The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Lesson in the Dangers of Ignoring History
I am sickened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and quite concerned about what the future holds for both Europe and the rest of the world. But sadly, I am not shocked.
On one hand, Putin’s attack on a sovereign nation should surprise no one. The Russian people have been dominated by brutal autocrats since the Mongols invaded Kievan Russia a thousand years ago. Russian expansion had been a goal of Russian tsars, dating back to the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These two monarchs expanded Russian borders, specifically around the Black Sea where they won Russia’s long coveted warm water port.
By the time World War I erupted in Europe, Russia was a large, corrupt, and bloated empire. The Germans decimated the Russians on their eastern front which gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. To end their part of the fighting, the new communist government ceded enormous swaths of western territories to Germany. Internally, Russian tsars were replaced by the likes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who ruled Russia with an iron fist.
In 1939, Stalin, after signing an agreement with NAZI Germany, invaded Poland and Finland in yet another land/power grab. The end of World War II led to Russian dominance over numerous Eastern European countries. Because the communist government proved to be just as corrupt as tsarist Russia, the weight of controlling these eastern countries became unmanageable, and the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, allowing several eastern block countries, including Ukraine, to once again enjoy their own autonomy.
The loss of these territories, and the resulting loss of prestige, served as a source of humiliation for some Russians, specifically Vladimir Putin, who is now hoping to restore Russia to her former greatness. His tactics have been alarming. He seized control over the Crimea back in 2014, and suffered little for this act of aggression. In 2016, his manipulations of American social media platforms helped elect a US president, Donald Trump, who spent four years slobbering over him. Trump then spent four years trashing our NATO alliance, an alliance that had helped promote European stability for over seventy years.
The American and European divisions that Putin and Trump helped sow, has given Putin the confidence that he can expand Russian influence with a minimum of pain. A divided United States and a divided Europe play perfectly in his plans.
The real question is what’s next? The answers partly depend on which historical examples are the most appropriate in this particular circumstance, and how the rest of the world responds. Below are a couple of scenarios I have thought of.
1. Using the model from the 1930s and 1940s, where the world saw the rise of aggressive fascist regimes, we should expect China to use the European distraction as a way to expand her own territory and influence, much in the way that Japan used German expansion to gobble up Asian territories in the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile, if Putin can subdue the Ukraine, then he might be emboldened to go after other former Soviet territories. In the 1930s, Hitler used bullying tactics and European divisions to expand the German Empire. Today, NATO numbers have expanded to include many former Soviet territories, including the Baltic nations, several Balkan nations, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. Any Russian incursion into these nations would set the stage for a much wider war, as the US and our NATO allies have pledged to fight for their sovereignty. I see this as a worse-case scenario, where an all-out world war between nuclear powers could take place.
2. A more likely model could be found in the Russian attempts to control Afghanistan in the 1980s and the US attempts to control Iraq after the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. In both cases, governments of weaker countries fell easily, but resistance to foreign control proved very costly to both countries. The Russians finally withdrew as a diminished power by the end of the decade. The Iraq debacle turned out to be a disastrous enterprise, costing the Americans trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and much good will around the world. Empires throughout history have doomed themselves through over-reaching ambitions that exhausted their will and their resources. The invasion of Ukraine could very well be the undoing of Putin’s regime, and the stimulus that re-unites the democracies of Europe.
There are other possibilities, of course, but regardless, the effects will be wide-reaching no matter how this shakes out. Meanwhile, innocent people will suffer and die because of the inflated ego of an autocrat who has no one in his own country to answer to.
This is not the first time that events overseas have darkened our own skies. As a nation we are tasked with deciding how best to confront these ugly events. One thing we can count on, though, is that we cannot escape the consequences of last night’s invasion. European peace has been shattered and tragedy is quickly following. And none of this had to happen.