News reports state that Swedish and Finnish political leaders are seriously considering joining NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Recent polls in both Sweden and Finland show growing popular support for NATO membership. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has publicly warned both countries against becoming NATO members. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has caused Germany, potentially the most powerful country in Europe, to finally pledge to increase defense spending commensurate with its size.
The United States has sent additional troops to nearby NATO nations, supplied military hardware to Ukraine forces, and imposed economic sanctions on Russia. Some American politicians and analysts are calling for the U.S. and its European allies to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The American media, meanwhile, portrays Putin as the new Hitler who “needs to be stopped” before the other East European “dominoes” fall.
One U.S. senator has urged Russians to assassinate Putin, while another senator suggested the possibility of America using nuclear weapons to defend Ukraine. The “Guns of March” threaten to engulf Europe and possibly the world in another catastrophic global war.
History shows how regional war can become world war
Barbara Tuchman in her widely acclaimed book "The Guns of August" (1962) argued that the great powers of Europe miscalculated and mistakenly produced the tragedy of World War I, a pre-nuclear era conflict that caused the deaths of more than 10 million people and devastated large tracts of Europe. Tuchman’s book is the story – which has been challenged by other historians – of how the errors and misconceptions of statesmen and military leaders transformed a regional Balkan war into a global cataclysm. It was German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who in the late 1880s presciently remarked that the next great war would be caused by “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”
Tuchman’s book recounts Europe’s march into the abyss of total war and ends with the indecisive Battle of the Marne, after which, she wrote, “the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve.” The great powers, Tuchman continued, “were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first 30 days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”
Thirty-seven years later, British historian Niall Ferguson in his insightful "The Pity of War" argued that the First World War was an “unnecessary war” that in the end resolved nothing, but instead set the stage for an even greater and more destructive war 20 years later. Ferguson provocatively contended that the world would have been better off if Great Britain passively accepted a German victory on the continent, but instead Britain’s decision for war “turn[ed] the continental war into a world war.” The First World War, Ferguson wrote, “was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”
That error was caused by the leaders of the great powers, who in decades preceding the war carelessly and recklessly threw away what the historian George Kennan called “Bismarck’s European order,” by ending old alliances and forming new ones that risked transforming regional conflicts into worldwide war. When Austria-Hungary attacked a rebellious province in the Balkans after the terrorist assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne (and his wife), Russia, viewing itself as the protector of the Balkan Slavs, and Germany, as Austria-Hungary’s ally, mobilized, which in turn caused France to mobilize, too, due to its alliance with Russia. And Great Britain, fearing Germany’s challenge to its global leadership, eventually sided with France and Russia. This resulted in what Kennan called “the seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
Expansion of NATO a ‘fateful error’
There are echoes of 1914 today. The West’s victory in the Cold War in 1989-91, was followed by what Kennan (echoing Niall Ferguson’s description of British diplomacy in the years preceding World War I) called “a strategic blunder of epic proportions” and “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” – the expansion of NATO to the frontiers of the defeated Russia. Between 1999 and 2020, NATO expanded into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, and North Macedonia.
That fateful error also included public discussions of possibly inviting Ukraine and Georgia – two nations that Russia’s leaders view as rebellious provinces -- to join the Western alliance. A glance at the map reveals that Ukraine is like a large dagger pointed at the heart of European Russia. Putin’s reaction to NATO expansion was anticipated by Kennan when he wrote in 1997 that NATO expansion would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” and would “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” Thus, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and the Crimea in 2014, and now Ukraine in 2022. And Putin has recently warned Sweden and Finland against joining NATO.
With few exceptions – Russia’s Count Sergei Witte was one – none of the leading statesmen, elder statesmen, or military leaders of the great powers foresaw catastrophe when Austro-Hungarian forces began shelling Serbia. Witte attempted to persuade Czar Nicholas II that the war would result in the end of the Romanov dynasty and breed revolution and fanaticism throughout the world. Later in the war, American President Woodrow Wilson initially resisted calls to get the United States involved as a belligerent, but once war was declared he turned it into a crusade for democracy and national self-determination while imposing draconian restrictions on liberties in the United States.
Biden mimicking Wilson, FDR ahead of wars
David Hendrickson of the John Quincy Adams Society, writing in The American Conservative, noted the dangerous parallels between America’s entry into both world wars and the Biden administration’s creeping involvement in today’s Russia-Ukraine War. Wilson’s approach in early 1917, Hendrickson writes, “reflected the same weird combination of ‘no, we’re not intervening now, but yes, at some future date we will guarantee everything’ that we saw, in the year before Putin’s War, in the Biden policy toward NATO expansion.” Similarly, Biden’s policy reminds Hendrickson of Franklin Roosevelt’s stance leading up to America’s entry into World War II – military aid to Britain and China, economic sanctions against Japan, but a public commitment not to send American boys to fight another foreign war.
“Those two examples, . . . preludes to America’s entry into the two world wars,” Hendrickson writes, “are disturbing because they suggest that one thing leads to another. They teach that the fervent desire to stay out of war may succumb in time to what [Thomas] Jefferson called ‘the chapter of accidents.”
“The chapter of accidents” is what Tuchman and Ferguson wrote about. It is what John Quincy Adams meant when he warned against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. It is what George
Washington feared when he cautioned about entanglement in foreign wars. And the great risk today is that a “chapter of accidents” could lead to a global conflagration with the added danger of nuclear weapons.
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