World War Analogies

 In searching for historical analogies to make sense of the present-day war in Europe, the first that came to mind—for me as for so many others—was to the origins of World War II. After all, the pattern seemed so familiar. Putin had established a pretext for invasion through various disingenuous claims about a trans-historical ethnic solidarity and the need to protect the rights of Russian-speaking minorities, which he then used as a rationale to hive off the territory of his neighbor. 

On analogy to the events in Europe in the late '30s, then, Putin's annexation of Crimea would be something akin to the Anschluss; the effort to provoke a situation in the Donbas which would justify intervention would be the equivalent of the Sudetenland Crisis; and Putin's final decision to simply drop all diplomatic pretenses and invade outright could be analogized to Germany's unprovoked incursion into Poland in 1939. 

It's obvious that this analogy has force: I still continue to believe it has relevant lessons to teach us. But suppose that the war in Ukraine is not only like the start of World War II, but is also unfolding a bit like the course of World War I? 

There's a sense of course in which that's a meaningless non-question. No historical event is really like another in a one-to-one sense. Every situation is sui generis, and to lean too heavily on analogical thinking is to risk falling into the proverbial general's trap of always fighting the last war. 

But I do think analogies are useful to think with—provided we don't take them too literally. And which analogy we prefer in this particular case has real policy implications. Not, that is to say, because either one changes the underlying right or wrong of the matter. Putin is the aggressor, in either event, let's be clear: he started this war without provocation and deserves to be condemned without reservation in global opinion. But the analogy we prefer may affect our understanding of how the West should respond to Putin's actions. 

After all, the two world wars are today remembered very differently. World War II is often still recalled as the quintessentially just war—a defensive struggle waged in response to the aggression of a genocidal megalomaniac. The lesson that is often taken from the events leading up to it, moreover, is that compromise with evil is foolhardy. Nothing can be gained from making concessions, because the ambitions of evil men cannot be placated: they can only be resisted. 

As I argued in an earlier piece, the lessons from the diplomatic history of the 1930s may not actually be as clear-cut as that. Since we are talking here about popular conceptions more than historical truth, however, we simply note that when most people think of the "Munich analogy," it can have only one possible implication: never compromise, never cede the slightest ground, because to do so would only be to embolden and enable the aggressor. 

World War I, however, occupies a very different position in our cultural memory. It is recalled above all as a massive exercise in futility: a pointless war over arbitrary lines in the dirt that ultimately cost millions of lives, just to feed the ambitions of generals, statesmen, and arms manufacturers. If people take any lessons from the conflict today, it is that war is never worth the cost it imposes in human lives, and peace should be pursued at all costs. 

When people try to reconstruct why the First World War happened at all, many can recall it only as a strange mania—a feverish death wish that gripped the globe and precipitated millions of innocents into the fire for no good reason at all. Writers recall the strange passion for Belgium and for avenging the crimes committed against her that aroused public indignation and that moved lads from distant Iowa or North Carolina to gladly lay down their lives for her sake.

Thomas Wolfe, recalling his own college days in Look Homeward, Angel, can only look back on this period in a spirit of mordant satire. He thus joined the ranks of so many other writers of that generation—Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the rest—as well as a few uniquely prophetic spirits from the one before it, such as Randolph Bourne—in regarding the war as something essentially fatuous—an eruption of atavism born of an irrational fever dream.

Much as the contemporary lessons we draw from Munich are often overly glib, however, this popular and literary reconstruction of the "Great War" may be only a half-truth. After all, Germany really did invade Belgium without provocation, in order to march on France. In doing so, they committed an act of aggression against a neutral and unoffending neighbor. This was a violation of international law, by most definitions, and it is not unreasonable to think other countries should have resisted their actions.

To be sure, the Allies did not do much to serve the Belgian cause—at least not in the eyes of subsequent cultural memory among the intelligentsia—by publishing a lot of false propaganda about alleged Germany atrocities. The outlandish and hyperbolic reports of German war crimes perpetrated against helpless Belgium—thickly layered over with gendered overtones of sexual menace—would later contribute to the sense of the absurd that subsequent writers would find in the whole episode. 

Thomas Wolfe depicts his younger self in satirical vein, through the medium of his fictional alter ego Eugene Gant, declaring in the full madness of war fever: "when I think of how they [that is, the Germans] have menaced All that we Hold Dear, when I think of Little Belgium, and then of My Own Mother, My Own Sister--." Wolfe as narrator then adds sardonically: "He turned away, clenching his hands, madly in love with himself." 

