One week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launching the largest military conflict in Europe since
1945, the world is again at war; and it appears the man who decided to wage aggression against his neighbor was not prepared for the response.
Yet, that is how conflicts of the 20th and 21st century typically begin, from
World War I to
World War II to the
America-led invasion of Iraq to Vladimir
Putin’s invasion today—never well thought out by the people eager to war, they dismiss evidence disputing their reasoning.
Consider Adolf Hitler’s grievances for invading his neighbors, his claim of protecting
German minorities in Czechoslovakia and
staging an “attack” by Polish soldiers; Lyndon Johnson’s
Gulf of Tonkin incident to fight North Vietnam;
elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and Putin’s bogus claim, among many, of
de-Nazifying Ukraine whose president is Jewish.
None of those reasons are true or accurate, but it led, as it’s leading Putin today, into devastating wars that produced more harm than good, particularly for the aggressors. History has shown that no one escape war unscathed; whether its lives, property or psyche, the damage is lasting.
Partly because Putin’s war is in Europe, and because Putin seemed to pull tactics from Hitler’s playbook for his reasoning to attack Ukraine, there have been allusions to World War II that lack the context of history.
Before the allies mustered the will to fight Germany and Japan, the international structure for cooperation among the world’s nations was weak, perhaps largely because the United States refused to join the
League of Nations to avoid getting pulled into another World War I.
Today, strong international security organizations have so far kept a nuclear-tipped world from engulfing itself in flames the last 77 years—the
United Nations and such regional alliances as the
European Union and
NATO, of which most members are Western European democracies.
However, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, former
Warsaw Pact nations – Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungry, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Rumania – have joined NATO, which is another of Putin’s complaints based on delusional thinking.
Despite diplomacy and economic connections between Russia and NATO countries including the U.S., Putin believes (though it remains unclear whether he really believes this) that NATO is just waiting to invade Russia, hence his demand that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO.
Western democracies worked with Russia within the NATO framework with hope the Russian federation would eventually become a member, but NATO severed ties in 2014 after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. As an old communist, Putin laments the demise of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which Russia controlled the Warsaw Pact, formed in direct response to NATO. In fact, both organizations once planned and conducted war games on how to repel the other, if either launched an invasion.
Putin’s war, which has put NATO and other world nations on high alert, is asymmetrical at the moment, running along an edge where it could tip into an abyss with armies of the West mobilizing for a conflagration that could become nuclear or towards an outcome that could put the region on a path toward real peace.
For now, the war is contained in Ukraine. Putin, angry at the failures of
his military’s shortcomings and frustrated by Ukrainian resilience (See Hitler:
Leningrad,
Stalingrad, etc.), has sent Russian forces
after non-military objectives – primarily residential buildings – to terrorize the population with brute force.
Thought outnumbered and outgunned, Ukrainian fighters
have been astonishingly effective, inflicting heavy casualties on the invaders while some of the Russian soldiers captured e
xpressing an unwillingness to fight their Slavic brothers and sisters.
With his tanks and bombs, Putin targets civilians, hoping for Ukraine’s
inspirational President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate, but willing to scorch the country regardless.
In response,
most of the world’s nations – including hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens – have called for Putin to end his war. Led by the United States,
the West has imposed sanctions that crippled the Russian economy; it will take years for the country to recover financially.
None of this has stopped Putin. He
wants to make this war about NATO and threatens to use nuclear weapons. Like Hitler, he seems willing to destroy his own country, which was Germany’s
fate as the allies closed in, and
Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.
The worry is whether Putin really believes his megalomaniacal dream of East Europe domination, of a restored USSR empire, is worth that.
It seems doubtful this war will lead to a nuclear exchange between Russia and the West, but if a desperate Putin resorts to detonating a weapon in Ukraine, what is the world’s response?
We can hope for the Russian people to rise up and topple Putin – who has started to shut down any dissent – but that seems uncertain. We can expect a bloody war and wonder—whether it ends with a truce, a mushroom cloud or in a bunker.
