/Frenchmen/etc. And that the goal of international policy is, where reasonable and within constraints, to draw a circle around each group of people and allow them to form a nation state. This is a myth, the circle can't exist absent state violence, and indeed the people mostly don't exist without state violence.
The idea of conquest in an age of nationalism means either genocide or slavery. In an age of monarchy it merely means adding subjects.
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American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).
That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.
Since WWII, who’s gotten away with land grabs via military invasion? I’m only aware of Russia in Crimea, and even that was more of a coup than a traditional military invasion and occupation like the War of 1870.
Off the top of my head there’s the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet, the various land grabs between Israel and its neighbours, the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, and the 1975 Indonesia annexation of East Timor. Depending how you frame it the Vietnam war ended either with North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam or the reunification of a single nation split by civil war.
There’s also been failed annexation attempts post ww2, like the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Great list, thanks. I suppose Tibetan independence after the collapse of the Qing was never internationally recognized, so legally that’s more of an internal matter than an international annexation.
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There were a few more powers involved in WWI than Germany and Britain.
Based on what I'm reading in the book, Britain was the early power with the largest degree of choice about whether to get involved. They weren't directly threatened by Germany, but decided that opposing Germany would put them in a better strategic position with respect to dominating the seas and maintaining their empire. So British involvement was responsible for prolonging the conflict and turning it into a "World War". So I think Britain's position as a key figure pursuing its long-term strategy makes it a fair comparison to Russia of today.
Well, no, the power with the largest degree of choice was Austria: Serbian politics were determined by terrorism and nationalism, so no individual politician had any real ability to stop radicals from doing radical things. But Conrad really was an individual driving force behind the 'Preventive War' against Serbia. While he had allies and supporters, if he had been able to show restraint the war would not have happened when it did. And, if the war did not happen when it did, the window on the German General Staff's plan for avoiding unwinnable two front war was closing as the Russian Army modernized.
You likely would have seen, then, an 18th century style Diplomatic Revolution and return of a waltz of powers as Russia became the clearer threat to the balance of power and Germany lost confidence in its ability to win even a swift two front war.
Of course, the actual best outcome for everyone would have been Frederich William accepting the Crown from the Gutter and a unified Germany coming into existence with responsible government from the start, without the Prussian military apparatus as an independent political power within the state, and with the conservative Junker class on a socio-political backfoot. Or, alternatively, the sequence of events leading to Mayerling never goes off and Franz Josef bumps his head a little hard sometimes in the 1890s, replacing the old reactionary with a young, liberal King-Emperor. Or the first Alexander was a bit more prudent on that cold winter day and the iron hand of the second (and the inept hand of his son) never got near the Autocracy.
Alternative historical speculation is hard and uncertain.
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And they all had overlapping war goals that got varied levels of success.
Hell, the Ottomans almost sided with the Entente, Germany brokered a separate peace that secured a lot of the eastern lands they wanted and Russia, well, had a revolution.
WW1 is not exactly a simple affair, but I do think the comparison with Ukraine is relevant because it was mostly about interlocking spheres of influence and nations being afraid of each other in a way that seemed to require escalation.
There is a good argument that can be made for both being failures of diplomacy even if you think that Europe was due a bloody conflict.
To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.
The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.
Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails, unless you don't actually want to contribute to understanding whether or not it has merit. You seem to primarily just want to ridicule the Russian position ("same old gripe", implication of not being "respectable", the "learned and wise" snark), which could either be a knee-jerk response (in which case, please don't) or because you think you have a moral imperative to help lower the enemy's status. But in the latter case, does doing that on a niche forum with bounded readership really help your cause? There are few normies here that could be converted or made to pick up subtle status signals, while the ability to maintain niche forums with nuanced discussion is actually one of the bigger status advantages that the West has over Russia, which has been organically and artificially stamping out its nuanced voices. Thus you might just be giving ammo to fence-sitters to point at you and say "see, both sides are exactly the same". (On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.)
I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.
They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).
Fun exercise: try to figure who, if anyone, the following statement refers to:
I am a Self Aware Individual, aware of and thus immune to the lies spread by propagandizers. Anyone who disagrees with me is a captured entity, and their failure to acknowledge the validity of my rational position reflects the depth of propaganda capture. What more, they believe THEY are the ones in the right, and that I am propagandized!
Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points. Man, what a tragedy that would be if internet words actually mattered to us and we acted on it!
I have bad news about the modern world.
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Honestly my impression as I start to learn about this topic is the opposite of this. It it looking like Britain (today Russia) really screwed things up. I get why they did it and saw it as their interest to oppose Germany, but everybody would have been better off just letting Germany (today America) win to establish pax Germana on the European continent.
But yeah, I guess I am trying to look for something deeper than "Putin is an insane tyrant" as the reason for Russia's current behavior. Do you really oppose even that minimal amount of respect and context applied to the current conflict?
This assumes Germany would have established a pax Germana on the European continent. 'Everyone would be better off just accept the despot's peace' tend to miss the despot is a despot because he already forewent the social and political systems that facilitate peace, and is actively preventing their re-assertion in order to remain the despot, and as such will be replaced in time with another despot whose own interests do not align with institutional peace.
