Every Sunday this summer, we’re sharing essays from the Foreign Affairs archives that examine the historical parallels of pressing global issues today. Next up is “How Wars Don’t End,” a 2023 essay by the historian Margaret MacMillan on what twentieth-century conflicts can tell us about the current war in Ukraine. Scenes from today’s battlefields—muddy soldiers shooting at one another across a shell-pocked wasteland—“could be from the western front in 1916 or Stalingrad in 1942,” wrote MacMillan. “And that is only one of many ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine harks back to the two world wars.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, in part, to correct what he saw as a national humiliation. Western governments in the twenty-first century underestimated the extent to which he “resented Moscow’s loss of power after the Cold War,” much as European elites “failed to grasp the strength of nationalism” in 1914. Like Putin today, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the leaders of Austria-Hungary believed in the run-up to World War I that winning a “quick and decisive war offered the best way to reinvigorate their countries.” But they miscalculated, leaving them “unprepared for what quickly became static frontlines,” noted MacMillan. “As World War I indelibly demonstrated, wars rarely go as planned.”
Making peace is difficult because “losers do not easily accept defeat, and victors find it hard to be magnanimous.” When the war in Ukraine eventually ends, Western governments will need to help Kyiv rebuild and refrain from treating Moscow “as a permanent pariah.” After all, “if Russia is left in turmoil, bitter and isolated, with many of its leaders and people blaming others for its failures, as so many Germans did in those interwar decades,” warned MacMillan, “then the end of one war could simply lay the groundwork for another.”
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