When big history is self-evidently being written, and leaders face momentous choices, the urge to find inspiration in instructive historical parallels is overwhelming and natural. “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” wrote the Oxford historian RG Collingwood.
The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas says 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 showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires. The lesson – and necessity – was to resist and rearm. “The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere,” Kallas said.
The Guardian
Russia has organised its economy onto a war footing, is using connections with BRIC countries to manage its financial stability and sending warships to Cuba with barely any pushback or comment from the west, which has become subsumed with the conflict in Gaza. Would a victorious Putin husband his resources, turn off the war machine and say the recapture of Kievan Rus had been a self-standing Moscow objective and Russia’s imperial ambitions were now sated?
But Russia’s foreign policy concept issued in 2023 focuses on a global confrontation with the US and building the alliances to defeat the west. The US president, 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.”
The D-day commemorations this week provide a timely reminder of the cost of not recognising the dangers in this febrile war zone and the consequences of not being prepared to bear the cost of continuing to subsidise the armaments required to help Ukraine fight on.