And this is without Wilhelm or the era's German self-perception as a global power deserving colonies and privileged interests abroad. Imperial Germany may have been no worse than other colonial Empires, but it was also no better while still being a colonial empire whose colonial interests were at odds with others.
Very interesting. If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization? In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.
Austria-Hungary.
Germany gave lots of very aggressive assurances to the country, which would otherwise not have dared to provoke Russia. And not just realpolitik tactful deterrence—things like “Germany stands ready to draw the sword!” The “blank check” is the most famous, but sentiment was very much in favor of brawling. If the Schlieffen plan had paid off, if they’d stayed out of Belgium, if France had cold feet about aiding Russia, if if if…there were ways it could have panned out favorably. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and Germany had a lot of enemies.
Wilhelm II more generally bought into the militaristic romanticism which had served Prussia and early Germany so well. He collected honorary military ranks and was quite optimistic about the indomitable German spirit. But it wasn’t 1871 anymore, and a British/French/Russian coalition was a lot more likely. He exacerbated the problem by poking at French and occasionally British colonies.
Also, he loved his boats. Thought they were the most important symbol of national prestige. Built a ton of them, directly challenging Britain for naval power. Not great support for the continental hegemon thesis. I mention this mostly to argue against the hypothetical where he’d give up the fleet to keep Britain out of war. Not a chance.
I’m going off what I’ve been reading in Massie’s Castles of Steel. If that’s out of date or revisionist, trust @Dean over me. But from what I’ve seen it holds up.
Ill second Castles of Steel as an excellent read.
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Among other things, the formation of modern Germany started with provoking a territorial conflict with established major power neighbors like France for a Prussian-centric state, instigating a major naval arms buildup despite the lack of naval relevance to its primary competitors (and thus really only being usable against Britain), alignment with the Austrian-Hungarians who were already cracking under the efforts to repression national identities (and thus getting involved in messes observable to Bismark), attempts to interfere in the overseas sphere's interests of its continental neighbors (demands for access to Africa and China, attempts to build influence in Latin America), the role of treaties as a co-belligerancy rather than defensive arrangement (thus getting Germany into wars of others choosing), and the previously mentioned adoption of the cult of the offensive.
This doesn't include such things like the flavors of ethno-supremacy of the era, the reputation for diplomatic brinksmanship, prussian militarism, monarchism, and so on in the post-victorian age.
This is, again, not to say that Germany was worse than its neighbors, but that it was not better, and the same flaws that saw its neighbors unable to provide pax Europa applied to Germany as well: greed, pride, and jingoism were all there, and such things do not work well for a peace and stability or abroad. The German empire felt it was entitled to territorial and colonial expansion at others expense, and the limits it faced were those of consequence of opposition, not self-limitation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.
Buchanan is an ideological paleoconservative, and part of that is an ideological alignment with American isolationism vis-a-vis Europe. He is writing with that conclusion in mind and working backwards via historical metaphors to try and convince the audience of the moral preferability of American isolationism/innocence by contrasting it to morally bad involvement in undeniably bad conflicts. However, doing so requires the metaphor fit and provide the narrative elements, such as to have a villain (the selfish/evil politician who links the alegorical Americana to Europe) drag the innocent (the US / US-analog England) into sin (needless European wars). When actual history gets in the way, it needs to be glossed over or ignored to fit the narrative.
As part of that, Buchanan needs to downplay the moral agency and responsibility of the opposing side, because if the conflict would come or occur regardless because the opponent was unreasonable it undercuts the moral argument for isolationism, since isolationism wouldn't avoid the conflict as much as delay it to a potentially worse position. Therefore, Kaiser Germany's naval buildup was 'just' a deterrence, despite torpedo boats being more than enough to keep battleships away from shores, and not a way for Germany to try and force its way into overseas territories to form a colonial empire that would lead to competition over colonies. Hitler's demands for a Polish corridor are not unreasonable demands as part of a publicized design to control Poland and treat eastern europe as living space, but a genuine attempt to build a German-Polish alliance. And back to WW1 again, Germany is a passive recipient to being forced into a war by the Russians, rather than the Russians being forced into the war by Austria-Hungary's attack on Serbia, or rather than a supporter of Austria-Hungary's response. It's classic hyperagent / hypoagent morality framing.
Likewise, Buchanan needs to elevate the sins of the tempters, the politicians who bring Americana into European issues. Hence the scale of the Holocaust is a consequence of Churchill's choice not to accept a peace in 1940, as opposed to an ideological fixation of Hitler's antisemetic party that was pursued despite and even against military utility. And in the context of WW1, Prussian militarism needs to be a myth invented by irrationally afraid British leaders to bring Britain into the war.
Buchanan isn't approaching history from a perspective of truth-seeking, but allegory. It relies on the audience not knowing enough about the subject to find the conclusion plausible, and the conclusion is to agree with Buchanan's politics of appropriate US foreign affairs regarding Europe.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. You're definitely correct that he downplays the role of German aggression or treats it as a background inevitability in his narrative of the leadup to WW1.
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