"For us to revel in mythic references to the 1940s and 'the American story' is a shameful, sentimental self-indulgence. If we are to evoke the past at all, let us do so in a critical and exploratory fashion."
Why?
Maybe there is value in adopting a vision of what we want to be, even if it isn't exactly what we are or have been. As Lincoln pointed out on many occasions, the Declaration of Independence's bold claims about equality did not reflect at all the state of equality in America at its writing, but it was the most important of American documents precisely because it set forth our ideals. Who we saw ourselves as ultimately led us to become more like that. This is not to say that critical examination of America is wrong, but rather that rejecting our ideals because of past hypocrisy surrounding them is foolish and wrong.
Lend-Lease is a mythical narrative in Russia just as much as it is in America. Branding our aid to Ukraine is not likely to cause Russia to reflect it as more hostile, it will instead recall the historical circumstances of the first case even to their minds. If we gloss over the small details even in the US, so will they surely not come to see it in these critical terms as a "trap" likely to ensure war. Just the action of calling it Lend-Lease itself does not reasonably push us further into escalation, it is in fact a propaganda of shame which may help deescalate if anything.
So I cannot help but feel that this article really isn't about the calling of it Lend-Lease, but more a cautionary tale about escalation implicit in real material aid to Ukraine under the guise of a cautionary tale about mythologizing. And that is a much more uncomfortable conversation, because I think the fault lines are less academic and more political than Tooze is admitting here. It is really a discussion of how much are we all willing to risk our own lives for the lives of strangers, i.e. the same debate that existed back then.
The basis for my Hawkish, interventionist (US and NATO) views were a blend of Mearsheimer arguments - that the West has treaded at great risk up to the Great (formerly) Russian Bear's doorstep, but since we led the Ukraine there every step of the way, we have a moral responsibility not to seem them crushed or their nation totally wrecked; while they fight heroically it is increasingly over rubble of their cities and their tragic strategic loss of southern ports they will surely need to be a viable economy again; the burden rests on Joe Biden's temperment and world view - his disastrous negotiations with Joe Manchin July-Dec. 2021 told Putin all he needed to know about Joe's risk taking aversion: wouldn't break with a friend even if the future direction of the US depended on doing so. My way of saying and writing that the time for US and NATO to have intervened by a actual sending of troops not to Russia's border's with Ukraine but south and east of Kyiv -was Dec..-January of 2021-2022. Remember Biden's conceding of the tactical moral ground to Putin: when he said as 150,000 Russian troops were on the verge of invading - just don't take a big bite (outrageous signal and lack of verbal and tactical discipline) and then openly saying to prevent escalation - we won't send troops or provide a NO FLY ZONE...unacceptable leadership. As were then his verbal escalation making Putin a virtual or is actual war criminal...not that he isn't, but the adults in the room don't say things like that unless they mean actual war then and there...
We may not know for decades, if ever, who was the drive of this sit it out for months as the threat the White House was openly citing on CNN - the massive build up of troops on Ukraine's border they did nothing to significantly deter it...Putin had correctly read Biden as a broker deal maker don't like a big stakes fuss...tragic...
Ukraine has reason to be grateful, but resentful at the same time: the price of Biden being outmaneuvered is the destruction of the physical Ukraine and their economy...whatever they have achieved on the field - but not in Mariupol - is a terrible price the US and NATO has made them pay... if you listen carefully to thoughtful analysis it is getting more and more pessimistic...no exit ramps for either side, Zelensky or Putin...at some point if Russian forces trap or encircle a good portion of the Ukrainian forces in the East or South or both...there will come a decision time for Biden and NATO: they will have to do more or hand the victory to Putin...and where are the 70,000 US Special Forces developed since 2001's 9/11?
On the international law aspect of Lend Lease, Mulder’s book on sanctions suggests that the US policy was within that (by then) established framework that had rewritten the laws applicable to neutral nations. So I’m no longer convinced it was such a black and white situation as was referenced in your piece.
I had understood that Hitler’s antisemitism played a significant role in how he viewed the US and the inevitability of conflict with it. The books cited only reinforce this view.
Nevertheless, the recent antisemitic comments by Russian FM Lavrov, which do not appear to be shared by Putin, might better be understood as a political framework to keep the Russian public on side as the toll of the conflict becomes more evident. Sadly, there is a deeply ingrained streak of antisemitism that has always permeated Russian Orthodoxy and, as a result, the larger Russian society. It’s not an iron rule applicable to all, but it seems a majoritarian impulse nevertheless.
Ultimately, the aims of Germany were contrary to American national interests and the reality was that there could be no accommodation, war was coming and the only question was whether the US might still have Allies standing when it arrived. If what I wrote is an accurate assessment, and there’s no way to know, then Lend Lease made, as the saying about diplomacy has it, the inevitable happen sooner.
How does this all affect our thinking about Putin? Will he take the view, if pushed to the wall and sees no exit, that (like Hitler in his bunker) it was not a personal miscalculation but a failure of the Russian people who proved themselves unworthy of their historical mission. Will that translate into Putin reaching for the Apocalypse? Or, if enough bad news continues to flow from the Ukraine misadventure, will Putin be removed internally? We cannot possibly know.
The problem in international affairs is what a resolution might look like and to what extent it may be said to reward aggression. Russia’s apparent brutality (even factoring in some element of media exaggeration) and conscription in the Donbas (if true) might well turn Ukraine’s russophone population against Russia. Then Putin has no face saving exit but potentially a long, grinding counter-insurgency on his hands.
Back to your article’s point, I think matters have evolved since WWII and both proxy wars and the syphoning of armaments and intelligence to a belligerent without yourself declaring war are fairly well established. The question is whether Russia will now change those rules.
