Winds of War, Again

If it's true that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then maybe we're in luck. Many people in this unhappy year are reading histories of World War I, such as Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914." That long-ago catastrophe began 100 years ago this week. The revisiting of this dark history may be why so many people today are asking if our own world—tense or aflame in so many places—resembles 1914, or 1938.

Whatever the answer, it is the remembering of past mistakes that matters, if the point is to avoid the high price of re-making those mistakes. A less hopeful view, in an era whose history comes and goes like pixels, would be that Santayana understated the problem. Even remembering the past may not be enough to protect a world poorly led. To understate: Leading from behind has never ended well.

In a recent essay for the Journal, Margaret MacMillan summarized the after-effects of World War I. Two resonate now. Political extremism gained traction, because so many people lost confidence in the existing political order or in the abilities of its leadership. That bred the isolationism of the 1920s and '30s. Isolationism was a refusal to see the whole world clearly. Self-interest, then and now, has its limits.

Which brings our new readings into the learning curves of history up to 1938. But not quite. First a revealing stop in the years just before Munich, when in 1935 Benito Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia.

Obama and the Dems, cheered on by the MSM, have advanced this theory that there will be peace on Earth if America just stops “throwing its weight around” and lets locals deal with their own problems in their own way. This article points out many reasons why that theory is wrong. A power vacuum does result in the locals dealing with issues in their own way. Unfortunately, that way is going to war, killing each other, and terrorizing each other into submission. The article provides evidence that American power keeps the bad guys from overreacting and destabilizing the world, and that once the bad guys realize that American leaders are too weak or incompetent to exercise that power, that the bad guys will go back to killing and terrorizing their way into power.

I just read "Europe's Last Summer", which is a very readable compilation of the latest historical research into the origins of the WWI.

First takeaway, there was a very small number of people, essentially in the dozens, who made the decisions in secret that launched the war.

Second, the European powers, all thought that they were getting weaker than there rivals. In Austro-Hungary and in Germany, this fear reached paranoiac levels. The Austrians thought that the existence of Serbia threatened their own existence, as they could unite the Balkan Slavs. The Germans had there own Slav paranoia, when they looked at the growing Russian population combined with recent industrialization. Both powers wanted war, Austria vs Serbia, where the plan was to dismantle Serbia and give parts away to Serbia's neighbors. Germany, which at the time bordered Russia as there was no Polish State.

Three, Austria and Germany could not go to war alone, they had to have the backing of the other. Once Germany gave Austria a blank check to back them, without knowing about the secret Austria plan to go beyond a punitive attack on Serbia to destroy Serbia, the war was on. Germany then demanded and received Austria backing for support against Russia, without knowing about the German plan to give Russia a knockout blow and set off a world war by bringing France and the worldwide British Empire against themselves.

So, lies, secret agendas within a tiny group dealt a huge blow against Western Civilization, which the German military plotters actually recognized and accepted as a risk of the war. Their paranoia lead the two German-speaking Empires in Central Europe to their own catastrophe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist, replaced by ethnic nation states. The German Empire lost a large chunk of geography in the East, replaced by the State of Poland and lost Alsace-Lorraine back to France permanently.

They created their own worst nightmares.

In Austria, the two powerful peace mongers, were the Emperor Franz Joseph and the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Emperor agreed to a punitive raid into Serbia. In Germany, the biggest peace monger was Kaiser Wilhelm. He turned pro-war to back Austria (not for the world war), because his friend the Archduke had been murdered. His military and Chancellor literally kept him out of the loop on the secret war agenda.

Great book, which ought to be read by everybody.

I don’t see enough blame laid at Britain’s feet for the arms race that led to WWI; they knew they had to crush Germany because the German fleet was building enough to rival their own.

By giving France a blank check, they stoked their dreams of revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. When the “war to make the world safe for democracy” was over, the sun still never set on the British Empire. They were the ultimate enemy of democracy for anyone who wasn’t British.

Like I said, all major powers felt that they were becoming weaker than their rivals. This lead to the thinking that an earlier war would be better than the later war. The Brits were opposed to entering the war, until the Germans invaded Belgium. The British had signed a treaty, which they believed obligated them, required them to defend the sovereignty of Belgium. That's what changed minds in Britain, the naval issue could've been finessed, as the Germans were going back to greater Army funding.

During the run up to WWI, the French leadership was on a ship from St. Petersburg back to France and did almost nothing. Yes, there were people in the French leadership, who wanted to get Alsace-Lorraine back, but in light of growing German strength, they had given up on that possibility. The French entered the war after Germany determined that the partial Russian mobilization was an act of war and declared war on Russia. Then France joined with Russia as part of its treaty obligations.

Read the book, it's really very good.

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