Victor Davis Hanson:History—and Ukraine and Israel
https://victorhanson.com/history-and-ukraine-and-israel/
After the heroic late February and early March 2022 salvation of Kyiv by ad hoc Ukrainian forces, ebullience swept the West. Putin and his thuggish invasion were seemingly defeated and the war all but won. Amid such euphoria, billions of dollars of weapons poured into Ukraine. European and American politicos outdid each other in becoming the most ardent and generous supporters of Ukrainian resistance. Some European rhetoric of support was almost Churchillian.
The Russians were laughed at for their arrogant incompetence. Even when Russian troops persisted all through early 2023, the received wisdom remained that the looming “Spring Offensive” of 2023, replete with Western armor, artillery, and advisors, would slash through occupied Ukraine, expel the invaders, and teach Putin a lesson.
Some of us pointed to two problems with such naivete. One, historically, while it is true that the Russian military fares poorly invading, or fighting far abroad against, other countries (e.g., Japan 1905, Poland 1919–1921, Finland 1939, etc.), it eventually wins, despite blunders, stupidity, and brutality, in or anywhere near land that it considers Mother Russia, which may include Ukraine for a great deal of its history.
Two, Russia enjoys nearly four times the population, 30 times the territory, and 10 times the GDP of Ukraine. Such disparity is hard to overcome in a stationary border war, fought almost exclusively on the ground.
Consequently, many of us, while hoping Ukraine would expel the Russians back to their February 24, 2022 starting point, feared, despite massive Western supplies and training, it would slowly be ground down into a Verdun/Somme stalemate, in which losing one Ukrainian to kill or wound three Russians would still prove a losing proposition.
And here we are.
Ukrainians are still fighting heroically. But Europe, buffeted by natural gas cutoffs, inadequate munitions reserves, and upset over Ukrainian corruption, are not so loud or generous in their support.
The U.S. is sharply divided over its support, in part because those who most loudly call for defending the borders of Ukraine at nearly all costs are themselves either complicit in or indifferent to a now nonexistent southern American border. Its utter disappearance has resulted in eight million illegal aliens, many of whom are involved in drug smuggling, human trafficking, and cartel work, and all are completely unaudited.
In sum, history matters.
In a completely different fashion, many of those who assured us of a rapid Ukrainian victory insisted that it was impossible for the IDF to enter Gaza, destroy Hamas, and prevent and deter future aggression emanating from the West Bank.
In fact, after four months, the IDF is systematically destroying Hamas headquarters, depots, tunnels, and its leadership. Given the horrific conditions of street-to-street urban fighting in Gaza, the IDF has lost a smaller-than-expected number of its soldiers and inflicted a devastating toll on Hamas, while achieving a singularly low rate of civilian casualties in comparison to the number of Hamas terrorists and combatants killed.
If anyone had examined carefully the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006 wars, and so on, even when Israel was surprised, or forced to fight in urban areas at a great disadvantage, or made blunders, the IDF nevertheless quickly recovered and defeated its enemies.
After only four months at a cost of less than 300 soldiers inside Gaza, Israel has neutralized Hamas. If it is not stopped by the U.S., it will within a month or two destroy what is left of the Hamas leadership that is still in Gaza—despite the human shields, the hostages, the use of hospitals, schools, mosques, and United Nations relief organization headquarters as shields for Hamas command and control, widespread riots and demonstrations for Hamas in the West, vast amounts of Hamas stockpiled missiles and drones, and the efforts of Hezbollah and Iran.
The point?
History offers an inexact but nonetheless helpful guide in determining the course of wars, as do the relative prewar resources of the two combatants. Hitler did not have history on his side when he invaded Mother Russia (he might have looked at the Swedish and French prior experience), and he did not have the quality or number of tanks and soldiers as Russia.
So too brave Ukrainians, who even with massive influxes of superior Western weaponry, struggle hard to match the Russian supply of artillery shells, mines, small arms, drones, and aircraft.
Hamas may be a clever terrorist organization with 50,000 or so hardened combatants, whose tunneling complex alone reflects a high degree of ruthlessness and cunning. But it lacks the resources of the IDF, its numbers, professionalism, and ingenuity. And so, the idea that the IDF will never escape the quagmire of Gaza as it is picked apart is not supported by either history or comparative analysis of the respective belligerents.
In sum, two conclusions: if the war continues, Ukraine will shrink even more than its present loss of nearly 25 percent of its population fleeing the country and run out of manpower to a degree that Russia may well be able to advance beyond its current position.
And if Israel is not stopped by cutoffs of U.S. supplies, it will destroy Hamas in toto and sooner than we are told.
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