Americans are an ignorant, sentimental, complacent, self-indulgent people. Also, sometimes, goodhearted and brave. We are always trying to figure out who we are, appropriately, as more than older places, that's a moving target. Thanks for the historical perspective.
To follow the morons in charge of this to wherever it leads with blinders on is mad. Unfortunately, it is becoming an existential battle for both sides. God help us, Republicans aren't going to help.
As the politicians increasingly fail, the only way out of disaster seems to be a seizure of power by the military, whether through an outright coup or a disguised coup. As a retired officer, I know the top brass leaves a lot to be desired, but the politicians seem to be leading us to an apocalyptic disaster.
The point is to increase the cost of losing to the United States, so as to be able to invoke the Sunk Cost Fallacy as an excuse to escalate still further..
Great points. While the land lease of 1941 was when the USA put in the mantle of the world leader the current conflict is the challenge. Is the USA still up for its job. The stakes are enormous. The loss of Ukraine in this war might mean only that the age of the American world order is really over and we are in some transitionary multi polar world. It would also mean that the US is unable to protect its allies. And they should seek new alliances.
For Russia it is an exista too al threat. If it loses it means the whole idea of the Russian world must be scrapped. A new national idea will have to be found. Probably a similar transformation into a more docile democratic nation as Germany and Japan after the WW2.
USA cannot let Russia win in Ukraine because the end of the American age will be a catastrophe for the West as a whole.
Russia neither can lose this war. It will be the end of the pretense to be a superpower with its sphere of influence.
Are we short of a direct confrontation between Russia and the West?
I cannot agree with much of what you have written, even though I agree with your conclusion we must act strongly to support Ukraine, because I think your framing is totally incorrect.
This war, and the conflict between Russia and the "West" is not an existential threat. They very truly do not face any threat to the existence of Russian people, nor even to a Russian way of life in terms of culture or their domestic institutions. That is exactly the propaganda nonsense the Kremlin uses to push the war. Even if the Russian regime collapsed, Russians could go on carrying on as they had, but the war has little chance of effecting any Russian people outside of them going to fight in it. They could choose to continue with their economy and laws the exact same, if they lost the war utterly, they would simply have to stop attacking their neighbors for that is all that the rest of the world cares about it.
Neither is this a war being fought for some abstract "American Age." Should Ukraine fall, it will be Ukrainians who die or live subjected to worse lives, not countries to the west of them who do not have reasonable prospects of being involved because of NATO's deterrence. We need to support Ukrainians because they are fighting for their real lives, not some wispy gilded notion about hegemony. These are real people.
World War One happened because the British Empire was unwilling to allow Germany to become an equal great power. I hope my country, the United States, has the wisdom not to cause an even worse disaster for humanity because we are unwilling to share power with Russia and China.
I would like to see some appreciation of the opponents to this grotesque idea; i.e. Scott Ritter, Jacque Baud, Alexander Mercouris, Col Macgregor and many others.
Tooze suggests that the analogy between the March 2022 Lend-Lease legislation providing aid to Ukraine and the March 1941 original goes well beyond names. He sees both as very risky escalations and, quite reasonably, warns his readers that we should take care. In his view, the original Lend-Lease program “set America on an inescapable path towards war,” merging two regional conflicts into a truly global conflict in which we had ‘boots on the ground’. He also appears to see the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the conventional beginning of the Holocaust, as, at least in part, a response to Lend-Lease.
On Tooze’s account of American involvement in the war, I should think the British, in particular, would have a rather different view. And it appears to pass over the long and vexed American debate about our proper response (see Lynne Olsen’s THOSE ANGRY DAYS).
The suggestion that the Wannsee Conference and the Holocaust were in any way provoked by Lend-Lease appears to be unwarranted. The bulk of the killing may well have occurred after Wannsee, but, according to Richard Evans’ THE REICH AT WAR, Germany began using gas to kill patients in mental hospitals, especially Jews, in Germany, in December 1939 (p. 84). Evans also notes that “In February and March 1940, virtually the entire Jewish community of Stettin, numbering over a thousand, was deported on Heydrich’s orders under such appalling conditions that almost a third of them died of hunger, cold and exhaustion en route. In the course of 1939, 1940 and the first four months of 1941, a series of uncoordinated actions led to the deportation of more than 63,000 Jews into the General Government, including more than 3,000 from Alsace, over 6,000 from Baden and the Saar, and even 280 from Luxembourg. … As a first step, Hitler envisaged the concentration of all the remaining Jews in the Reich, including the newly incorporated territories, into ghettos located in the main Polish cities, which, he agreed with Himmler and Heydrich, would make their eventual expulsion easier. The American correspondent William L. Shirer concluded in November 1939 that ‘Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews’, for what else could be the consequence of their ghettoization? If the Jews were unable to make a living, how could they survive?” (p. 57)
According to Wikipedia, “At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union [by Germans] had already been underway for some months. Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – Einsatzgruppen were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941, Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute Comintern officials, ranking members of the Communist Party, extremist and radical Communist Party members, people’s commissars, and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute ‘other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)’. He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged. On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. By August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed.” (wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference)
Escalation should never be undertaken lightly, but, as Timothy Snyder observes in ON TYRANNY, neither should one “obey in advance.”
In 1941 the United States produced 70% of the world's oil and its GDP was 2.5 times that of Germany and 4.4 times that of Japan, with much room to grow given its access to resources. The USSR economy was nearly equal to that of Germany. In 2022 the US GDP has been overtaken by China (PPP) and Russia is equal to that of Germany (PPP), with the growth engine of the world being in the East (with ASEAN and India refusing to side with the US), not in a slow growing Europe with increasing resource issues.
