RUTHFULLY YOURS

The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide eruption of violence.

In this respect, democracies today are in a situation similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the 1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.

It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite its focus in Europe.

This, however, raises a more important question of definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early 20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a European crisis into a world crisis.

This First World Crisis is easily demarcated in time. There were several European wars from the 1870s onward, even between great powers. Prussia first fought Austria, then France, and overcame both to transform itself into Germany. Imperial Russia fought war after war against the eroding Ottoman Empire, each of which ended at the negotiating table as other great powers threatened war to restrain Russian ambition. In 1905, Japan fought Russia directly, smashing it on land and at sea and thereby claiming its place among the great powers. Multiple crises and smaller wars occurred from 1908 to 1913, including large-scale combat in the Balkans. Nevertheless, the true beginning of the cataclysm was in 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June led to multiple and reactive continental declarations of war in August. The Ottomans and the Italians, who remained out of the war for several months, were not decisive factors. It was, rather, the entrance of other European powers — alongside the Japanese, who declared war in late August 1914 — that set off the First World War. Similarly, the end of the First World Crisis was roughly between November 1918 and July 1919, spanning the 1918 armistice (Germany’s only option to stave off collapse and revolution) and the adoption of the Versailles Treaty at the Paris Peace Conference. This treaty contained within it the seedlings of the next world crisis, undoubtedly. But it remains a clean historical-chronological break from the First World Crisis.

Perhaps as a result, we have come to expect a clearly delineated presentation of historical events as if each were mostly isolated from the others. This is delusional. The concentration of friction points and eruptions of violence that defined the beginning of the First World Crisis, and the seemingly tidy way in which the First World Crisis concluded in 1919, is not the norm.

The Second World Crisis began quite quickly after the first. Indeed, this demonstrates that the traditional, cleanly demarcated, American-European historical periodization is not simply misleading but deleterious to long-range strategic thinking.

The Versailles Treaty was an attempt to limit German capacity for conquest. Alongside it stood the Washington Naval Treaty, one of the first efforts at arms control in human history. But, for one thing, the U.S. never formally joined the broader international system after the First World Crisis ended, owing to Woodrow Wilson’s limited political talent and a reflexive hostility to long-term binding commitments. For another, absent U.S. coalition management, France and Britain lacked the geopolitical acumen to both limit German resurgence and contain Soviet Russia.

It is this second issue, Soviet and German power, that demonstrates the failures of the settlement of the First World Crisis. Russia and Germany had been central to the European balance of power during the previous two centuries. Any system had to address both the potential for German dominance on the European continent and Russian territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the Middle East. The Versailles Treaty did not balance these concerns adequately, and it would not have done so even if the United States had been a full party to it. Hence the settlement of the First World Crisis was really a deferral of unresolved conflict.

The relative peace of the 1920s stemmed partly from the sheer damage of the First World War. Britain and France lacked the capacity for a major military campaign. The Soviet Union, despite its attempts to sweep into Europe, was checked on the Vistula in 1920. While most Ukrainians were absorbed into the Soviet empire, Poland and the rest of Central Europe were given a two-decade reprieve from Soviet pressure. The Second World Crisis took shape for a decade before exploding.

The first signs were in Asia. Japan’s civilian government increasingly lost control of the armed forces. The result was the Kwantung Army’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the creation of the puppet Manchukuo government. Sino–Japanese rivalry exploded in 1937 with Japan’s attempted lightning offensive against Republican China. This initiated an eight-year-long war that broke the Japanese Empire. Indeed, one can draw a direct line from the decision of the Japanese military to expand the war in China in July 1937 to the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 to Japan’s defeat and occupation in 1945. Japan discovered, despite early victories, that subjugating a country of China’s size took far more time and resources than it could hope to expend. Another war, for additional resources, was thus probable, whether against the Americans or the Soviets. Never mind that this would simply create additional enemies. Ideology caused Japan to drive Asia into calamity. The Second World War began on July 7, 1937, near Beijing, not in Poland two years later.

Europe’s descent into horror, meanwhile, began not with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany but with Mussolini’s Mediterranean adventurism. The Italian dictator was indisputably the most talented of the Axis’s political leaders, with an instinctive understanding of diplomatic questions and the balance of power — Stalin’s intransigence, often mistaken for strategic patience, did not approach Mussolini’s intellect.

Yet the Duce’s diplomatic skill was not matched with political prudence derived from a sound grasp of Italy’s military and economic constraints. Mussolini’s regime pursued an Italian version of Weltmacht from the 1920s onward. Its first step was the “pacification” of Libya — a brutal colonial war that saw the large-scale use of concentration camps and attacks against civilians to bully the local population into submission. Mussolini clearly recognized the risks that Hitler’s European ambitions posed to Italy: Bandwagoning might be effective for a time, but Italy would eventually be subjugated by a Germany that dominated Europe. The result was a series of negotiations and diplomatic arrangements between Italy and the Western Allies, culminating in the Locarno Pact, that should have formed the basis for a reasonable coalition against German expansion. Mussolini’s ambition, however, grossly outstripped his prudence, resulting in the Abyssinian Crisis, which placed Italy and the Allies at odds in 1935. In turn, Spain collapsed into civil war a year later, creating a proxy battleground for Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union.

