West Stockbridge — It has been roughly 25 years since the Cold War, the last global struggle between world powers. Roughly 20 years was the period between the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War, and the German invasion of Poland that began the second. As in 1939, the world is rift by a proxy war over territory which does not technically belong to our adversary’s country, but is overwhelmingly populated by those who consider themselves to identify ethnically and culturally with that country. In both years, these regions had been internationally recognized, in the previous two decades, as belonging to the nation which most of its inhabitants think of as their motherland, and had, before that point, been part of that country’s territory for centuries.
In 1939 these territories were Austria, and the Sudetenland, the German populated area of Czechoslovakia; our adversary was Nazi Germany. In 2015 it is Crimea, annexed one year ago this past week, and the Donbas region of Ukraine, comprising the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk; our adversary is Putin’s Russia. Both conflicts resulted from the dismemberment of the losing nation in the preceding conflict some 20 years before, and both resulted in bitterness within that county, that the settlement of the previous war had been unfair, and that its national honor must be restored. In 1938, Hitler was determined to retrieve territory that had historically belonged to the German people, of which, he felt, Germany had been ignominiously stripped in the Treaty of Versailles. He clearly never thought of the recently created Czechoslovakia as a legitimate country. In 2015, Putin certainly feels the same way about Ukraine, and has repeatedly said that he does not consider Ukraine to be a real country. Certainly, it had been part of Russia since the 18th century, and there are also vast swaths of the population, especially in the East, that consider themselves to be ethnically Russian.
To be sure, Vladimir Putin may not be as evil or tyrannical as Adolf Hitler. His political ideology is not based on systematic racism, anti-Semitism, and a desire for enforced racial purity within the Russian nation. Hitler was a genocidal maniac. Putin is a tyrant, but not even among the worst tyrants of today. Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, all of whom maintain friendly relations with the west, have much worse human rights records than Putin’s Russia. There has been no Kristallnacht in Putin’s Russia, though there were many such episodes in Soviet, and Czarist Russia, nor is there ever likely to be. Indeed, the similarities between Putin and Hitler have nothing to do with domestic policy, or political ideology, but with the geo-political crises that confronted them.
It would not at all be difficult for the west to bungle things as badly as they did in 1939. All that is necessary is for NATO to offer an untenable military alliance to a county which Putin sees as being historically part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and which contains a large population of ethnic Russians. Britain and France made such an alliance with Poland in 1939, thereby ending all negotiations for the return of the German-populated city of Danzig to the third Reich, and convincing Hitler to ally himself with the Soviet Union. With all negations over Poland now off the table, Hitler felt he had sufficient pretext to invade a now hostile country, along with the Soviets, in September of that year. To some extent we have already made such an alliance by allowing Latvia and Lithuania into NATO in 2004. Ukraine’s new regime has not, as yet, been offered a place in NATO; but they have been given vast amounts of financial and military assistance; and just months ago, the Pentagon began flirting with the idea of directly arming Ukrainian forces. If we go one step further, and offer the Ukrainians a formal alliance, the result could be nuclear war. This past week, Putin revealed, in an interview with Russian television, that he was preparing for nuclear war, “if necessary,” as a response to a conflict in Ukraine, which he views, not wrongly, as largely spurred on by American support of anti-Russian forces within Ukraine. The whole thing has been reported by the British newspaper “the Independent,” and can be read here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-says-russia-was-preparing-to-use-nuclear-weapons-if-necessary-and-blames-us-for-ukraine-crisis-in-crimea-documentary-10109615.html#
The appropriate response to this is not to conjure up heroic images of Winston Churchill, to be defiant in the face of reason, and to risk starting a nuclear war over remote areas of Europe which Russia has many good claims to. But, if 2015 is like 1939, our political leaders are definitely capable of being pig-headed enough to simply talk tough, and ignore reality. The result could be catastrophic for us all.
