The world cannot avoid a global war, writes NR. Experts compare the current situation with the 1930s of the XX century. Now, as then, many countries refuse to recognize the inevitability of total conflict – but war will come sooner or later, the authors of the article are sure.
Seth Cropsey, Harry Halem
The United States will have to choose: either courage or cowardice.
The deceptive peace that lasted 31 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial seizures once again became an instrument of revisionist powers. However, history, especially the history of global violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that when the clouds of crisis begin to gather, the situation usually tends to worsen, and as a result, a global explosion occurs.
In this regard, democratic countries today find themselves in a situation similar to the 1930s. The recklessness and stupidity of the period leading up to the 1930s was not so much appeasement (as the strategy of limited but significant concessions to an aggressive opponent in order to satisfy his desire for expansion is called), as a refusal to recognize the systemic inevitability of rivalry and conflict. Today's mistake is also not appeasement, but the desire of democratic political leaders to escape from strategic reality. The war will come sooner or later. Democratic States must prepare for a long-term struggle. As in the 1930s, we do not have enough time and initial advantages.
It is better to talk about a global crisis than about a world war, because in linguistic terms, the word "war" is a very capricious thing. It has both a legal and a moral and political definition. The concept of world war has its limitations. During the First World War, military operations were conducted in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. But the epicenter of the conflict was Europe. The skirmishes in the Middle East and Africa were important, but limited. And there was almost no military action in Asia after the beginning of 1915, because Germany could send only very limited forces and means outside Europe. So was the First World War really a world war? All major powers participated in it. Moreover, it was the first modern conflict in which the two leading participants — the United States and Japan — were not European states. Thus, we can call that conflict a world war, although it took place mainly in Europe.
But this raises a more important question of definition. It's a matter of time. The First World War was the result of what can be called the First World Crisis. Until the middle of the 19th century, international politics was almost synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that, thanks to their technical, political and military achievements, the European powers began to indisputably dominate all other major countries. The European wars that took place from the XV to the XIX century, culminating in Napoleon's attempt to establish dominance on the continent, had worldwide consequences. The general strategy of Napoleonic France included at least Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia in its sphere of interests. France's goal was to weaken Britain's ties to its priceless imperial possession of India, but it was not achieved. Nevertheless, the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars, the issue of the structure of the European, and therefore the world order, was resolved on the battlefields of Europe, in the European maritime zone, as well as at the negotiating table with dozens of European diplomats who worked out the details of a settlement after the end of hostilities. By the beginning of the 20th century, changes in the distribution of international power and influence had turned the European crisis into a global one.
The first world crisis can easily be defined by a time frame. There have been several wars in Europe since 1870, even between great powers. Prussia first fought with Austria, then with France, and after defeating both, turned into Germany. The Russian Empire fought one war after another with the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and each such war ended at the negotiating table, where other great powers threatened war in order to curb Russian ambitions. In 1905, Japan entered the war with Russia, defeated it on land and at sea and thereby claimed a place among the great powers. From 1908 to 1913, numerous crises and small wars broke out, including large-scale hostilities in the Balkans. Nevertheless, the beginning of the real cataclysm should be attributed to 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June soon led to numerous declarations of war by the countries of the continent. The Ottomans and Italians, who had stayed away from the war for several months, were not the decisive force. Rather, the beginning of the First World War was marked by the entry into hostilities of the European powers, as well as Japan, which declared war at the end of August 1914. And the end of the First World Crisis falls on the period from November 1918 to July 1919 and covers the armistice of 1918 (for Germany, this was the only opportunity to prevent collapse and revolution), the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the Paris Peace Conference. The seeds of the next global crisis were laid in this treaty, that's for sure. But it meant a clear historical and chronological way out of the First World Crisis.
As a result, we have a clearly delineated historical picture of events, as if each of them is isolated from the others. But this is a misconception. The concentration of problems and outbreaks of violence that became a defining feature of the beginning of the First World Crisis, as well as its seemingly orderly conclusion in 1919, are not the norm.
The second world crisis began shortly after the first. And this shows that the traditional, clearly demarcated American-European periodization of history is not just misleading, but also harmful to long-term strategic thinking.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt to limit Germany's ability to conquer. Next to it stands the Washington Naval Treaty (the Treaty of the Five Powers), which became one of the first attempts at arms control in the history of mankind. But, firstly, the United States did not officially join the international system after the end of the First World Crisis due to Woodrow Wilson's limited political talents and its reflexive hostility towards long-term commitments. And, secondly, in America's lack of desire to participate in the leadership of the coalition of France and Britain did not have enough geopolitical acumen and the ability to limit the rise of Germany and deter Soviet Russia.