The sane are in China and Russia, the insanity is that of the US pushing an aggressive NATO to Russia's borders and fostering regime change (2014) in Ukraine and then training and arming a Ukraine military integrated into the NATO command structure. This proxy war (because that is what it is) will not end well for the West. The only question is if they will be insane enough to escalate further, Russia and China are happy to watch the slow relative decline unless forced to take action.
You could start by reading my post properly, I am using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP which removes the distortions of over and under valued exchange rates. From the World Bank:
My fault. I googled for PPP and nothing useful came up. From what I found I was thinking about "per capita", but there the results would have been even worse, so I figured it wasn't what you meant.
I don't agree with your assessment about Purchase Power Parity being useful when it comes to comparing economic strengths while discussing a war though. The thing with purchasing power parity is, that it doesn't buy you any imports, which the Russian military still largely depends on. Especially not imports from the west, which again the Russian military still largely depends on.
China is another discussion; I agree. But China has way more potential than the US alone anyways, regardless whether they are currently first or second place.
On the other hand China still needs a strong economy to keep its citizens happy. And again PPP doesn't really reflect the situation correctly here. Chinese don't want equal purchasing power from their Russian customers; they want actual purchasing power. And again Russia isn't all that strong in that department, because exchange rates actually do matter when trading internationally.
Russia is about to get relegated to being a resource colony of China. Of course the Chinese won't be stupid enough to say so. The contracts they are offering will though ...
US + EU has the potential to almost match the economic might of China, but that's about it. Russia will be all but a rounding error, regardless of which side they chose in the long run, economically. Their resources and their strategic position will be a lot more valuable to China than anything Russia can offer economically.
The deciding factors in the long run will be how India, Asia, Africa and even South America chose to align IMO. Russia will only be a nuisance to everyone due to its (decaying) nuclear arsenal.
I appreciate the careful historical analysis and thought which went into the strategic questions at the very end. I have written fairly extensively about the war since the very beginning, and readers who are interested can find find my postings here: https://wordpress.com/posts/gracchibros.wordpress.com; the Ukraine commentary has eight posts starting on Feb. 25, 2022 the latest on April 21st.
In my commentary on the siege of Mariupol, I was calling for an airdrop/airlift/humanitarian/military no fly zone (March 8th) as soon as it was apparent the deep trouble Ukraine was in, and would be in, and still is by the loss of that key port, which essentially undermines its economic ability to export its products by sea.
I don't think I was naïve militarily or strategically, as I anticipated that any of these tactics to re-supply implied getting to a NO FLY ZONE with all the possible escalatory steps involved: suppression of Russian electronic and anti-aircraft missile systems, including those beyond Ukrainian soil, most likely in very southern Russia itself; it could have been argued on the best moral grounds if it was done just to get the civilians out, worth the risks of escalation on those sound grounds; yet all I hear on CNN, almost equivalent in its censorship of differing views to official Washington policy, is how important the southern sea coasts of Ukraine are, how badly Russian wants them, especially Mariupol - in which case March was the month to act...but all we get are "heroic resistance" stories...Biden and NATO were unwilling to face those risks in early/mid March.
If I was willing to run those risks of escalation then, the situation we are in now looks to me that if Putin doubles down on or after May 9th, imposes a draft or more, then our level of aid to Ukraine while increasing, will be insufficient to drive the Russians out and to create a viable Ukrainian state and economy. Therefore, I think at some point air intervention will be necessary, perhaps starting with the transfer of A-10 anti armor attack aircraft. Will they be effective without the other layers of peeling off the Russian air defenses? Including the other aircraft whose work logically precedes the A-10's specialties. I don't know, but I doubt it.
But does the West understand that so much has happened to remind us of Timothy Snyder's accounts in "Bloodlands" that Ukraine is not going to compromise since so much of their country and its southern coastline have been lost or destroyed, they can't stop at the compromises which everyone saw a month ago (from Prof. Mearsheimer to Yanis Varoufakis).
That's a round about way of me agreeing here, with Lend Lease in 1941 being a defacto declaration of war by the US and I said it in the posts in March, that we, the US and much if not all of NATO are at war with Russia now, we just don't want to admit it and the risks it involves but the measures necessary to even save the Ukraine, and push the Russians out to regain the borders of 1991's Independence Vote, amount to calling Putin's bluffs, undefined ravings as well as nuclear threats. Sorry, that's where we are and when the truth is known about the conduct of Russia in Mariupol, the escalatory pressure will go up mightily.
May I supplement that a bit? Ukraine has been famous for its rich soils for a long time, but it's only with the recent surge into headlines and background stories that I've come to realize just how dependent the Third World - Middle East and Africa, esp. are on its grain shipments abroad (and sunflower oil as well). If you couple this fact with Russia's mineral and fossil fuel abundances, it would be strategically important for both Russia and the West to try to make sure that Ukraine's riches (it has some substantial minerals in the South and Southeast as well) were in their orbits. So from Putin's long term interests, it's not all about geography and culture. Had he, Putin, built something more desirable since 1991, in Russia, worthy of emulation, then he m ight have been able to convince some former satellites or even closer regions to come back within Russia's orbit. Who wants to be close to Russia now? Ukraine voted clearly in 1991 to be free and independent, with majorities in all regions. A Russia which controlled mineral and agricultural resources on a combined scale from both countries would be even more trouble for the West. Maybe not an "existential rival" as Prof. Mearsheimer has described the US vs China, but after this physical invasion, its getting much closer; and if we're willing to risk nuclear war to defend "every inch of every NATO member" as Biden says, that means the Baltics and Romania are worth nuclear risks...but the Ukraine which we have led close to NATO but not over the finish line...gets conventional weapons but no such pledge? This is a legal distinction obscuring a moral debt which we and NATO have enmeshed Ukraine in...although we're very slow to admit it...We owe them full protection.
