TomRoushOnline

The recent election, where Donald Trump triumphed over Kamala Harris, has raised hopes that the war in Ukraine will find a negotiated end. This end should it come, would be welcome to the diminished population of Ukraine who have lost hundreds of thousands of men to the fighting and women in the flight to safety. Will Ukraine ever reconstitute into a functioning, healthy, growth-oriented society? I doubt it.

A ceasefire and follow on peace treaty would lower the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the forces of Russia and the NATO alliance. It has been speculated that NATO weapons, if used on the Russian mainland, would prompt a nuclear response by the Russians, but that has not happened, even though American provided weapons have been used within Russia. What this means, it’s hard to know. Do the Russian weapons work? Are they patiently waiting for Ukraine to be abandoned?

Should even one nuclear weapon be used, a world war could slide right into the present from the past. The two sides would then do what they have done previously; seek to drag the non-aligned states to their cause. The Russians have open alliances with the Chinese. The Chinese might also subsequently be attacked by the Japanese and Americans in the Pacific. Iran and North Korea would side with the Russians and Chinese, and this would make the South Koreans, Saudis, and Israelis side with NATO and the US. It is unclear what role the Indians might play. The UK and France are both nuclear powers, and the Scandinavian countries share land or sea borders with the Russians.

This war would be existential, if any of the doomsday predictions of nuclear exchange are true.

It would be instructive to take lessons from the previous two world wars, since they involved many of the same belligerents, but unfortunately, World War 1 and World War 2 were driven by different dynamics, and they offer different lessons.

World War 1

The First World War ended a period of relative peace that had descended on Europe after the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815. There were wars in this period, with revolutions and incursions, but they were nothing like the wars of reformation or the epic battles between the English and the French, or the Spanish and the British. In 1837, Victoria took the British throne, and this ushered in the Victorian age, a period where the great royal houses of Europe were linked through Victoria and her family members, or through a broader royal network of deference. When she died in 1901, her funeral was attended by every royal house from the Artic Circle to Jerusalem, and surely, at the time, the many secret or semi-secret alliances that held the Old World together were reinforced.

In 1914, these alliances drove events as they came apart. Three of the royals, King George in Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany, and Czar Nickolas in Russian, were first cousins, but that didn’t prevent them from siding against each other. In central Europe, the ailing, nonsensical Austria-Hungarian empire was still ruled by the Hapsburgs, even after 640 years.  The Ottomans in Turkey, the Serbians in the Balkans, and others further south, all had royals who had connections and loyalties that would soon be revealed. All it took was one precipitating incident, the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, to reveal where those alliances came into conflict. 20 million people, mostly Europeans, perished in the subsequent fire.

Between the Wars

Wars often unleash a wave of productivity and growth in the peace that follows. After World War 1, and the Spanish Flu epidemic that followed, a wave of prosperity burned through Europe and the United States. The roaring twenties brought a new rush of economic growth and breakthroughs in the arts and culture.

In Germany, a former soldier and his brothers in arms drank and nursed their wounds and hatreds. Adolph Hitler survived the war after many brushes with death, and the war had defined him. In many ways, he never left thosse trenches. When the prosperity of the twenties turned into the depression of the thirties, he rode, like Roosevelt in the United States, the depression to power. After a short time, Hitler was able to bypass all the checks on his power in the Germany government, and he set about rearming the Germans and restoring the German nation to power.

The First World War had consumed many of the monarchies that existed in 1914, and so rather than secret alliances, the many powers of Europe, the Middle East and Asia had open treaties and formal alliances that included mutual defense pacts. These treaties were to serve the same function as the secret alliance had; they would push the world towards total war.

World War 2

The Germans, driven by Hitler, pushed the boundaries of the treaty that ended the First World War. Hitler began to direct German industry to rearm the military, and his soldiers began to push into territories where German military was forbidden, starting in the Rhineland. The treaties and the violations were not a secret; all could see what was happening.