It was this circumstance, the power of the Soviets and Germany, that proved the failure in resolving the First World Crisis. In the previous two centuries, Russia and Germany played a central role in the European balance of power. And any system had to take into account the possibility of German domination on the European continent and Russia's territorial claims in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as in the Middle East. The Treaty of Versailles did not solve these problems properly. If the United States had become a full participant in it, everything would have been different. Therefore, the settlement of the First World Crisis in reality simply postponed the unresolved conflict.
The relative peace in the 1920s was partly a consequence of the enormous damage caused by the First World War. Britain and France were deprived of the opportunity to conduct major military campaigns. The Soviet Union, despite its attempts to invade Europe, was stopped on the Vistula in 1920. Most of Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Empire, but Poland and the rest of Central Europe received a twenty-year respite from Soviet oppression. The Second world crisis was brewing for 10 years, and only then an explosion occurred.
The first signs appeared in Asia. The civilian government of Japan was increasingly less in control of the armed forces. As a result, the Kwantung Army occupied Manchuria in 1931 and created the puppet state of Manchukuo there. Hostilities between Japan and China began in 1937, when the Japanese tried to launch a lightning offensive against the Republic of China. This marked the beginning of the eight-year war, which broke the backbone of the Japanese Empire. In fact, a direct line can be drawn between the decision of the Japanese military to start a war in China in July 1937, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the defeat and occupation of Japan in 1945. Despite the victories in the initial period of the war, Japan found that it took much more time and resources to enslave a country as large as China than it had in reserve. Thus, another war for additional resources was quite likely, either with the Americans or with the Soviets. And it doesn't matter that Japan simply created new enemies in this way. Ideology forced Japan to bring Asia to disaster. The Second World War began on July 7, 1937, near Beijing, and not two years later in Poland.
Europe's slide into the quagmire of nightmare, meanwhile, began not with Hitler's rise to power in Germany, but with Mussolini's adventurism in the Mediterranean. The Italian dictator was undoubtedly the most talented of the Axis political leaders. He instinctively understood diplomatic problems and the balance of power. Stalin's intransigence, which is often mistakenly considered strategic patience, was nothing compared to Mussolini's intellect.
However, the Duce's diplomatic talents were not supported by political prudence and caution, born of a clear understanding of Italy's military and economic constraints. Since the 1920s, Mussolini's regime has sought to create its own version of a great power from Italy. The first step on this path was the "pacification" of Libya, which was actually a brutal colonial war, during which concentration camps and attacks on the local civilian population were widely used in order to bring them to submission. Mussolini was well aware of the risks that Hitler's European ambitions posed to Italy. It was profitable to join the winner for a while, but over time, Germany, which dominated Europe, would certainly subjugate Italy. The result of such reflections was a series of negotiations and diplomatic agreements between Italy and the Western Allies, culminating in the Locarno Treaties. They were supposed to lay the foundation for a rational coalition against German expansion. But Mussolini had much more ambition than prudence, which resulted in the Abyssinian crisis, because of which Italy quarreled with the allies in 1935. Spain, in turn, slipped into the abyss of civil war a year later, becoming an indirect battlefield for Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.
Throughout all these crises and Japan's increasingly brutal war in China, the Allies pursued a policy of strategic self-exclusion. Pacification was only part of the story. This word denoted the British tactic of agreeing with Germany's territorial conquests in Europe, which she used in the hope that this would become the basis for a long-term settlement. But British appeasement would not have been possible without France's strategic miscalculations and political indecision.
It cannot be said that France did not want to fight. In 1939 and 1940, its society and political leadership were ready to send most of the male population of military age into the meat grinder of war in order to defeat Germany in a positional war similar to the First World War. It's all the fault of France's military policy. France refused to consider any options other than strategic defense, betting on the long-term development of artillery and believing that this would allow it to wipe out the German army with its firepower. She had no backup plans involving a limited offensive against Germany using mechanized units or even motorized infantry and mobile artillery. Moreover, despite the hype around the Small Entente in Central and Eastern Europe, the French had no desire to resist Germany on their own. Thus, France, by refusing to fight alone, as well as to build a flexible and easily adjustable military policy, doomed itself to a cataclysm. And she used England's demand to make concessions to Germany as a psychological justification for her unwillingness to act independently.