I hope that helps. Because right now, it looks tragic all the way around.
In the spirit of your question, would defending Poland be? On the very small Baltics? The same answer but the answer is loaded already in your question. But let me turn that around on you. If your reasoning is airtight, that fear drives all the discussions of escalation/frictions/conventional war between the nuclear powers - 2 of the 7 (or is it eight now.) then the aggressor which waves the wildest threats and has the weapons deters those who most fear a confrontation escalating up the nuclear rungs of weapons...I lived through the Berlin stand-off at Checkpoint Charlie and the Cuban Missile crisis where nuclear bluffing was a component on both sides, as was nuclear fear...and the US early in the Cold War (Quemoy and Matsu, Korea...) was the one waving its nuclear superiority around as a deterrent...
So the risks and fears are real but in Biden's and NATO's case on the table here it seems to me they have handed all the tactical initiative to Putin out of the gate, especially Biden's bizarre early statements (don't take too big a slice; we won't send troops of set up "NO FLY ZONE"; Putin it seems to me is a skilled psychological observer of the West and all he had to do in weighing Biden's reaction was to look at the fiasco of Biden's negotiations with Joe Manchin: always backtracking, no imaginative alternatives, and no "riot act" read to Manchin in a national broadcast.
No sane person wants to court a nuclear exchange: by the same token the side which lets those fears dominate strategy is at a great disadvantage...in this case Ukraine is paying a huge price for those fears every day; they may win and having nothing of their country left to celebrate...
Where do these ideas come from, e.g., "FDR's denunciation of Kristallnacht"? He waffled and did little. The US response came from Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and despite FDR.
The pages above contain many myths, like the notion that "the American Century" getting traction in 1941, let alone at any time in the 1940s. There's no documentation for this. The American Century might have been trumpeted in the better drawing rooms of the northeast coast, but was repellent in Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, and elsewhere in the country at least until the Korean War.
As for lend lease, it got out of control, just as the noninterventionists predicted. Start by calculating how much of the vast amount of aid sent to Stalin--with no accounting by Congress-- was dedicated to maintaining the Gulag in the midst of war. Am not seeing that figure....
the leadership in Europe in the US, the center right, broadly defined, could not deal with the Climate Crisis over the past 30 years, starting with James Hansen's testimony in 1988, and the events in Ukraine, and their cost today (which will soar when we see how much of the country Putin's troops have wrecked) only add up to the fact the West cannot do anything large and costly now given legislative stalemate, even at the cost of their own future.
Democrats have provided little leadership, and the core intellectual ideas (sic) of the Republican party: anti-statist, anti-spending, anti-tax, anti-regulatory mean that not much happens, even to "Make America Great Again." If you want a refresher course on our futility just visit all the writing about China's rise and its Belt and Road overtures.
Has any major power - addressed to Professor Tooze here as well - ever laid out a grander red carpet to its potential rival and next great power than the US (and Western Europe, esp. Germany)...on this Professor Mearsheimer is surely right, but he got the invasion wrong, and the brutal fact is no former Soviet "satellite" nation wants any part (voluntarily) of Putin's system unless they're already in a stranglehold like Belarus.
I take a back seat to no one on climate, having spent three years fighting for a Green New Deal. Any better ideas? Gee, maybe a carbon tax now 30 y ears too late and oh, by the way, it's a tax forbidden by Republican ideology...back to Emerson's self-reliance I guess.
Remarquable travail de la DW ! Et bizarrement j’observe que la Russie face à l’Ukraine recoupe très évidemment la France face à l’Algerie. Ce n’est certes pas par hasard que les amis de Putin en France / le Pen Zemmour l’Action française / sont aussi des tenants de l’Algérie française : l’Algérie n’est pas un pays le peuple algérien n’existe pas…
Impérialisme et Colonialisme sont à la source de ces politiques. Timothy Snyder a fort bien montré que cette réthorique était identique à celle du chancelier Hitler et que par- delà l’Ukraine elle recouvrait aussi Pologne et pays baltes, entre autres cibles potentielles de Putin.
Le moindre risque aujourd’hui c’est de faire tout / Tout / pour que la Russie soit défaite. Autrement la machine de guerre repartira de l’avant et ce sera bien pire. Nous avons / Allemagne et UE / eu tout faux en 2014 - le résultat et là en 2022.
Ce que vous dites Adam est intéressant mais l’heure n’est plus à noyer le poisson et à finasser.
We are already at War with Russia, we're just using Ukrainians to fight it, and when all of then are Dead, and that day is not far off, we will used are EU Puppies to fight the Russians. The problem is that Russia will be forced into their fall back Survival of the Russian State Plan and then the War will arrive in the American Homeland.
"For us to revel in mythic references to the 1940s and 'the American story' is a shameful, sentimental self-indulgence. If we are to evoke the past at all, let us do so in a critical and exploratory fashion."
Why?
Maybe there is value in adopting a vision of what we want to be, even if it isn't exactly what we are or have been. As Lincoln pointed out on many occasions, the Declaration of Independence's bold claims about equality did not reflect at all the state of equality in America at its writing, but it was the most important of American documents precisely because it set forth our ideals. Who we saw ourselves as ultimately led us to become more like that. This is not to say that critical examination of America is wrong, but rather that rejecting our ideals because of past hypocrisy surrounding them is foolish and wrong.