Likewise Robert Graves, reflecting back on the war years in his memoir Goodbye to All That, felt that for all his skepticism at the time, he had still allowed himself to be influenced too strongly by mendacious or inflated tales of German iniquity. "Though I discounted perhaps twenty per cent of the atrocity details [that he encountered in newspapers of the time] as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course, sufficient." In the light of hindsight, in short, fighting a war over Belgium began to appear ridiculous. 

But it is worth quoting as well the line that precedes Graves' wry observation about the atrocity stories: "I was outraged to read of the Germans' cynical violation of Belgian neutrality." And even if nine-tenths of the subsequent reports about German atrocities were invented or at least baldly exaggerated, this bare fact of international law still holds true: the Germans had invaded a sovereign country without provocation or justice on their side. And that was worth feeling outraged about. 

In the face of such a criminal act, Belgium was certainly justified in defending itself; just as Ukraine is justified in waging defensive war today against Putin's invasion. By extension, other nations presumably had some moral duty to intervene on Belgium's behalf to try to restore the status quo prior to the invasion; this duty just needed to be weighed against the other moral considerations—including the cost in human lives—that an intervention in military form would entail. 

Where World War I crossed over into an exercise in sheer futility and mass slaughter for its own sake, therefore, was not perhaps the moment when the Allies swore to defend Belgium; but somewhat later, when the Allies refused to make any peace on terms of a compromise with Germany, or even to accept a return to the status quo ante, but rather to insist on prosecuting their victory to the fullest extent possible, and demanding ruinous concessions in territory and economic reparations from the defeated enemy. 

This, at any rate, is the lesson one takes from reading contemporary critics of the war, rather than the writers who came a generation later and could only recall the whole thing as an irrational adolescent mania. 

It would be hard to think of a more quintessential anti-war contemporary than Siegfried Sassoon, after all, whose condemnation in verse of the war's waste and brutality still resonates today. Yet when Graves quotes his prose writings from the period at length, we find that Sassoon doesn't say that the war was unjustified all along, simply that it was pushed beyond the limits of its original justified aims: 

"[T]his war," Sassoon writes, "upon which I entered as a war of defen[s]e and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest." It was the Allies's maximalist demands in the Peace, rather than the initial causes of the war—in Sassoon's telling–that had made it such a needlessly drawn out and futile bloodbath. 

With this slightly more nuanced understanding of World War I now in place, what might it have to tell us about today's war in Ukraine? 

If we are willing to go with this analogy and see where it leads us, Ukraine would of course be equivalent to Belgium: an unoffending nation attacked without provocation by a much stronger neighboring power. Unlike with Belgium, however, we have no reason to believe that the reports of atrocities on the part of the invaders are not genuine. Considerable independent evidence has emerged to confirm the reality of Russian war crimes, much as Putin stooges like Glenn Greenwald would like to deny them. 

Still though, there is a touch of the same "war mania" in the U.S. cultural mood right now that is reminiscent of the outcry over the image of prostrate Belgium that obsessed English and American minds a century earlier. When the Met Opera hosts a concert featuring Ukrainian nationalist songs, and ordinary Americans cry "glory to Ukraine!," one is reminded more than a little of the "Rape of Belgium" tableaux that were staged in elegant parlors in Britain and in the United States during World War I. 

Likewise, the ugliness of the mania shows itself now as then. There was the moment when anything culturally Russian seemed suddenly tainted and suspect—shades of World War I-era "liberty cabbage" and the persecution during that era of German-Americans. 

This farcical Russophobic posturing reached its apogee when the Met canceled performances by famous opera soprano Anna Netrebko—simply, it would seem, for being Russian. Of course, the opera house claims that they did this because of her political opinions, not her nationality—specifically that she had failed to "sufficiently distance herself" from Putin's actions. 

One has to wonder, though, if every singer in the Met was held to this same standard, or only Russian nationals. One strongly suspects this was not a test that was applied equally and without discrimination to every Met employee. Moreover, Netrebko has since issued a statement clarifying that she does in fact oppose the invasion, so it's not clear what more is being asked of her. At any rate, the whole thing stinks of "loyalty oaths" and jingoistic chauvinism in their worst forms. 