What lessons can we learn from this sequence of events? History does not repeat itself, at least with absolute accuracy. However, there are certain similarities between the development of events in the last century and the current situation.
We found ourselves in the epicenter of the Third World Crisis. There were no formal negotiations, no settlement that ended the Cold War. There was no analogue of the Treaty of Versailles and its accompanying agreements, which could be called fundamental to the world order after the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, in the period from 1988 to 1992, the situation changed rapidly, marking a very obvious turning point. Germany united and joined NATO. The USSR split into Russia and a number of small states on its periphery, the most important of which, due to geography, population, resources and historical memory, was Ukraine.
Germany's irredentism in the period after the First World Crisis is well known. Even before Hitler's arrival, the German army and the Foreign Ministry were determined to restore Germany's position as a great power. To do this, they considered options for limited wars against Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and possibly France. Ideally, it was possible to create a coalition balancing between the Central European powers and the Soviet Union. Germany did not admit defeat in 1918. She wanted to bring peace back to June 1914 with some minor changes, and considered four years of bloodshed to be nothing more than a tragic mistake.
Moscow viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union in much the same way. She did not recognize the end of the Cold War. This is not explained by the Russian version of the myth of stabbing in the back, which arose in Germany after the defeat in World War I, but rather by Russia's unwillingness to recognize the realities that have developed since 1991 and the inability of the United States to force it to do so. Even when the Soviet Empire was disintegrating, Mikhail Gorbachev saw the unification of Germany as a reset and believed that Europe would return to the balance of power of 1945-1948. He did not consider this the beginning of a new system that would include a single Euro-Atlantic security space and a strong American strategic presence in Eurasia. This view inevitably rejected the existence of NATO and the independence of the countries of Eastern Europe. Boris Yeltsin held the same views, despite a productive, oddly enough, relationship with Bill Clinton. The same can be said about Vladimir Putin. According to Moscow, not only Ukraine, but also the Baltic States and Belarus do not exist.
Russia also considers NATO's presence outside Germany's former internal border illegal. That is why, being under the power of false ideas, she sees in Germany an American puppet who remains in the "occupation". In her opinion, today's war in Europe is akin to the 1938 crisis in the Sudetenland. However, now, unlike Czechoslovakia, which was betrayed by the leading powers, Ukraine stands on its own and steadfastly fights against an enemy superior in strength.
The Sudetenland crisis was not the first major strategic incident of the 1930s involving a revisionist power. So the Russian expansion began long before 2022, when the armed conflict in Ukraine arose. In 2008, Russia was at war with Georgia. In 2014, the Kremlin took advantage of the instability in Ukraine and annexed Crimea. If a Ukrainian had written the history of the Third World Crisis, he would certainly have dated its occurrence to February 2014, 2008 or 2004 - and would have been right in any case.
Russia's military actions in Ukraine are very similar to the seizure of China by Japan in the 1930s. In both cases, the attacking side first developed a strategy of gradually destroying the sovereignty of its victim, and then took advantage of the favorable opportunity for a sharp escalation. Japan assumed that it would capture China very quickly in 1937, but got bogged down in a brutal war of attrition. In the same way, Russia got bogged down in Ukraine in 2022. The biggest difference is, of course, the size. Japan was much smaller than China, and Russia was much larger than Ukraine in terms of territory, population and GDP. However, in both cases, the attacking country faced unexpected problems. Japan decided to expand the scope of its war, first against the Soviet Union and then against the United States. Russia has not yet taken such a step.
The most striking difference between previous world crises and the current situation is that the main revisionist power today, China, has so far refrained from actively participating in military operations. But we must take seriously his military preparations and his declared readiness to use force.
Thus, the United States faced a choice. But not between rearmament and appeasement, but between courage and cowardice. Rearmament is very important, and it is likely to be implemented in the next five years, even if it is too late to prevent a major conflict, as happened with Britain before the Second World War. The United States can, like France, take a restrained position, delaying the conflict due to lack of support from allies and lack of military power. But this will guarantee a larger-scale collision in the coming years. Or America can start acting right now, demonstrate its capabilities and enter into a long-term struggle for supremacy in one of the three regions of Eurasia.
One way or another, a war is coming.
Seth Cropsey is the president of the Yorktown Institute. He served in the Navy and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Harry Halem is a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute and a fellow at the European Leadership Forum.
