Is this a 1938 moment for the world?
The Guardian
08 Jun 2024
Patrick Wintour talks to the historians and politicians who fear we could be on the brink of a third world war.
When big history is self-evidently being written and leaders face momentous choices, the urge to find inspiration in historical parallels is natural. “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” the historian RG Collingwood once wrote.
One of the contemporary politicians most influenced by the past is the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas. She lugs books on Nato-Russian relations with her on beach holidays. In her hi-tech office in Tallinn, she argues that this is a 1938 moment – a point when a wider war is imminent but the west has not yet joined the dots.
She said the same mistake was made in 1938 when tensions in Abyssinia, Japan and Germany were treated as isolated events. The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture shows an interconnected battlefield where post-cold war certainties have given way to “greatpower competition”, in which authoritarian leaders are testing the boundaries of their empires. “The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere,” Kallas said.
Her favourite historian, Prof Tim Snyder, adds a twist by reimagining 1938 as a year in which Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine in 2022, had chosen to fight. “So you had in Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine, an imperfect democracy. The farthest democracy in eastern Europe. When threatened by a larger neighbour, it chooses to resist. In that world, where Czechoslovakia resists, there’s no second world war.”
He said such an outcome had been possible. “They could have held the Germans back. It was largely a bluff on the German side. If the Czechs resisted, and the French, British and maybe Americans started to help, there would have been conflict, but there wouldn’t have been a world war.
“Instead, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was invading Poland with the Czech armaments industry, which was the best in the world. It was invading with Slovak soldiers. It was invading from a geographical position that it only gained because it had destroyed Czechoslovakia.
“If Ukrainians give up, or if we give up on Ukraine, then it’s different. It’s Russia making war in the future. It’s Russia making war with Ukrainian technology. At that point, we’re in 1939. We’re in 1938 now. In effect, what Ukrainians are letting us do is extend 1938.”
As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, much American foolishness abroad, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, has been launched on the back of Munich syndrome, the belief that those who appease bullies, as the then British prime minister Neville Chamberlain sought to do with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, are either dupes or cowards. Such leaders are eventually forced to put their soldiers into battle, often unprepared and ill-equipped.
Snyder made his remarks in Tallinn last month at the Lennart Meri conference, which met under the slogan “Let us not despair, but act”. It was held against the backdrop of Russia and China hailing a new authoritarian world order. Many at the conference wrestled with how much had gone wrong in Ukraine and whether the west would shed its self-imposed constraints on helping Kyiv.
In a sense, everyone wanted an answer to the question posed by the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski: “Ukraine has bought us time. Will we put it to good use?” In 1934-35, what Winston Churchill termed the “locust years”, Britain did not put the time to good use, instead allowing Germany to race ahead in rearmament.
Johann Wadephul, the deputy chair of the German Christian Democratic Union’s defence policy committee, is pessimistic. “If the war goes on like it is, it’s clear Ukraine will lose. It cannot withstand Russian power with its well-organised support from Iran, China and North Korea and countries like India looking only at its self-interest.”
Europe had simply not reorganised itself for war, he said. Listing the consequences in terms of lost human rights, access to resources and confidence in the west, he said simply: “If Ukraine loses, it will be a catastrophe.”
Samir Saran, the head of the Indian thinktank the Observer Research Foundation, agreed that something bigger than Europe was at stake as he almost mocked the inability of the west’s $40tn economy to organise a battlefield defeat of Russia’s $2tn economy.
"One side is not participating in the battle. You have hosted conferences supporting Ukraine and then do nothing more,” he said. “It tells countries like us that if something like this were to happen in the Indo-Pacific, you have no chance against China.”
Yet it is paradoxical. Nato is bigger and stronger than ever. The transatlantic alliance is functioning
far better than the US, France and Britain did in the 1930s – and, after five months of hesitation, some of the extra $60bn in US arms may reach the frontline within weeks.
But from Kyiv’s perspective, everything remains too slow. Germany’s Marie-Agnes StrackZimmermann, the Free Democratic party’s top candidate for the European elections, said: “We have the problem that, while Poland is doing a lot as a neighbouring country, while Germany is doing a lot, France is doing relatively little.”
Others say the culprit is Berlin and that, despite recognising the threat Vladimir Putin represents, it cannot accept the consequences in terms of the nuclear risks of going all in for a Russian defeat. Benjamin Tallis, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said: “For all of this talk of political will, what we actually face is political won’t. We won’t define victory as a goal.”
Without naming Germany, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “Europe clearly faces a moment when it will be necessary not to be cowards.”
Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, had less compunction about naming names. “[Olaf] Scholz’s behaviour has shown that, as far as the security of Europe goes, he is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time,” he said of the German chancellor.
