Don’t mention the old World Wars Outdated analogies make bad foreign policy

Any pressure on Kiev to make a deal with Moscow is tantamount to “appeasement,” according to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who tweeted as much on Sunday. The “appeasement” stick is only one of the World War II-era historical analogies used by partisans to beat up their opponents. Yet 80 years after the end of World War II, and 111 years after the beginning of World War I, it is time to forget the world wars.

I don’t mean the world wars should be forgotten as historical events. The three-decade conflict of 1914 to 1945, best thought of as a single conflict in two phases, was the greatest catastrophe in human history to date, causing 100 million deaths, all told. The war ended with cities and factories in Europe and Asia in ruins, millions of displaced people, the rapid decolonization of the bankrupt European empires, the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power amid the wreckage, and the half-century Soviet-American Cold War. As long as civilization exists, that three-decade cataclysm will never be forgotten.

But when it comes to thinking about and making foreign policy, the world wars provide few if any “lessons of history” that are of value in today’s world. On the contrary, parallels with the events of 1914-1945 — whether drawn by historians, pundits, or policymakers — are likely to be harmful, by trying to impose anachronistic patterns on the realities of our time. 

The peddling of these false parallels — by media outlets in search of audiences, politicians striking heroic poses, and academics who want to be celebrities — has made the public think that today’s world is far more dangerous and unstable than it actually is. According to a recent YouGov poll, 22% of Americans think it is very likely that there will be another world war in the next 10 years, and another 39% think it is somewhat likely. 

Many of the alleged parallels that are cited are so abstract that they are also parallels between our age and many other periods in history as well — say, the Crimean War, or the age of the French Revolution, or the wars of the Reformation in Europe.

For example, Lord David Alton of Liverpool published an essay in February arguing that conflicts in the Middle East; tensions over Taiwan; the race to secure rare-earth minerals; and the growing alliance between China, Iran, and Russia — all suggest “parallels between the world wars and today’s circumstances.” Last year in Foreign Affairs, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins published an essay headlined: “The Next Global War: How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II.” He followed it up with an essay in Bloomberg headlined: “It’s Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There.”

“Our world resembles the 1930s more than we might think,” Brands wrote, “Now, as then, the balance of power is shifting ominously. Violent autocracies are seeking expansive empires. Ties between authoritarian states are growing stronger; regional conflicts are becoming interwoven.” Then he added: “To be sure, the parallels are inexact.”

Indeed, they are so inexact as to be virtually nonexistent.

In the 1930s, outside of the Americas, most of the world was dominated by the British empire and other European colonial empires, with Germany, Italy, and Japan seeking to conquer other countries in order to establish their own regional empires. Where are the “violent autocracies” that “are seeking expansive empires” today? 

Putin’s Russia might fit the bill. It has invaded Ukraine to annex Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Post-Soviet Russia, which to date has not won its proxy war with the United States and Europe in Ukraine, can threaten other weak neighbors like the Baltic States. But it lacks the capacity to conquer much of Eastern and Western Europe as both Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany did.

Nor is China a suitable candidate. Chinese troops have engaged in limited border conflicts with India and harassed other maritime nations in the South China Sea. But those limited acts of aggression cannot be compared to Japan’s invasion and occupation of much of East and Southeast Asia before and during World War II. 

Compare this to 1914, when a German secret program envisioned not only an authoritarian German-ruled Central European economic bloc, but also the annexation by force of chunks of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.  Much of this was brought to fruition in 1918, when the treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceded Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States to Imperial Germany. The treaty’s other signatory was the new Communist regime of Vladimir Lenin, who had been transported to Tsarist Russia with the help of the German government.

Hitler’s territorial program was even more radical, involving the use of mass murder and deliberate starvation to depopulate Eastern Europe and Russia and make room for German colonists. No great power today, not even Putin’s revanchist Russia, has anything remotely resembling the grandiose plans of Imperial and Nazi Germany or Japan’s design for an autarkic Asian empire.

