Being somewhat harsh to the defeated aggressor may fuel the next war by giving them grievances without taking away their power. But that does not mean being kind to the defeated aggressor is the wise course of action. When you strike an aggressive king, you need to kill him. But nukes complicate that.
This should be a lesson for ending the Winter War of 2022?
After the First World War, the victorious powers blamed Germany for the war, imposed economic reparations that Churchill called “malignant and silly” and “futile,” and “imposed upon the Germans all the long-sought ideals of the liberal nations of the West” which large segments of the German people “regarded as an imposition of the enemy.” And the victorious powers disarmed even as the two pariah nations--Germany and the Soviet Union--secretly rearmed, and as Japan sought to construct an Asia-western Pacific empire.
After the Cold War, the victorious powers, led by the United States, in a fit of victor’s hubris responded to the collapse of the defeated Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact alliance by broadly and relentlessly expanding NATO to virtually the entire western border of Russia and thereby fueling the resentment among Russians of an imposed peace and igniting the worst aspects of Russian nationalist and imperialist tendencies.
This is the foundation of really bad advice for ending the Winter War of 2022.
But instead of gratitude and a desire to join the West, we see Russia trying to regain what they've lost, like their former territory in Georgia and Ukraine; and their reputation for power by intervening in Syria.
While some see this Russian hostility as our fault, clinging to the notion that the West was too harsh on Russia after we won the Cold War, the fact is that the lesson of World War I was wrong. The victors of World War I were not too harsh on Germany, we were too easy on them[.]
The German militarists carried out a successful information war based on the lie that the Treaty of Versailles was brutal. Sure, the peace was far worse than the idealistic 14-point plan President Wilson proposed. But the information operation relied on hiding from the German people the fact that the plan went nowhere. And the militarists hid the fact that the Armistice saved the German army in the west from collapse and humiliation, just as the war-weary and defeated Czarist Russian army experienced in the east. The information operation relied on the lie that the German army marched home out of the goodness of the German rulers' hearts who wanted a Wilsonian new world.
And the Germans pushed that interpretation of German victimhood through the war-weary and guilt-ridden Western allies to throw off the restrictions in the treaty designed to prevent Germany from reviving its military and becoming a threat to peace.
Good grief, if Putin had just kept his mouth shut and his army at home, NATO would have continued to disarm. In a few years of the trend continuing, the fierce warriors of Montenegro could have conquered Germany.
And for years after the Cold War, NATO expansion east was in name only. NATO did not add forces to new NATO members and NATO didn't build up the logistics infrastructure to sustain a defense of those new members, let alone to attack Russia from there. And NATO didn't even have war plans to defend new members. Russia changed all that with its serial aggression against Ukraine.
Really, you can't simultaneously argue that NATO provoked Russian aggression and that it is perfectly natural for Russia to want buffer territory in the west. Would Russia have attacked west if NATO never admitted former Soviet-controlled territory, or not?
In fact, World War II was extremely harsh on the losing aggressors Germany and Japan, with both stripped of territory, disarmed, purged of Nazis or militarists, and occupied to this very day by the victors. Both remain democratic allies of America despite the objectively far harsher peace imposed on them than the allegedly harsh Versailles Treaty and post-Cold War NATO policies.
Realistically, we can't follow the superior World War II example and kill the king we struck. Russia is too large to occupy and it has too many nukes. And despite my suspicions, we have to assume enough work. That reason was absolutely paramount in limiting what NATO could achieve after the Cold War. So Russia will survive this war to nurse its paranoia if it clearly loses the war.
Because paranoia means Russian nationalists and imperialists will see any NATO action as part of a plot against Russia. So don't use this false Cold War/Versailles argument as a reason to portray Russia as a victim of the brutal war against Ukraine that Russia started. That must not justify a non-peace masquerading as peace for our time.
Keep Russia as far east as possible until it gets realistic about where the real threats to Russia come from.
We can't break Russia. Nor do we want to. We have an interest in keeping Russia intact to contain China. But we can build up the countries and forces in the east to stop Russia from expanding west. Maybe that hard reality will be the basis for diplomacy that finally ends the pointless hostility between Russia and the democratic West.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