Lend-Lease is a mythical narrative in Russia just as much as it is in America. Branding our aid to Ukraine is not likely to cause Russia to reflect it as more hostile, it will instead recall the historical circumstances of the first case even to their minds. If we gloss over the small details even in the US, so will they surely not come to see it in these critical terms as a "trap" likely to ensure war. Just the action of calling it Lend-Lease itself does not reasonably push us further into escalation, it is in fact a propaganda of shame which may help deescalate if anything.
So I cannot help but feel that this article really isn't about the calling of it Lend-Lease, but more a cautionary tale about escalation implicit in real material aid to Ukraine under the guise of a cautionary tale about mythologizing. And that is a much more uncomfortable conversation, because I think the fault lines are less academic and more political than Tooze is admitting here. It is really a discussion of how much are we all willing to risk our own lives for the lives of strangers, i.e. the same debate that existed back then.
This is one of the most thoughtful comments I’ve read in a long time and gives important things to think about.
Thank you. There is a lot more I wanted to say, but I tried to write less so that at least some of it might be intelligible, and I'm glad it worked.
The basis for my Hawkish, interventionist (US and NATO) views were a blend of Mearsheimer arguments - that the West has treaded at great risk up to the Great (formerly) Russian Bear's doorstep, but since we led the Ukraine there every step of the way, we have a moral responsibility not to seem them crushed or their nation totally wrecked; while they fight heroically it is increasingly over rubble of their cities and their tragic strategic loss of southern ports they will surely need to be a viable economy again; the burden rests on Joe Biden's temperment and world view - his disastrous negotiations with Joe Manchin July-Dec. 2021 told Putin all he needed to know about Joe's risk taking aversion: wouldn't break with a friend even if the future direction of the US depended on doing so. My way of saying and writing that the time for US and NATO to have intervened by a actual sending of troops not to Russia's border's with Ukraine but south and east of Kyiv -was Dec..-January of 2021-2022. Remember Biden's conceding of the tactical moral ground to Putin: when he said as 150,000 Russian troops were on the verge of invading - just don't take a big bite (outrageous signal and lack of verbal and tactical discipline) and then openly saying to prevent escalation - we won't send troops or provide a NO FLY ZONE...unacceptable leadership. As were then his verbal escalation making Putin a virtual or is actual war criminal...not that he isn't, but the adults in the room don't say things like that unless they mean actual war then and there...
We may not know for decades, if ever, who was the drive of this sit it out for months as the threat the White House was openly citing on CNN - the massive build up of troops on Ukraine's border they did nothing to significantly deter it...Putin had correctly read Biden as a broker deal maker don't like a big stakes fuss...tragic...
Ukraine has reason to be grateful, but resentful at the same time: the price of Biden being outmaneuvered is the destruction of the physical Ukraine and their economy...whatever they have achieved on the field - but not in Mariupol - is a terrible price the US and NATO has made them pay... if you listen carefully to thoughtful analysis it is getting more and more pessimistic...no exit ramps for either side, Zelensky or Putin...at some point if Russian forces trap or encircle a good portion of the Ukrainian forces in the East or South or both...there will come a decision time for Biden and NATO: they will have to do more or hand the victory to Putin...and where are the 70,000 US Special Forces developed since 2001's 9/11?
On the international law aspect of Lend Lease, Mulder’s book on sanctions suggests that the US policy was within that (by then) established framework that had rewritten the laws applicable to neutral nations. So I’m no longer convinced it was such a black and white situation as was referenced in your piece.
I had understood that Hitler’s antisemitism played a significant role in how he viewed the US and the inevitability of conflict with it. The books cited only reinforce this view.
Nevertheless, the recent antisemitic comments by Russian FM Lavrov, which do not appear to be shared by Putin, might better be understood as a political framework to keep the Russian public on side as the toll of the conflict becomes more evident. Sadly, there is a deeply ingrained streak of antisemitism that has always permeated Russian Orthodoxy and, as a result, the larger Russian society. It’s not an iron rule applicable to all, but it seems a majoritarian impulse nevertheless.
Ultimately, the aims of Germany were contrary to American national interests and the reality was that there could be no accommodation, war was coming and the only question was whether the US might still have Allies standing when it arrived. If what I wrote is an accurate assessment, and there’s no way to know, then Lend Lease made, as the saying about diplomacy has it, the inevitable happen sooner.
How does this all affect our thinking about Putin? Will he take the view, if pushed to the wall and sees no exit, that (like Hitler in his bunker) it was not a personal miscalculation but a failure of the Russian people who proved themselves unworthy of their historical mission. Will that translate into Putin reaching for the Apocalypse? Or, if enough bad news continues to flow from the Ukraine misadventure, will Putin be removed internally? We cannot possibly know.
The problem in international affairs is what a resolution might look like and to what extent it may be said to reward aggression. Russia’s apparent brutality (even factoring in some element of media exaggeration) and conscription in the Donbas (if true) might well turn Ukraine’s russophone population against Russia. Then Putin has no face saving exit but potentially a long, grinding counter-insurgency on his hands.
Back to your article’s point, I think matters have evolved since WWII and both proxy wars and the syphoning of armaments and intelligence to a belligerent without yourself declaring war are fairly well established. The question is whether Russia will now change those rules.
Americans are an ignorant, sentimental, complacent, self-indulgent people. Also, sometimes, goodhearted and brave. We are always trying to figure out who we are, appropriately, as more than older places, that's a moving target. Thanks for the historical perspective.
Terribly frightening.