In the early 21st century, the equivalents of empires are competitive trade blocs that are established by diplomacy, not military conquest. In today’s multipolar world order, contemporary great powers use trade blocs to magnify their home markets. The goal is to promote national champions in large-scale industrial sectors, those characterized by increasing returns to scale — there’s a reason we don’t have mom-and-pop tire factories — or network effects — it’s better to have two rail lines linking 200 towns than 100 individual lines. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to NAFTA, has created a market of more than 500 million people, augmenting America’s home market of 340 million inhabitants. The European Union has more than 450 million people.

For its part, China, in addition to seeking bilateral economic agreements with countries around the world, has persuaded 14 other Asia-Pacific nations to join its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — without invading and occupying a single one of them. With its global Belt and Road Initiative, combining its overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” with its “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road,” China has sent bankers, development specialists, and infrastructure experts to countries, not soldiers. Beijing’s only acknowledged overseas military base is one in Djibouti, established in 2016.

Russia, with a mere 143 million people, has collaborated with Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan to form the Eurasian Economic Union, boasting more than 180 million people. The estimated 3 million inhabitants of the Ukrainian territories conquered by Russia add little to the population and home market of Russia’s Eurasian bloc, whatever the strategic value of the conquered territories might be to the Putin regime.

When it comes to military technologies and strategies, the differences between our time and the age of the world wars are also profound. Sudden cyberattacks on enemy infrastructure and telecommunications might be possible, but surprise attacks like Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union will not be repeated in our age of global satellite surveillance.

The age of mass conscription of citizens as cannon fodder in colossal wars is a thing of the past, too. As wars come to be fought by conventional missiles and drones and autonomous forces, along with technicians and special forces, mass armies with millions of conscripts are as obsolete as the cavalry. 

Moreover, as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, the individualistic citizens of one-child or two-child families, in “post-heroic” autocracies like China and Russia as well as in democracies, would be reluctant to serve in campaigns outside of their nation’s borders. In World War II, 40% percent of Americans who served were volunteers; 4 out of 10 American soldiers were volunteers in World War I, as well.

But according to YouGov, 60% of Americans who were recently polled say that in the event of a new world war, they would be unable to serve because of age or disability; 13% say they would refuse to serve if drafted; 9% say they would serve if drafted but would not volunteer; only 6% say they would volunteer for service.

Another source of confusion arises from describing all great-power rivalries, even indirect and limited ones, as “world wars.” In April, Fiona Hill, a former Trump national-security official, told Britain’s Channel Four, “We’re already in a situation where you could describe this as World War II structurally. We’ve got a hot war in Europe at the moment that’s had around a million casualties in terms of people either killed or severely wounded, millions of refugees, and all kinds of knock-on effects. That’s very similar to what happened in World War I and World War II.” 

It is more accurate to describe today’s geopolitical pattern as Cold War II, not World War III. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I between 1946 and 1990, there are two blocs — Washington and its European and East Asian allies and its Arab and Israeli allies in the Middle East against a loose coalition of China, Russia, and Iran. The grinding attrition of the war in Ukraine may bring to mind the trenches in World War I, but the war itself is similar to the proxy wars among America, the Soviet Union, and China that were fought in Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan in the first cold war. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I, the leaders of each bloc engage not only in limited proxy warfare, but also in arms races, space races, competition to win the favor of nonaligned nations, and various forms of subversion and sabotage, without bombing or invading each other’s homelands. And at some point, Cold War II is likely to end in a détente or what Boris Yeltsin called “a cold peace,” not in anything like the devastation, occupation, and reconstruction of defeated Germany and Japan eighty years ago. 

In addition to the example of the first Cold War, a historical comparison that might be useful is provided by the mercantilist rivalries of the 17th century through the 19th, when European powers like Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal fought limited wars outside of Europe with the goal of promoting their own commercial and industrial interests. The citizens of European countries often were little affected by these low-level skirmishes to control sea lanes or sugar islands or foreign markets outside of Europe.

But even these historical parallels, though more plausible than analogies with the world wars, should be handled with care. Unlike today’s Hollywood movies, today’s global conflicts are not an endless series of remakes of earlier stories. Rummaging through historical archives for specious precedents is a distraction from the necessary effort to understand what is genuinely new — and newly dangerous — in our own time. 

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