By Michael F. Duggan
The problem with historical comparisons is that all analogies eventually break down, especially in the details. Historical understanding is the best basis for understanding geopolitical crises, and yet if you compare the two most comparable events or periods of history, you will find that the dissimilarities outweigh the similarities.1
It seems that every new enemy of the United State or the West is the next “Hitler.” For years I have believed that equating Putin with Hitler to be foolish, inaccurate, and ultimately dangerous; Hitler was a phobic psychopath and Nazi Germany was a rogue state bent on ethic warfare, continental conquest, and world domination. The subtext of such comparisons is that Hitler cannot remain in power, and thus war to remove him is just and justified.
Rather, Putin fits in with the historical model of the Russian leader as strongman/strongwoman (e.g. Ivan III, Peter, Catherine, Stalin). If we must compare him to a German leader, a more fitting analogy would be to a consolidator and hardball practitioner of realpolitik like Bismarck, rather than a madman like Hitler (and given that about 24 million Soviets died fighting the Nazis, and that an estimated seven out of ten Wehrmacht solders who died in combat were killed by Soviet forces, comparisons to Hitler will likely poison any possibility for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine). Although Putin and Bismarck share some important similarities (e.g. both used war as a basis for foreign policy), there are also some important differences.
For one, Bismarck was a geopolitical genius who was advised by arguably the greatest military genius since Napoleon, Helmuth von Moltke. Although Moltke was a Clauzewizian and not a Jominiain, he believed in fighting “kabinet wars”—small, decisive conflicts between professional armies that could be won quickly with minimal cost and which achieved specific war aims. The wars that the Prussians fought against Denmark in order to annex Schleswig and Holstein in 1864 and against Austria in 1866 are emblematic of this kind of war (the Franco-Prussian War was much larger and threatened to dissolve into a “people’s war” but ended quickly with tremendous violence and a number of decisive German victories).
Moltke hated the idea of a “people’s war”—long, drawn-out, often indecisive conflicts typified by mass destruction and loss of life, in which the peoples of warring nations (or within a nation) were as much at war as the armies that represented or opposed them. These struggles were founded as much on the passions of the people as on official goals and included the French Revolution, the European democratic revolutions of the 19th century, and the American Civil War. Moltke was horrified by the carnage of our Civil War and specifically wanted to prevent that kind of conflict coming to Europe (on a side note, the idea of total warfare was in part introduced to the Germans by none other than General Philip Sheridan after the American Civil War).2
The point of all this is the fact that the war in Ukraine is exactly the kind of war that Bismarck and von Moltke sought to avoid: a slow, anticipated, underpowered invasion of a large country with an armed and hostile population that will fight until the last person. A plausible argument can be made that Putin saw himself as having no choice but to invade Ukraine in order to finally make a stand against NATO expansion. Thus, Ukraine is not a kabinet war a la Moltke, but rather a people’s war initiated by a desperate leader committed to an ugly, protracted conflict no matter what the cost. It is likely that Bismarck would have fought such a war, but only if his interests depended on it and he had no choice. As things turned out, he never had to.
One of the more insightful books on the period of Bismarck and von Moltke is Geoffrey Wawro’s The Franco-Prussian War. One of the things that makes this book so interesting for me—not to mention topical—is how Wawro introduces the war in the broader context of a struggle between the proselytizing idealism of Napoleon III vis-a-vis the order-based Congress System of the five powers of Europe (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) that had been established at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815).3 Louis-Napoleon advocated a kind of United States of Europe centered around a revitalized France and his idees napoleoniennes (Napoleonic ideas) and the active spread of political liberalism. In retrospect, it now seems inevitable that Louis-Napoleon’s policy of proactive liberalism would run afoul of the the ambitions and stark realism of the Prussians—the specific goals and hard-nosed consolidationist outlook of Bismarck. The Prussian chancellor had long considered the French emperor to be a lightweight. In the general abstract (although not the myriad of specific facts), this sounds a lot like the current ideological divide between the globalist West and Putin’s nationalistic Russia. More analogies.
Although I would not go so far as to embrace the harsh realism of a Bismarck or a Putin, it is notable that the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian War and parts of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany as Alsace-Lorraine. In terms of geopolitical results, realism generally trumps moralism. If a new cold war is in the offing, then perhaps the U.S. would do well to abandon its heady ideology of economic globalization and embrace moderate realism, like that of George Kennan, whose grand strategy of containment (albeit in much altered form) won the first Cold War.
Notes
- Karl Popper makes this point in The Poverty of Historicism, 110-111.
- Regarding Bismarck and von Moltke, see generally Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864-1871; Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, ed.s, On the Road to Total War; Daniel J. Hughes, ed., Moltke on the Art of War, Selected Writings; Philip Sheridan, The Personal Memoirs of P.H. Sheridan.
- Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War, The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871, 1-15.