To follow the morons in charge of this to wherever it leads with blinders on is mad. Unfortunately, it is becoming an existential battle for both sides. God help us, Republicans aren't going to help.
As the politicians increasingly fail, the only way out of disaster seems to be a seizure of power by the military, whether through an outright coup or a disguised coup. As a retired officer, I know the top brass leaves a lot to be desired, but the politicians seem to be leading us to an apocalyptic disaster.
The point is to increase the cost of losing to the United States, so as to be able to invoke the Sunk Cost Fallacy as an excuse to escalate still further..
Muh American Credibility!
I would suggest reading "Day of Deceit" by Robert Stinnett, then re-reading the above timeline of events.
Douglas Horne did a two volume work on the leadup to Pearl Harbor that amplifies and supports Stinnett's case.
Great points. While the land lease of 1941 was when the USA put in the mantle of the world leader the current conflict is the challenge. Is the USA still up for its job. The stakes are enormous. The loss of Ukraine in this war might mean only that the age of the American world order is really over and we are in some transitionary multi polar world. It would also mean that the US is unable to protect its allies. And they should seek new alliances.
For Russia it is an exista too al threat. If it loses it means the whole idea of the Russian world must be scrapped. A new national idea will have to be found. Probably a similar transformation into a more docile democratic nation as Germany and Japan after the WW2.
USA cannot let Russia win in Ukraine because the end of the American age will be a catastrophe for the West as a whole.
Russia neither can lose this war. It will be the end of the pretense to be a superpower with its sphere of influence.
Are we short of a direct confrontation between Russia and the West?
I cannot agree with much of what you have written, even though I agree with your conclusion we must act strongly to support Ukraine, because I think your framing is totally incorrect.
This war, and the conflict between Russia and the "West" is not an existential threat. They very truly do not face any threat to the existence of Russian people, nor even to a Russian way of life in terms of culture or their domestic institutions. That is exactly the propaganda nonsense the Kremlin uses to push the war. Even if the Russian regime collapsed, Russians could go on carrying on as they had, but the war has little chance of effecting any Russian people outside of them going to fight in it. They could choose to continue with their economy and laws the exact same, if they lost the war utterly, they would simply have to stop attacking their neighbors for that is all that the rest of the world cares about it.
Neither is this a war being fought for some abstract "American Age." Should Ukraine fall, it will be Ukrainians who die or live subjected to worse lives, not countries to the west of them who do not have reasonable prospects of being involved because of NATO's deterrence. We need to support Ukrainians because they are fighting for their real lives, not some wispy gilded notion about hegemony. These are real people.
World War One happened because the British Empire was unwilling to allow Germany to become an equal great power. I hope my country, the United States, has the wisdom not to cause an even worse disaster for humanity because we are unwilling to share power with Russia and China.
I would like to see some appreciation of the opponents to this grotesque idea; i.e. Scott Ritter, Jacque Baud, Alexander Mercouris, Col Macgregor and many others.
Tooze suggests that the analogy between the March 2022 Lend-Lease legislation providing aid to Ukraine and the March 1941 original goes well beyond names. He sees both as very risky escalations and, quite reasonably, warns his readers that we should take care. In his view, the original Lend-Lease program “set America on an inescapable path towards war,” merging two regional conflicts into a truly global conflict in which we had ‘boots on the ground’. He also appears to see the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the conventional beginning of the Holocaust, as, at least in part, a response to Lend-Lease.
On Tooze’s account of American involvement in the war, I should think the British, in particular, would have a rather different view. And it appears to pass over the long and vexed American debate about our proper response (see Lynne Olsen’s THOSE ANGRY DAYS).
The suggestion that the Wannsee Conference and the Holocaust were in any way provoked by Lend-Lease appears to be unwarranted. The bulk of the killing may well have occurred after Wannsee, but, according to Richard Evans’ THE REICH AT WAR, Germany began using gas to kill patients in mental hospitals, especially Jews, in Germany, in December 1939 (p. 84). Evans also notes that “In February and March 1940, virtually the entire Jewish community of Stettin, numbering over a thousand, was deported on Heydrich’s orders under such appalling conditions that almost a third of them died of hunger, cold and exhaustion en route. In the course of 1939, 1940 and the first four months of 1941, a series of uncoordinated actions led to the deportation of more than 63,000 Jews into the General Government, including more than 3,000 from Alsace, over 6,000 from Baden and the Saar, and even 280 from Luxembourg. … As a first step, Hitler envisaged the concentration of all the remaining Jews in the Reich, including the newly incorporated territories, into ghettos located in the main Polish cities, which, he agreed with Himmler and Heydrich, would make their eventual expulsion easier. The American correspondent William L. Shirer concluded in November 1939 that ‘Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews’, for what else could be the consequence of their ghettoization? If the Jews were unable to make a living, how could they survive?” (p. 57)
According to Wikipedia, “At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union [by Germans] had already been underway for some months. Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – Einsatzgruppen were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941, Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute Comintern officials, ranking members of the Communist Party, extremist and radical Communist Party members, people’s commissars, and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute ‘other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)’. He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged. On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. By August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed.” (wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference)
Escalation should never be undertaken lightly, but, as Timothy Snyder observes in ON TYRANNY, neither should one “obey in advance.”
In 1941 the United States produced 70% of the world's oil and its GDP was 2.5 times that of Germany and 4.4 times that of Japan, with much room to grow given its access to resources. The USSR economy was nearly equal to that of Germany. In 2022 the US GDP has been overtaken by China (PPP) and Russia is equal to that of Germany (PPP), with the growth engine of the world being in the East (with ASEAN and India refusing to side with the US), not in a slow growing Europe with increasing resource issues.
