World War I itself was so destructive that I doubt any of the actors involved would have done as they did had they known what was going to happen. This reluctance was a major factor in WW2, which would never have happened had there not been a fanatical, irrational actor involved(Hitler). That’s the only way WW3 ever starts I think. We need another Hitler for that. Putin is a more common type of dictator, very Mussolini-ish, but a lot smarter. He’ll take what he can believes he can get, but he won’t risk his country or his power to get it.
That’s why it’s important to keep him thinking sensibly. A move into the Baltics would be very much like Hitler’s move into the Rhineland. That got Hitler thinking he could get away with anything and you don’t want Putin getting into that frame of mind. Then he might take a risk that DOES actually put all his money on the table, and that’s when using nukes becomes possible.
Looking into the future, I think that China actually has the best chance of seeing a deluded nationalistic type take power.
You should start by repairing this misunderstanding and then proceed to rethink everything from there on.
That said, if Russia genuinely attacked Estonia, there would be war, and who’s to say it wouldn’t be better to just let them have that country if it would preserve peace in our time.
Hopefully you’re being sarcastic. Letting Putin have the Baltics would be the surest way to make WW3 inevitable. Going after the Baltic is a big bet, but if he succeeds, why shouldn’t he see if we have the resolve to defend Poland? If Putin’s goal is to restore as much of the old Soviet Empire as possible without threatening his regime, then the only way to get him to stop is to threaten his regime. That means we draw the redline at the Baltics.
I can’t tell whether you’re being sarcastic or deliberately obtuse. Or simply misunderstood my point.
Your suggestion here is a very, very poor reason to enter a war. It may have been a common rationalization in the past. There’s not much excuse for it being an acceptable one today or going forward. At least not for any civilized country.
He is not totally off base though. Since 1945 and especially since 1989, nations have increasingly employed non-state actors to place pressure on geopolitical rivals, sometimes with direct involvement of special forces and “advisors”. Almost the way priviteers were used in the Age of Sail.
If Putin encourages local “Russian” to rise up in Estonia using say SVR and undercover Spetsnaz operators, he places NATO in a quandry. Stay out and they are accused of not helping a member state against aggression. Go in and the world is treated to images of NATO-Alliance troops putting down a disliked minority. Talk about a Hobson’s choice.
Security Alliances are built around preventing direct action. They are pretty poor against non-state actors; the WW1 alliance went to war over the action of a non-state actor.
True, but that assumes that uprisings are easy to foment and hard to put down, which is not always true. If it was that easy Hitler wouldn’t have needed to make up atrocities against German minorities in countries he wanted to conquer. He could have just provoked them. he had organized Nazi organizations wherever there was a German minority, yet he couldn’t really get much going. I just can’t see Russians in the Baltics rising up, as the Baltics are vastly wealthier than Ukraine. Comfortable people don’t rebel en masse. Whatever trouble Russia could foment could be dealt with through normal police work in all likelihood. Probably a few crazies willing to engage in mass shootings or bombings in any group and I"m sure Russian intelligence can find them. But it won’t be enough.
Nuclear weapons are another big difference between 1914 and today and the US and Russia just happen to be the two biggest powers. Major wars have diminished considerably since their advent. Their mere existence is awful but they do tend to have a stabilizing effect.
Sure, to fight a prolonged world war two style land war, with no allies in support, that’s true. But with the advance warning of modern satellite systems and drones and so on, there’s no chance that anyone could launch a surprise attack in full strength, which would NECESSITATE the sort of approach that applied in WW1. Which is what this thread is about.
This thread question is an example of something I see too often for my sensibilities. It gets played out in the news all the time, too. Someone who has only a grade-school level, fifteen minute understanding of World War 1, hears that there’s an argument about who gets to do what in the Balkans, and they start worrying that WW1 part two is about to erupt.
Trigger events are only trigger events, if powerful people have prearranged that they WILL BE trigger events. World War 1 was NOT caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, by Serbian Victor Princip. It was caused by all of Europe arranging in advance, to go to war immediately, if anyone attacked anyone else.
If you want to worry about history repeating itself, you really need to know just how complicated the past really was, first.
Unfortunately, I think nukes are a lot like credit derivatives. They seem to stabilize things until one day they don’t. Nukes are stabilizing in a world where every leader is rational and the people haven’t been taught that their nation is oppressed and should be an equal of the other great powers. There’s a lot of insane leaders and a lot of peoples with delusions of grandeur who are convinced they are being held down(some even think the Jews have something to do with it, which is never a promising sign). Right now, we don’t have the perfect storm of crazy leader+aggrieved people+powerful nation, but that can change and then nukes become DEstabilizing.
And yes, I know Trump is crazy, but he’s not expansionist crazy. It’s not even clear he has any real ambitions to accomplish anything.
If neither side wants a war, even major issues can be smoothed over. If one side is looking for an excuse for a war, then any small incident can start one.
Churchill writing about the causes of WWI:
Today, neither Russia nor the US nor China nor Europe wants a major war. That’s why a major war won’t happen.
Back in WW2 plenty of people didn’t want to fight either. When you’re given the option “fight, or up against the wall”, most people fight. Especially when if you don’t fight, the enemy will kill you anyway.
Which is why there were such things as penal battalions, prisoner battalions, osttruppen etc…
Besides, mostly you don’t assign unwilling guys to frontline duties unless really desperate - they won’t hold and they won’t fight well. But having them sit back, deal with logistics and police actions and security and so on frees up your motivated goons for the fight.