Eliot Cohen, a neocon neverTrumper, finds a wider institutional and moral malaise that needs addressing through a theory of victory. He said: “Are you willing to lift the restrictions on arms factories to run them 24 hours a day? Are you willing to give them ATACMS [missiles] and hit targets in Russia, and get Germany to give them Taurus missiles? My chief concern is that war is so remote from our societies that we have trouble grappling with what success requires.”
Sabine Fischer, a political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said behind these disputes is the pivot around which every judgment turns: whether Europe believes a Ukrainian defeat can be contained. In other words, what are the consequences for Europe, if any, if Ukraine collapses or a Russian-dictated peace leads to its retention of land gained by military conquest? Would a victorious Putin turn off the war machine and say Russia’s imperial ambitions were now sated?
Russia’s foreign policy concept issued in 2023 focuses on a global confrontation with the US and building alliances to defeat the west. Given his unrivalled record of broken promises, a Russian peace guarantee might end up as reassuring as Chamberlain’s advice to the British people to have a quiet night’s sleep after he returned from Munich.
Joe Biden, interviewed in Time magazine this week, appeared to regard the consequences as vast. “If we ever let Ukraine go down, mark my words: you’ll see Poland go, and you’ll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia, from the Balkans and Belarus, all those, they’re going to make their own accommodations.”
Others said the Polish response would be less conciliatory. One former Nato commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “If Ukraine fails, I am certain that our Polish allies are not going to sit and wait for them to keep coming. I think the Romanian allies are not going to sit and wait for Russia to go into Moldova. So the best way to prevent Nato from being involved directly in a conflict is to help Ukraine defeat Russia in Ukraine.”
Fischer said the consequences of a Russian-dictated peace would not be containable. “Ukraine will experience a new wave of refugees fleeing to the west,” she said. “The terror regime of the Russian occupation will expand and hundreds of thousands will suffer.”
Ukrainians have tried to frame the consequences of defeat in lurid terms, in an attempt to galvanise the west. Olena Halushka, the co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, urged Europe to think about the bombardment of Kharkiv. “Imagine a city the size of Munich is likely to be without electricity this winter. The cost in terms of millions of migrants will overwhelm Europe.”
Wadephul fears even such framing has not worked. “If you ask the average German on the street, ‘Do you really recognise what is at stake? That we have to spend money not for health but for defence?’, the answers show there is still a lot of persuasion to do. Europeans think they can have this war without thinking they are themselves at war.”
He thinks the guilty people are the leaders who pander to voters who dismiss the Russian threat. That takes the debate back to Germany’s, and specifically the Social Democratic party’s, ambivalence about a Russian defeat, which Scholz refuses to set as an objective.
Five 20th-century historians, including the Weimar Republic expert Heinrich August Winkler, complained in an open letter that Scholz was not willing to learn from history or recognise that Russia was bent on destroying Ukraine.
“The chancellor and the SPD leadership, by drawing red lines, not for Russia but for German politics, weaken Germany’s security policy and benefit Russia.” The government had to come up with a strategy for victory, they argued.
Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.
The reality was that Britain, overstretched and in debt, fell behind, and calls for a ministry of supply to coordinate the flow of arms were spurned. Nevertheless, Chamberlain complacently predicted that the “terrifying power” Britain was building by boosting its defences would have a “sobering effect on the opinion of the world”.
Something similar happened with regard to ammunition supplies for Ukraine in Europe. In 2023, leaders said they would have 1m shells ready for Ukraine by March 2024, only to admit they could reach only half that number.
A Ukrainian military adviser said the reality is that the Russian arms industry can now churn out 4.5m shells a year, each costing about $1,000 to manufacture.
Meanwhile, in Europe and the US, a total of 1.3m shells are being produced at an average cost of about $4,000.
The adviser said: “We need a central plan like in the first or second world war. Industrial warfare requires national institutions and a Nato-level industrial warfare committee, which would regulate prices.”
Some say things are improving, but the fact is that, according to Sikorski, 40% of the Russian government’s budget is devoted to defence. Russia, not Europe, has turned into a war economy.
The Ukrainian military adviser predicts the west may have caught up in two to three years in drones and munitions, but that means the next few years are the most dangerous the region would face.
Michael Bohnert, an engineer at the Rand Corporation, sees no sign of a public coordinated military plan to raise the firepower needed, let alone new munitions factories. Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted last month that after two years, “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory ... As it is, we give enough only for Ukraine to survive.”
To the extent that any European leader has grasped this lacuna, it is Macron, with his emergency meeting in Paris on 26 February to look at ammunition shortfalls and repeated speeches on the existential threat to Europe from the far right and Putin.
It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him, with all the risk that carries.
Macron will know many in Europe see the external threat as coming from migration, not Putin, and as a French politician he knows the popular lure of an easy peace.
Flowers, not tomatoes, greeted the French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, to his surprise, when he returned from Munich in 1938. Knowing the threat posed by Hitler, and that he and Chamberlain had betrayed Czechoslovakia, he turned to his aide and said of the cheering crowds: “Bunch of fools.”
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