Throughout these crises, and alongside Japan’s increasingly brutal war in China, the Allies pursued a policy of strategic abdication. Appeasement, once again, is only part of the story: It refers to the British tactic of granting Germany territorial gains in Europe with the expectation that they would become the foundation of a long-term settlement. But British appeasement would have been impossible absent French strategic miscalculation and political timidity.

It is not that France was unwilling to fight. In 1939 and 1940, French society and the French political leadership were prepared to feed the bulk of their military-age male population to the meat grinder to defeat Germany in a positional war akin to the First World War. Rather, it was French military policy that was at fault. France refused to consider options beyond strategic defense via the long-term buildup of artillery-centric forces, which, it imagined, would allow it to pulverize the German army with firepower. There was no contingency plan that included a limited offensive into Germany with mechanized forces or even with motorized infantry and mobile artillery. Moreover, even with fanfare around the Little Entente in Central and Eastern Europe, there was no French desire to resist Germany independently. Thus France, refusing to fight alone and refusing to construct a military policy of flexibility and adaptation, condemned itself to a cataclysm, using English demands to accommodate Germany, as a psychological excuse against independent action.

What might we learn from this pattern of events? History does not repeat itself, at least not with any degree of precision, yet there are similarities between the course of events over the past century and the present situation.

We are in the midst of a Third World Crisis. There was no formal negotiation or settlement that ended the Cold War, no analogue to the Versailles Treaty and its surrounding agreements that can be identified as foundational to a post–Cold War order. The situation nonetheless changed rapidly enough between 1988 and 1992 to mark an obvious watershed. Germany was reunited and joined NATO. The USSR shattered into Russia and a number of smaller surrounding states, the most important, by virtue of its geography, population, resources, and historical memory, being Ukraine.

Germany’s post–First World Crisis irredentism is well known. Even before Hitler, the German army and foreign office were set on restoring Berlin’s status as a great power, likely through a series of limited wars against Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and potentially France, and ideally through a coalition that balanced between the Central European powers and the Soviet Union. Germany never accepted its defeat in 1918. It wanted the world to return to June 1914, with some small modifications, and see the four years of bloodletting as no more than a tragic mistake.

Moscow took a very similar view of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It never accepted the end of the Cold War. This was due not to a German-style Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) but rather to Russia’s failure to accept post-1991 realities — and a failure by the United States to press those realities upon it. Even as the Soviet empire fell apart, Mikhail Gorbachev viewed German unification as a reset that would return Europe to the 1945–48 balance of power rather than as the beginning of a new system that would include an integrated Euro-Atlantic security space and an entrenched American strategic presence in Eurasia. This view necessarily rejected the existence of NATO and the independence of the Eastern European states. Boris Yeltsin, despite his bizarrely productive relationship with Bill Clinton, maintained the same view. Vladimir Putin does as well. It is not only Ukraine but also the Baltics and Belarus that are nonexistent in Moscow’s view.

Nor does Russia accept as legitimate NATO’s presence beyond the former inner German border. This explains why it delusionally sees Germany as partly an American proxy that remains under “occupation.” The current war in Europe is akin to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 — except that, unlike Czechoslovakia, which was sold out by major powers, Ukraine has stood its ground and is fighting it out against a much larger foe.

Just as the Sudetenland crisis was not the first major strategic incident involving a revisionist power in the 1930s, however, recent Russian expansion began long before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In 2008, Russia waged war on Georgia on largely manufactured pretexts. The Kremlin seized the opportunity that Ukrainian instability presented in 2014 and snatched Crimea. If the history of the Third World Crisis is written by a Ukrainian, the author may well date its genesis to February 2014 or, with equal validity, to 2008 or 2004.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has taken a form similar to Japan’s conquest of China in the 1930s. In both cases, the offensive power initially had a strategy of incrementally eroding the sovereignty of the target state and seizing opportunities for sharp escalation. Just as Japan assumed it could swallow China rapidly in 1937 but instead became mired in a brutal attritional war, so did Russia find itself bogged down in Ukraine in 2022. The greatest difference, of course, is relative size — Japan was far smaller than China, while Russia is far larger than Ukraine in territory, population, and GDP. Nevertheless, in both cases, the aggressive power faced unexpected obstacles. Japan chose to expand the war, first against the Soviet Union and then against the United States. Russia has yet to take such a step.

The most striking difference between the previous world crises and the present situation is that the largest revisionist power at present, China, remains out of active participation in wars for now. But its military preparations and stated willingness to employ force ought to be taken at face value.

The United States therefore faces a choice not between rearmament and appeasement but between courage and cowardice. Rearmament is critical and will likely come in the next five years — even if, much as it did in the British case before the Second World War, it comes too late to prevent systemic war. Like France, the United States can lock itself into a restraint paradigm that defers conflict in the absence of allied support and military capacity, thereby guaranteeing a much larger clash later. Or it can push now, demonstrate its capacity, and solidify one of Eurasia’s three regions in a long-term contest for supremacy.

Either way, war is coming.

Seth Cropsey, the president of the Yorktown Institute, served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy. He is the author of Mayday and Seablindness. Harry Halem is a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute and a Young Generation Leaders Network fellow at the European Leadership Forum.