The sane are in China and Russia, the insanity is that of the US pushing an aggressive NATO to Russia's borders and fostering regime change (2014) in Ukraine and then training and arming a Ukraine military integrated into the NATO command structure. This proxy war (because that is what it is) will not end well for the West. The only question is if they will be insane enough to escalate further, Russia and China are happy to watch the slow relative decline unless forced to take action.
Russia GDP equal to Germanies? It's not even close:
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/russia/germany?sc=XE15
Russia just barely achieves to come close to Italy:
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/russia/italy
China vs US:
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/usa/china
Interestingly enough China and Russia are roughly on the same level now, if compared per capita.
You could start by reading my post properly, I am using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) GDP which removes the distortions of over and under valued exchange rates. From the World Bank:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD
China: US$24.3 trillion
USA: US$21 trillion
Germany: US$4.6 trillion:
Russia: US$4.4 billion
The above is a much better measure of the actual economic size of each nation. In PPP terms China passed the US in 2013.
My fault. I googled for PPP and nothing useful came up. From what I found I was thinking about "per capita", but there the results would have been even worse, so I figured it wasn't what you meant.
I don't agree with your assessment about Purchase Power Parity being useful when it comes to comparing economic strengths while discussing a war though. The thing with purchasing power parity is, that it doesn't buy you any imports, which the Russian military still largely depends on. Especially not imports from the west, which again the Russian military still largely depends on.
China is another discussion; I agree. But China has way more potential than the US alone anyways, regardless whether they are currently first or second place.
On the other hand China still needs a strong economy to keep its citizens happy. And again PPP doesn't really reflect the situation correctly here. Chinese don't want equal purchasing power from their Russian customers; they want actual purchasing power. And again Russia isn't all that strong in that department, because exchange rates actually do matter when trading internationally.
Russia is about to get relegated to being a resource colony of China. Of course the Chinese won't be stupid enough to say so. The contracts they are offering will though ...
US + EU has the potential to almost match the economic might of China, but that's about it. Russia will be all but a rounding error, regardless of which side they chose in the long run, economically. Their resources and their strategic position will be a lot more valuable to China than anything Russia can offer economically.
The deciding factors in the long run will be how India, Asia, Africa and even South America chose to align IMO. Russia will only be a nuisance to everyone due to its (decaying) nuclear arsenal.
I appreciate the careful historical analysis and thought which went into the strategic questions at the very end. I have written fairly extensively about the war since the very beginning, and readers who are interested can find find my postings here: https://wordpress.com/posts/gracchibros.wordpress.com; the Ukraine commentary has eight posts starting on Feb. 25, 2022 the latest on April 21st.
In my commentary on the siege of Mariupol, I was calling for an airdrop/airlift/humanitarian/military no fly zone (March 8th) as soon as it was apparent the deep trouble Ukraine was in, and would be in, and still is by the loss of that key port, which essentially undermines its economic ability to export its products by sea.
I don't think I was naïve militarily or strategically, as I anticipated that any of these tactics to re-supply implied getting to a NO FLY ZONE with all the possible escalatory steps involved: suppression of Russian electronic and anti-aircraft missile systems, including those beyond Ukrainian soil, most likely in very southern Russia itself; it could have been argued on the best moral grounds if it was done just to get the civilians out, worth the risks of escalation on those sound grounds; yet all I hear on CNN, almost equivalent in its censorship of differing views to official Washington policy, is how important the southern sea coasts of Ukraine are, how badly Russian wants them, especially Mariupol - in which case March was the month to act...but all we get are "heroic resistance" stories...Biden and NATO were unwilling to face those risks in early/mid March.
If I was willing to run those risks of escalation then, the situation we are in now looks to me that if Putin doubles down on or after May 9th, imposes a draft or more, then our level of aid to Ukraine while increasing, will be insufficient to drive the Russians out and to create a viable Ukrainian state and economy. Therefore, I think at some point air intervention will be necessary, perhaps starting with the transfer of A-10 anti armor attack aircraft. Will they be effective without the other layers of peeling off the Russian air defenses? Including the other aircraft whose work logically precedes the A-10's specialties. I don't know, but I doubt it.
But does the West understand that so much has happened to remind us of Timothy Snyder's accounts in "Bloodlands" that Ukraine is not going to compromise since so much of their country and its southern coastline have been lost or destroyed, they can't stop at the compromises which everyone saw a month ago (from Prof. Mearsheimer to Yanis Varoufakis).
That's a round about way of me agreeing here, with Lend Lease in 1941 being a defacto declaration of war by the US and I said it in the posts in March, that we, the US and much if not all of NATO are at war with Russia now, we just don't want to admit it and the risks it involves but the measures necessary to even save the Ukraine, and push the Russians out to regain the borders of 1991's Independence Vote, amount to calling Putin's bluffs, undefined ravings as well as nuclear threats. Sorry, that's where we are and when the truth is known about the conduct of Russia in Mariupol, the escalatory pressure will go up mightily.
Why is Ukraine worth risking a nuclear war?
