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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
Thucydides Trap historical metaphors tend to fall into the trap of ignoring relevant actors, the issues of when national advantages get conflated with national strategies, and incompetent leaders.
The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion (where ancient Sparta and Athens were by far the regional leading leaders of coalitions with limited agency) and general proposer propensities (the Thucydides Trap is most often raised in realist schools of theory, which are currently framed in bipolar conflicts), it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors. These actors not only have their own agency (France was a major military power in its own right, and there's a reason France-British rapproachment coincided with the rise of torpedo speed boats that the Royal Navy couldn't have stopped from throttling channel trade), but their presence and potential drives decision making of the key actors (Germany's WW1 strategy prioritizing a westward rush due to expectations of Russian mobilization; modern Eastern European lobbying to expand NATO in the post Cold War).
This matters to your Russia-American metaphor because the roles in the current era really aren't analogous to either WW1 or Thucydides Trap due to the relevance of other actors. The US is not the actor who felt a need to pre-empt a specific threat (the German allusion to WW1), nor was it trying to displace a hegemon / at risk of being displaced as a hegemon by Russia in Ukraine.
The model also struggles to recognize how doctrine and strategy interact, and yet don't substitute for eachother, and how a doctrine predicated on a form of offense can lead to bad strategy and unwise conflict. In WW1, Germany was caught up in what was sometimes referred to as the cult of the offense- the idea that with elan and alacrity and modern military planning you could blitz the enemy to submission much faster and cheaply than a methodical campaign. This, in turn, would let you fight greater opposing forces, since you could knock out some (say France and thus Britain) early enough to focus on the rest (Russia). There was reason to believe this was possible- German offensives had beaten the French before, and would again nearly 30 years later- but this is a tactic that became a strategy by necessity. This was because the Kaiser German military context kept getting worse and worse, because the willingness to aggressively push personal interests at the expense of others created coalitions that wouldn't have formed had other actors felt at risk. The greater the potential coalitions became, the greater the appeal of the cult of the offense to negate that disadvantage. By WW1, German planners largely thought Russia was a massive threat that would take their full focus and thus couldn't be faced with France at the same time... hence the intent to knock out France first. But doing so required going through Belgium, which is what got Britain into the war that it otherwise would have likely sat out on. The Germans took a calculated risk, but boy were they were bad at math because not even they recognized the implications of the technologies available, and that their own strategy built on past success was putting them in a bad strategic context.
This matters to your modern example because Russia was/is in the thrall of its own version of the cult of the offense. Call it the cult of the asymmetric spook. Putin had enough success with small-scale unconventional / special operations that it not only became a Russian advantage, but the entire Russian strategy for Ukraine. The reason so many people publicly doubted the pre-invasion American warnings was because it would be monumentally stupid to go up with a force like that with what Russia had assembled. But Putin was convinced his special military operation successes in the past would work again, and lo and behold when it didn't the strategy crashed and burned.
By contrast, the American comparison to this metaphor isn't Germany in WW1, but far closer to... America in WW1, where the American center of power was never at meaningful threat, and potential threat-rivals devastated themselves while the American political debate was how much favoritism to show the generally favored side without actually entering the war.
Which goes to the final point, leader competence.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but WW1's Kaiser Wilhelm was a certain kind of an idiot- an aggressive idiot. Aggressive foreign policy got him results he otherwise wouldn't have had he been more passive, but who also created the foundations for the coalition that would encircle him, and the willingness of everyone to not only fight back but to help others keep beating his forces up well after the initial bloody nose. Wilhelm's incompetence wasn't just in choosing a bad war, but in the choices that led to Germany's isolation in Europe leading up to this, and the strategic options available to him as a result of his shaping of the local international environment to a point where allies were mercurial at best.
From this position- where the military facts were against him, and the coalitions surrounding him, and victory hinged on a trump card succeeding without issue- Wilhelm then doubled down on a weak hand.
This matters to your example because, again, the historical analog here isn't the US to Germany, or even the US to Britain, but Russia to the worst aspects of WW1 Germany.
That people will take him seriously, not literally. And/or pay attention to other things that he's said in the past, such as his conditional willingness to further supply Ukraine if Russia doesn't agree to reasonable terms, various formulations of which Russia has to date rejected as unreasonable.
Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?
Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984; by Jack Snyder. Here is a summary
The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War; by Stephen Van Evera. Here's a link to a summary... and of some other military history education sources.
Here is a thesis from an American Airforce officer on the Cult of the Offense as it applies to airpower.
I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.
American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).
That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.
Since WWII, who’s gotten away with land grabs via military invasion? I’m only aware of Russia in Crimea, and even that was more of a coup than a traditional military invasion and occupation like the War of 1870.
Off the top of my head there’s the 1951 Chinese annexation of Tibet, the various land grabs between Israel and its neighbours, the 1961 annexation of Goa by India, and the 1975 Indonesia annexation of East Timor. Depending how you frame it the Vietnam war ended either with North Vietnam annexing South Vietnam or the reunification of a single nation split by civil war.
There’s also been failed annexation attempts post ww2, like the 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Great list, thanks. I suppose Tibetan independence after the collapse of the Qing was never internationally recognized, so legally that’s more of an internal matter than an international annexation.
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