Different Histories

In his piece at Bloomberg, after expressing a fond hope that the Ukrainians will prevail in their war against the Russian invasion of their country which I share, Niall Ferguson makes what I think is a very good point. Presidents Biden, Zelenskyy, Putin, and Xi are all turning to historic parallels to form their understanding of what’s going on now but they’re each turning to different history and interpreting it differently. As Dr. Ferguson sees it, the Biden administration is seeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the prism of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan:

According to Sanger, who cannot have written his piece without high-level sources, the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units, according to American officials. But as of now, Mr. Biden and his staff do not see the utility of an expansive covert effort to use the spy agency to ferry in arms as the United States did in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.”

He remarks:

It would indeed be wonderful if the combination of attrition in Ukraine and a sanctions-induced financial crisis at home led to Putin’s downfall. Take that, China! Just you try the same trick with Taiwan — which, by the way, we care about a lot more than Ukraine because of all those amazing semiconductors they make at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The fascinating thing about this strategy is the way it combines cynicism and optimism. It is, when you come to think of it, archetypal Realpolitik to allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; to sit back and watch the heroic Ukrainians “bleed Russia dry”; to think of the conflict as a mere sub-plot in Cold War II, a struggle in which China is our real opponent.

Meanwhile President Zelenskyy harnesses whichever historic parallel is most telling to the audience to which he is appealing:

Remember, both sides get to apply history. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a master of the art, carefully tailoring his speeches to each national parliament he addresses, effectively telling one country after another: “Our history is your history. We are you.” He gave the Brits Churchill, the Germans the Berlin Wall, the Yanks Martin Luther King Jr., and the Israelis the Holocaust.

The history on which President Putin is relying is considerably older:

Yet such recent history is less significant to Putin than the much older history of Russia’s imperial past. I have made this argument here before. Fresh evidence that Putin’s project is not the resurrection of the Soviet Union, but looks back to tsarist imperialism and Orthodoxy, was provided by his speech at the fascistic rally held on Friday at Moscow’s main football stadium. Its concluding allusion to the tsarist admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who made his reputation by winning victories in the Black Sea, struck me as ominous for Odesa.

and the history to which President Xi is different yet again:

The Chinese also know how to apply history to contemporary problems, but they do it in a different way again. While Putin wants to transport post-Soviet Russia back into a mythologized tsarist past, Xi remains the heir to Mao Zedong, and one who aspires to a place alongside him in the Chinese Communist Party’s pantheon. In their two-hour call on Friday, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry read-out, Biden told Xi:

50 years ago, the US and China made the important choice of issuing the Shanghai Communique. Fifty years on, the US-China relationship has once again come to a critical time. How this relationship develops will shape the world in the 21st century. Biden reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change China’s system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support “Taiwan independence”; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China.

To judge by Xi’s response, he believes not one word of Biden’s assurances. As he replied:

The China-US relationship, instead of getting out of the predicament created by the previous US administration, has encountered a growing number of challenges. …

In particular … some people in the US have sent a wrong signal to “Taiwan independence” forces. This is very dangerous. Mishandling of the Taiwan question will have a disruptive impact on the bilateral ties … The direct cause for the current situation in the China-US relationship is that some people on the US side have not followed through on the important common understanding reached by the two Presidents …

Xi concluded with a Chinese saying: “He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.” Make of that what you will, but it didn’t strike me as very encouraging to those in Team Biden who have been pushing a hawkish line toward China.

I don’t have a great deal to add to that. There will be no perfect historic parallel. As a remark frequently incorrectly attributed to Sam Clemens puts it history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Those rhymes are composed of permanent national interests and human nature.

It might be worthwhile to pass along the way in which Russians see World War II, dramatically different from ours, which they call “the Great Patriotic War”. As the Russians tell it the Soviets won the war; the Americans were just standing around holding their coats while the Soviets worked.

I don’t think that either the Russian or American interpretation is quite right or complete. I think that during World War II the Soviets put up with hardships and setbacks we can barely imagine. They lost and lost and lost and lost and then they won. That victory was made possible because the Germans didn’t have the ability to fight on four fronts at once. Largely the Brits were doing massive damage to German industrial capability in the north, the Americans and Brits were advancing from the south, the Soviets from the east, and, nearly simultaneous with the Soviets’ westward advance into Poland, American and British forces began advancing from the west. The Germans were actually afraid of the Soviets; they knew how much damage they had absorbed since 1941 and recognized they were out for revenge. Besides, the German forces used to make war against the Soviet Union were needed elsewhere. It was the American and British advances form the north, south, and west that made the Soviet advances possible. It would actually be against the law to say that in Russia.

I honestly don’t know how the Chinese Communist Party views World War II. I wouldn’t be surprised if their view were similar to that of the Russians—that they won the war without a great deal of help.