Agree completely with your overall post. IMO you’re accurately describing the situation today as a snapshot in the movie of history. I’d add one more sentence on the end to address the fact history *is *a movie, not a snapshot. …
So the thing to watch out for is signs that one of the biggees starts acting like a war, even a “minor” border skirmish, would be a worthwhile tradeoff.
For myself I see some risk, as **adaher **said up-thread, that Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea could turn into a shooting war with one of the their neighbors. Probably not under the current Chinese administration of President Xi, but perhaps the next.
A fundamentally different thing about US “imperialism” and that of the other powers is that by and large we have no interest in expansionism near our borders. All of our various adventurisms, for reasons both high-minded and low, are far afield. OTOH, both Russia and China are very, very interested in altering the power balance with their immediate neighbors.
That asymmetry is something to watch very carefully. The evolution of highly asymmetrical situations have a way of being blindingly obvious to one side and a total surprise to the other.
I have a nuanced disagreement with this. Wanting a major war is not a necessary condition for a major war to break out. To use a contemporaneous and difficult scenario, Russia is very, very unlikely to send armored divisions into the Baltics to seize them a la Hitler. If Putin wants to do something with respect to the Baltics, he is very likely to do the same as what he has done in Ukraine: make up bullshit about oppressed Russians in the hinterlands, and then Russian “volunteers” just start showing up in that country with advanced armaments to stir shit up with the intent of weakening and breaking up the country.
The intent to seize territory is the same as sending in overwhelming ground forces, but it presents a difficult calculation for the invaded country: at what point must the attacked country escalate to defend itself from an invasion that is not abundantly clear?
If there’s going to be a war between Russia and NATO, I will bet anything that it starts like that: Russia invades in a “deniable” way but everyone knows what they are doing, and NATO has to escalate to stop the aggression. So we have an aggressor who doesn’t want “war,” and defenders who have little to no choice on how to defend themselves.
Germany’s plan was to defeat France in about six weeks with a sweeping offensive through Belgium, which would basically end the war with Germany as victor. Britain wasn’t supposed to come in (it took a lot of active incompetence on Germany’s part to get them into the war) and couldn’t do anything continental without France anyway, and Russia facing a one-front war against Germany and Austria would be forced to surrender, and if not would be easily defeated. So ‘home by Christmas’ was the actual timetable Germany had set for winning the war. (The fact that the full plan relied on Belgium not offering much resistance and required more divisions than they actually had were glossed over.)
My impression is that this is an excuse from the Germans - after the war one of the higher-ups in the rail service angrily wrote a book about it (I can’t find the name of it right now, unfortunately). He argued that it was an insult to the rail service to claim that they couldn’t stop, and claimed that they were perfectly capable of stopping, pausing, or changing (shifting troops east instead of west) without major issues.
Also the sort of mass conscript army that made mobilization so important is a thing of the past - European countries and the US have entirely or mostly ditched conscription as a way to fill the ranks, and no one relies on a large reserve of conscripts for offensive war anymore.
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A fundamentally different thing about US “imperialism” and that of the other powers is that by and large we have no interest in expansionism near our borders. All of our various adventurisms, for reasons both high-minded and low, are far afield. OTOH, both Russia and China are very, very interested in altering the power balance with their immediate neighbors.
[/QUOTE]
Not since the Mexican war anyway.
A peer or a near-peer adversary could well decide to try and make the Mexican border very problematic. Its bad enough now with the Mexican drug war.
It’s not something I hope for obviously, however it would be basic asymmetrical warfare. All countries outside of N America do something similar with their adversaries as a matter of course, its very effective at tying down large numbers of the other guy’s men and material.
A hypothetical, Chinese Government as an example, before beginning expansionist tendencies might try and stir up as much trouble as they can in Mexico to tie down US attention. Its a no loss situation. Worst case, nothing happens, the status quo remains, best case, well, you thought that Trump’s proposed border wall was expensive.
Dude, please stop. I am getting traumatic flashbacks to 1914. Since, replace Putin with Czar Nick and the Baltics with the Balkans and we have the exact situation; well no one really wanted or thought war would come…:eek:
And do any of the Euro leaders seem any better than the Class of 1914? Fuck.
I disagree that Russia was the aggressor in the Ukraine. Rather Russia felt greatly threatened by events in the Ukraine.
A government hostile to Russia took over in the Ukraine - with strong and overt US support - and Russia saw its security as being at stake.
The Russians have had a naval base in the Crimea for more than 200 years, and it’s strategically important to them. They saw that this base would suddenly be lost, even though the population of Crimea is mainly Russian and supports Russia. They saw the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, and NATO troops, missiles and anti-missile systems installed right on the Ukraine-Russian border.
They weren’t going to sit back quietly and let that happen, and they took rational and proportional measures to stop it. Basically they have succeeded.
Well, to address your fears, it isn’t necessarily foregone that a NATO escalation would involve striking at Russia itself. Imagine Putin’s little green men running around Lithuania, trying to create a land route to Kaliningrad. What happens if NATO sends in an overwhelming amount of military force to crush the “insurgency” that is wholly within Lithuania? That sort of throws the dilemma back to Putin: how much is he willing to risk Russia going to war against NATO – which he must know will end poorly for him – on behalf of Russian “volunteers” who he denies he is sending there?
Yes, they invaded an annexed part of a country that posed no military threat to them, and the world let them get away with it. Of course they succeeded. Just like Stalin succeeded.