May I supplement that a bit? Ukraine has been famous for its rich soils for a long time, but it's only with the recent surge into headlines and background stories that I've come to realize just how dependent the Third World - Middle East and Africa, esp. are on its grain shipments abroad (and sunflower oil as well). If you couple this fact with Russia's mineral and fossil fuel abundances, it would be strategically important for both Russia and the West to try to make sure that Ukraine's riches (it has some substantial minerals in the South and Southeast as well) were in their orbits. So from Putin's long term interests, it's not all about geography and culture. Had he, Putin, built something more desirable since 1991, in Russia, worthy of emulation, then he m ight have been able to convince some former satellites or even closer regions to come back within Russia's orbit. Who wants to be close to Russia now? Ukraine voted clearly in 1991 to be free and independent, with majorities in all regions. A Russia which controlled mineral and agricultural resources on a combined scale from both countries would be even more trouble for the West. Maybe not an "existential rival" as Prof. Mearsheimer has described the US vs China, but after this physical invasion, its getting much closer; and if we're willing to risk nuclear war to defend "every inch of every NATO member" as Biden says, that means the Baltics and Romania are worth nuclear risks...but the Ukraine which we have led close to NATO but not over the finish line...gets conventional weapons but no such pledge? This is a legal distinction obscuring a moral debt which we and NATO have enmeshed Ukraine in...although we're very slow to admit it...We owe them full protection.
I hope that helps. Because right now, it looks tragic all the way around.
In the spirit of your question, would defending Poland be? On the very small Baltics? The same answer but the answer is loaded already in your question. But let me turn that around on you. If your reasoning is airtight, that fear drives all the discussions of escalation/frictions/conventional war between the nuclear powers - 2 of the 7 (or is it eight now.) then the aggressor which waves the wildest threats and has the weapons deters those who most fear a confrontation escalating up the nuclear rungs of weapons...I lived through the Berlin stand-off at Checkpoint Charlie and the Cuban Missile crisis where nuclear bluffing was a component on both sides, as was nuclear fear...and the US early in the Cold War (Quemoy and Matsu, Korea...) was the one waving its nuclear superiority around as a deterrent...
So the risks and fears are real but in Biden's and NATO's case on the table here it seems to me they have handed all the tactical initiative to Putin out of the gate, especially Biden's bizarre early statements (don't take too big a slice; we won't send troops of set up "NO FLY ZONE"; Putin it seems to me is a skilled psychological observer of the West and all he had to do in weighing Biden's reaction was to look at the fiasco of Biden's negotiations with Joe Manchin: always backtracking, no imaginative alternatives, and no "riot act" read to Manchin in a national broadcast.
No sane person wants to court a nuclear exchange: by the same token the side which lets those fears dominate strategy is at a great disadvantage...in this case Ukraine is paying a huge price for those fears every day; they may win and having nothing of their country left to celebrate...
Where do these ideas come from, e.g., "FDR's denunciation of Kristallnacht"? He waffled and did little. The US response came from Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and despite FDR.
The pages above contain many myths, like the notion that "the American Century" getting traction in 1941, let alone at any time in the 1940s. There's no documentation for this. The American Century might have been trumpeted in the better drawing rooms of the northeast coast, but was repellent in Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, and elsewhere in the country at least until the Korean War.
As for lend lease, it got out of control, just as the noninterventionists predicted. Start by calculating how much of the vast amount of aid sent to Stalin--with no accounting by Congress-- was dedicated to maintaining the Gulag in the midst of war. Am not seeing that figure....
Etc etc.....
spending more on Ukraine than on the Climate. That says a lot about priorities.
the leadership in Europe in the US, the center right, broadly defined, could not deal with the Climate Crisis over the past 30 years, starting with James Hansen's testimony in 1988, and the events in Ukraine, and their cost today (which will soar when we see how much of the country Putin's troops have wrecked) only add up to the fact the West cannot do anything large and costly now given legislative stalemate, even at the cost of their own future.
Democrats have provided little leadership, and the core intellectual ideas (sic) of the Republican party: anti-statist, anti-spending, anti-tax, anti-regulatory mean that not much happens, even to "Make America Great Again." If you want a refresher course on our futility just visit all the writing about China's rise and its Belt and Road overtures.
Has any major power - addressed to Professor Tooze here as well - ever laid out a grander red carpet to its potential rival and next great power than the US (and Western Europe, esp. Germany)...on this Professor Mearsheimer is surely right, but he got the invasion wrong, and the brutal fact is no former Soviet "satellite" nation wants any part (voluntarily) of Putin's system unless they're already in a stranglehold like Belarus.
I take a back seat to no one on climate, having spent three years fighting for a Green New Deal. Any better ideas? Gee, maybe a carbon tax now 30 y ears too late and oh, by the way, it's a tax forbidden by Republican ideology...back to Emerson's self-reliance I guess.
https://www.dw.com/en/russias-war-in-ukraine-germany-faces-a-reckoning/a-61713248
Remarquable travail de la DW ! Et bizarrement j’observe que la Russie face à l’Ukraine recoupe très évidemment la France face à l’Algerie. Ce n’est certes pas par hasard que les amis de Putin en France / le Pen Zemmour l’Action française / sont aussi des tenants de l’Algérie française : l’Algérie n’est pas un pays le peuple algérien n’existe pas…
Impérialisme et Colonialisme sont à la source de ces politiques. Timothy Snyder a fort bien montré que cette réthorique était identique à celle du chancelier Hitler et que par- delà l’Ukraine elle recouvrait aussi Pologne et pays baltes, entre autres cibles potentielles de Putin.
Le moindre risque aujourd’hui c’est de faire tout / Tout / pour que la Russie soit défaite. Autrement la machine de guerre repartira de l’avant et ce sera bien pire. Nous avons / Allemagne et UE / eu tout faux en 2014 - le résultat et là en 2022.
Ce que vous dites Adam est intéressant mais l’heure n’est plus à noyer le poisson et à finasser.
Very well put.
We are already at War with Russia, we're just using Ukrainians to fight it, and when all of then are Dead, and that day is not far off, we will used are EU Puppies to fight the Russians. The problem is that Russia will be forced into their fall back Survival of the Russian State Plan and then the War will arrive in the American Homeland.