When we turn from these cultural matters to the actual foreign policy that Western powers should pursue, though, does the World War I analogy provide any guidance? I believe the answer is yes, and that the most relevant of it is to be found in the quote from Siegfried Sassoon: his warning that a conflict which began as "a war of defen[s]e and liberation" could degenerate into a "war of aggression and conquest," if pushed beyond its original and more limited aims. 

It seems to me that the limited justified aims of the Ukrainian war effort—the purposes that are consistent with fighting a "war of defense and liberation"—are simply to throw out Putin's invading army and to retain enough of their own internal defensive capacity to deter him from immediately turning around and attempting the same aggression again. The Western powers are justified in aiding them to achieve this objective (so long as that aid does not cross the line into actual engagement with Russian forces in a way that would risk escalating the conflict into a World War III). 

The danger of exceeding these justified aims lies in the fact that Ukraine may decide—particularly if the latest rounds of Western aid are effective—that they will pursue objectives beyond simply restoring the status quo ante. They may decide, for instance, that instead of accepting a compromise peace proposal that cedes Crimea and parts of the Donbas, that they will attempt to seize these territories that were unjustly and unlawfully hived off from them through earlier acts of Russian aggression. 

Indeed, Henry Kissinger—not someone I normally have cause to agree with—made headlines just this week by warning against exactly such an eventuality. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kissinger urged Ukraine not to pursue the war into the territory that Russia had previously annexed in 2014, or which had been de facto incorporated into Putin's orbit under the Minsk agreements. "Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante," said Kissinger: "Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself."

In his own way, he is simply echoing Sassoon: a "war of defense and liberation" must not be pursued to a point at which it becomes a "war of aggression and conquest." 

Of course, proponents of maximalist Ukrainian war demands have already accused Kissinger of calling for "appeasement" (they prefer the World War II to the World War I analogy, for obvious reasons). They respond to his argument by reminding us that, under international law, Ukraine has a sovereign right to the territories that Putin had earlier claimed in the Crimea and the Donbas. He was the one who violated international compacts and the UN charter by seizing them in the first place: if Ukraine wishes to take them back, that is their right. 

This may be true in some absolute sense. But, let us recall that similar fights over historical claims to disputed territories, some of which had been unjustly seized in the past (Alsace-Lorraine, anyone?) were part of what made World War I so protracted. 

My point is that, as I have argued previously about this war, there are limits to how many actual human lives should be sacrificed to purely conceptual things like justice, historical rights, national boundaries, and international compacts. Putin may have seized Crimea and the Donbas by underhanded means. He has no right to them in a moral or legal sense. But that doesn't mean it's justified to push the globe into an even more prolonged and bloody conflict just for the sake of proving this point, especially not if peace could be attained much sooner simply by returning, as Kissinger puts it, to the "status quo ante."

Another argument that the Ukraine hawks use is to assert that all of this is not the West's decision to make, one way or the other. As Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution put it in a recent thread on Twitter, this is Ukraine's fight. They were the ones who were invaded; they are the ones doing the actual fighting and sacrificing; they are the ones whose sovereign rights under the UN Charter were attacked—they therefore deserve to make their own decisions about whether or not to pursue the war into the Donbas and Crimea. 

Fair enough, one thinks—but if it is their decision whether or not to continue fighting to try to seize those disputed territories, then it is equally the United States' decision as to whether or not to continue to bankroll and support their war effort, if they do in fact pursue it to such a point. I would suggest that the U.S. should not support such an effort, but rather we should make our ongoing military aid contingent upon Ukraine accepting terms of peace that restore the status quo ante. 

This will of course strike people as conceding to injustice and aggression. But there are factors—such as human life and the global food supply—that have to come into consideration beyond technical matters of international law. If there is any realistic opportunity for peace that allows Ukraine to preserve its current government and defensive capacity—even if it means losing some territory—we should take it. And since the U.S. is already in this war to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, it has a right to condition that aid on our allies being willing to accept such an opportunity for peace when it arises. 

The lesson that World War I teaches is what happens when great powers refuse such opportunities for peace, because they regard them as coming on overly-compromised terms. When they instead pursue maximalist demands and total victory, what may have begun as a purely defensive and justified intervention turns into a protracted war of conquest, with millions of lives needlessly lost along the way and untold suffering, economic disruption, starvation and injustice loosed upon the generations to come. 

If there be an opportunity for peace in the present conflict, let us take it, and not allow this to become a pursuit of total victory that—like World War I—in the end merely sows the dragon's teeth of the next conflagration.