On Deterrence
Churchill's campaign against appeasement in the 1930s contains lessons for us all in the mid-2020s
"UK - London - Westminster: Parliament Square - Winston Churchill statue" by wallyg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. [Sculpture by Ivor Roberts-Jones]
Germany's Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently warned that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin could attack a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in less than a decade. Shortly afterwards, Sweden, which shares a maritime border with Russia, ended its long-standing policy of neutrality and joined NATO; and French president Emmanuel Macron said that NATO members should think about sending troops to Ukraine.
A few days after Pistorius’s comments, controversial US Presidential candidate Donald Trump, said he would “encourage” Putin to invade any NATO members that under-spend on defence. These comments are likely to have added treason to the former president’s charge sheet, which already includes his 2021 coup attempt and various other crimes*. He later talked back the comments.
Meanwhile, Trumpist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been hindering attempts to get more US aid to Ukraine. He has tried to link support for the East European country with security measures on the US border with Mexico.
Substack commentator Noah Smith - a proponent of techno-optimism- is more clear-eyed than most on the risks of a Russian victory in Ukraine. He describes Putin as an advocate of “ethnic imperialism.”
Putin doesn’t want Ukraine’s wheat farms. Nor is he motivated by some world-conquering ideology. He simply wants Russia to rule over all the places he views as being within its historic and linguistic sphere of influence.
Ethnic imperialism involves an empire taking over neighbouring countries, which have similar cultures and languages. Previous examples include the British conquest of Ireland; the Japanese invasion of Korea and China in World War II (WWII); and the German annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia under Adolf Hitler.
Smith argues that Poland, a member of both NATO and the European Union (EU), is “the elephant in the room.” Poland and Russia, which have similar cultures and related languages, have a long history of conflict, spanning centuries. Since the end of communism, though, Poland has exited Russia’s sphere of influence, joining the western world with great success.
NATO membership has offered Poland secure borders for the first time in its history, while EU membership has allowed its inhabitants to generate wealth. “And as long as Poland is wealthy and strong and independent, Putin, with the 1600s still fresh in his mind, will always feel like Russia is under direct threat,” Smith writes.
Polish voters recently turned away from populism. Many Poles are well aware of the risks of Russian imperialism. The country’s Defense Minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said in February that Poland would be ready to defend itself against Russian military aggression in "all scenarios." The government also corrected a series of lies that Putin told his American apologist Tucker Carlson in a recent interview.
As Republicans like Carlson, Johnson and Trump flirt with appeasement of Putin, it is worth remembering an important lesson from former British Prime Minister (PM) Winston Churchill. Today, he is best remembered for his honourable role leading the UK to victory in WWII with US support by 1945; and for his dishonourable role in the Bengal famine of 1943.
However, Churchill’s main lessons for us today come from a slightly earlier time, between 1933 and 1939, when he was a backbencher. He was quick to realise that under Hitler, Germany would soon surpass the UK in air force spending. He urged increased spending on defence as he denounced Nazism in the House of Commons and on the radio long before this was a popular position. As the 1930s went on, he also argued publicly against the risks of appeasement.
In 1938, Churchill said: “War will be avoided, in present circumstances, only by the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor.” He argued that European states threatened by German expansionism should sign a mutual-aid pact - something that finally happened after WWII with Article 5 of NATO (1949).
Churchill’s popularity with the British public increased throughout the 1930s as many voters gradually came to realise that he had been right about the threats for a long time. He was appointed to the Cabinet in 1939; and became PM the following year, leading Britain and its empire throughout the rest of the war to an Allied victory.
Sadly, the British politician’s words from 1938 remain absolutely as true today as they did 86 years ago. Let me repeat them once more: “War will be avoided, in present circumstances, only by the accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor.” The best path to peace in Europe depends on Putin realising that the downsides of attacking Poland (or Estonia or Sweden) massively outweigh any potential upside.
This emphasis on deterrence can be a hard lesson for people on the left. I remember being a teenage member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s and having eye-opening conversations with my very gentle grandfather - a retired film director and inventor - about why he had left the Peace Pledge Union (a pacifist organisation founded in the 1930s) and joined the Royal Air Force’s Film Unit at the start of WWII.
Churchill’s insight from the 1930s on the power of deterrence is based on a paradox of strategy first identified in the ancient world. The pithiest version - “if you want peace, prepare for war” (“si vis pacem, para bellum” in Latin) - is a simplification of a statement by Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, writing in the 5th century.
Modern author Edward N. Luttwak explains why this paradox makes sense:
Consider an ordinary tactical choice, of the sort frequently made in war. To move forward towards its objective, an advancing force can choose between two roads, one good and one bad, the first broad, direct, and well paved, the second narrow, circuitous, and unpaved. Only in the paradoxical realm of strategy would the choice arise at all, because it is only in war that a bad road can be good precisely because it is bad and may therefore be less strongly defended or even left unguarded by the enemy. Equally, the good road can be bad precisely because it is the much better road, whose use by the opposing force is more likely to be anticipated and opposed.
We can see the same paradox at work in everyday life too. People who seek out a little disorder in their free-time, whether by lifting heavy weights, joining a rugby club or training in martial arts, often find the likelihood of getting mugged diminishes fast. The same is true of people who avoid trouble by keeping an eye out for potential dangers. Muggers let these people walk on by as they wait for more compliant and unaware victims. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
In order for Putin to understand the risks of ethnic imperialism in Europe, serious institutionalist Republicans in the US need to commit to abstaining or voting against their own party in November if Trump wins the nomination, as seems likely.
Meanwhile, European leaders need to start thinking hard about how NATO can survive if the US retreats from the alliance. And no matter who wins in November, countries across the west need to take the industrial production of armaments increasingly seriously in a more dangerous world.
Let me start to wind up this week’s article with a thought from newspaper columnist Janan Ganesh, who asks a practical question about how to stop Trump weakening or leaving NATO if he ends up beating Biden in November.
The answer is to take him at his word, and address the cash question. It isn’t code for something else. A financial gesture would go farther with him (“Look what I got out of the Europeans”) than his outward intransigence suggests. “Transactional” is just a harsh word for “negotiable”. Trump is much the worst president in the Nato era, but an ideological anti-liberal and Kremlinophile, of which there is no lack on the US right, would be harder to bind into the alliance.
Finally, there is an argument to be made to convince the “anti-liberal and Kremlinophile” right to show some backbone when it comes to standing up to Putin. The countries that lose wars always expel millions of migrants afterwards. There are more than 43m Ukrainians, nearly 38m people in Poland and more than 6m people in the Baltic States, including Estonia.
The right-wing Putin apologists tend to be fiercely opposed to immigration. Would they be prepared to accept a flood of refugees after Russian tanks cross more European borders? If not, wouldn’t it be better to deter more invasions instead of trying to cope with the unpredictable results?
Russian apologists - who divide people like insects based on their ethnicity instead of subscribing to universal human rights - can be very annoying on the internet. The comments are closed. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Further Reading
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward N. Luttwak
*There are interesting parallels with Catalonia. The European Parliament has voted to urge Spain to investigate links between the leaders of the Catalan independence movement and the Kremlin. Russia backed a disinformation campaign in the region in 2017, as we have discussed before. Any serious investigation makes the Spanish government’s controversial amnesty proposal even more explosive.
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