In his magisterial summation of World War I, The Pity of War (1998), Niall Ferguson concludes that the chief responsibility for this epochal conflict lay with Great Britain by virtue of its ill-advised entry into a continental European power struggle, likely to be of brief duration and manageable consequence, thereby transforming it into a global conflagration that would take a wrecking ball to the past accomplishments and future prospects of Western civilization.
Behind the blundering series of decisions that led Britain into war in 1914, says Ferguson, lay a profound misunderstanding of their country’s military history, and a gross misapprehension of how different that history of a century of intermittent colonial wars against weak and ill-armed opponents would be from the coming collision with the German Imperial Army.
This reflection upon baleful historical events of a century ago is brought to mind by their eerie similarity to the dangerous and rapidly accelerating escalation of America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
As this alarming flirtation with nuclear war threatens to erupt into open and direct combat between Russia and NATO, a number of reports are breaking through the serial “happy talk” that has characterized media coverage of this war since its beginning one year ago.
Most compelling of these is the recent article by military analyst Douglas Mac Gregor—“This Time It’s Different” (American Conservative 1/26/23), in which he contrasts Americas sixty-year history of failed wars against “weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad”—wars America could afford to lose—with the prospect of an existential conflict with a Russia whose military capacity has been consistently underestimated.
Such a conflict could obviously have devastating consequences in the American and European heartlands. Who is thinking this through? Where’s the sober realism we need from our leaders and opinion-makers?
Also, significant to note is a 2/7/23 article in the New York Times headlined, “Outnumbered and worn out, Ukrainians in the East brace for a Russian Assault” (2/7/23). It reports that “exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned”—even before the anticipated Russian offensive begins— war reporting very different in both tone and substance from earlier Times coverage.
Likewise supportive of these concerns is Victor Davis Hanson’s article “Ukrainian Paradoxes” (American Greatness 2/5/23) that asks how Russia—30 times the size of Ukraine, with 10 times the GDP, 3.5 times the population (even before 15 of 37 million Ukrainians fled their country), and an economy and currency stronger than before the war, while Ukraine is an economic basket case, not helped by failed Western sanctions— could be widely assumed to be the loser in its military contest with Ukraine.
Also noteworthy is that recent polling shows that 82 % of Europeans believe “Russia and Ukraine should be forced into peace talks to end the war”—though their governments, utterly dependent on the American military umbrella, have little choice other than support of Washington’s much more aggressive policies.
So how do we explain America’s penchant for losing wars and lost causes? Two well- known commentators offer strikingly similar answers.
David Goldman, deputy editor of Asia Times, writes (2/3/23) that “utopian illusions about exporting democracy motivated America’s great blunders of the last generation from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, Syria and ultimately Ukraine.” He concludes that another national humiliation on the scale of Vietnam might have the salutary effect of restoring sanity to our understanding of what “national interest” really means.
Walter Russell Mead’s article “The World Rejects the Wilsonian Order” (Wall Street Journal (2/6/23) views America’s failure through an even wider lens, describing how the countries of the Global South—representing the great majority of the world’s population—by their actions disprove the myth of an “isolated” Russia and a “world-unifying” America.
Mead concludes by stating that President Woodrow Wilson’s “world-order-building efforts collapsed because he overestimated the political appeal of his principles in the U.S. and abroad. A similar blindness afflicts his 21st-century heirs. We must hope that their failures will be less consequential than his.”
Indeed, the time grows short. Very soon we shall see just how high a price the world must pay to learn this lesson once again.
Bill Moloney is a Senior Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial institute who studied at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a former Colorado Commissioner of Education.