In Asia, the Japanese were replicating an old colonial pattern by establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was a philosophy of conquest that led the Japanese to use Korea, which they had taken in 1910, to invade China, and other parts of Southeast Asia. This brought them into conflict with the British Empire, itself a series of treaties and alliances, and into close contact with the American who still controlled the Philippines (ironically named after Prince Phillip, a former Habsburg monarch). 

In August of 1939, the Germans entered a formal alliance with the Soviets. It was a non-aggression pact which served the purpose of carving up Poland and driving the rest of Eastern Europe into zones of influence. Hitler invaded Poland, thus drawing in the British, who were treaty bound to defend the Poles.  With the Soviets sidelined by treaty, Germans forces went West, towards France. By the end of 1940, France as conquered and the Germans and British were in open warfare. Hitler had reenacted the First World War, but in this one, Germany prevailed over France.

This far, the war, as bad as it was, had not consumed the lives of the 50,000,000 people who were about to perish, including the six million Jews who would die in the Holocaust. Treaty obligations and historical grievances drove the next phase. All efforts to contain this toxic mess were thwarted, and in 1941, it exploded exponentially.

In June of 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of his treaty partner, the Soviets. This doomed his rule eventually. In the Pacific, the Japanese attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor, thus setting the clock for defeat. Three and a half years later, the Germans and Japanese were defeated and destroyed, possibly for good. I maintain that culturally, they have never recovered, and demographically, they are dying. The Soviets lost 26 million people in the war, and the Russian successors are also demographically in decline. The British Empire was fatally wounded. The Holocaust set the stage for the creation of Isreal in 1948, as part of a declaration of the United Nations, an organization that was to take the place of the secret alliances that defined the First World War, and the disclosed by often ignored treaties and alliances that defined World War 2.

Between The Wars?

In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the Cold War, a conflict that had turned hot all over the globe but never triggered a nuclear exchange, came to an end. A sort of freedom came to Russia even as so much of the territory that defined the country went their own way. The period that followed is not remembered fondly by the Russians. They saw a decrepit autocracy descend into governmental anarchy.

It should be remembered that the dissolution of the Soviets occurred two years after the Berlin Wall was toppled in Germany in 1989. Democracy movements were spreading across Eastern Europe, and while they nearly caught fire in China, the Chinese did what the East Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians, and then the Russians as well, would not do, which was to put down the democracy movement by force. The Chinese did not experience the same wave of democratic expansion that followed the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War, they stuck to their mix of authoritarian political rules while also pursuing and open capitalistic economic models.

The long period of peace that followed the end of the Cold War is now being tested. The Russians have watched as the borders of NATO crept closer to their territory. The Chinese are now a formidable military power, and they have stated clearly that they wish to reunite the mainland with Taiwan. Iran is seeking greater power in the Middle East. The Americans are retreating into their protective fortress on the North American continent. Europe is demographically declining and less able to field a military, but then, so are most of the potential belligerents. There is still no peace between the North and South Koreans, and now, North Korea is a nuclear state. Iran is seeking to follow, and they are engaged in a proxy battle with Isreal that is, for the Jews, existential. Only India, South America and Africa seem to have no formidable role in these tensions.

NATO has the largest and most well-known treaty obligations, but there may be secret alliances as well. The UN is hardly working as planned and so it is not a helpful forum to stop the march to war. The United States has no formal treaty to fight for Taiwan, but President Biden has stated quite clear the US would, in fact, defend a free Taiwan. Is his promise a treaty, or an alliance, or is it just meaningless? Of what use is a free to unfree Taiwan to the USA? Is this island worth fighting for?

The United States suffered from strategic confusion, and this is marginally less bad than an entangling alliance or treaty obligation. The US doesn’t know what it will do, what it wants, or what is in the strategic national interest. The world doesn’t have to have another worldwide conflagration, and given how the population is about to fall, a catastrophic war would be terrible for humanity. But war is the natural state of the homo sapiens and global wars have occurred twice, and the period in between was just a holding pattern.