Weak Western Leadership is Opening the Way to World War III
The world is now reeling in shock, witnessing widespread evidence of massive atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. In the recently liberated town of Bucha near Kyiv, the advancing Ukrainian army discovered mass graves, the bodies of female rape victims run over by tanks, cellars containing caches of cut-off children’s ears, and streets filled with dead civilians, arms bound and shot in the back of the head.
Europe has not witnessed such barbarism since the fall of Nazi Germany. Now it has returned. The key question – how to stop it?
To halt the orgy of violence unleashed upon Ukraine by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, his forces need to be repelled. Achieving this means providing Ukraine with all the weapons it needs to eject the invaders.
But this is not being done. Instead, the West has adopted a policy of providing Ukraine with limited types of arms, in amounts far from those needed to secure victory. For example, in response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate plea for aid, delivered to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, U.S. President Joe Biden authorized the transfer to Ukraine of 100 Switchblade 300 drones. These have a range of less than 10 kilometers and insufficient explosive payload to destroy a tank. With luck, they might be able to take out 30 trucks. At a price of $6,000 each, the drone package was worth $600,000, an amount smaller than that expended to move the president to Camp David for a weekend. Since then, the U.S. has also decided to send Switchblade 600s, which can take out tanks from a range of 40 kilometers. So sending a lot of them to Ukraine could really make a difference. But only ten have thus far been sent.
Other more useful arms have been boycotted altogether. Most noteworthy for their absence from the transfer list have been fighter aircraft. NATO possesses some 80 MiG fighters, which the Ukrainians have shown themselves superbly able to fly. With these in their possession, the Ukrainians could destroy the trains the Russian are using to supply and reposition their forces, plaster the artillery bombarding Mariupol with napalm, and sink the Black Sea fleet threatening Odesa. But they, along with much else, are not being given.
Various statements claim that the Ukrainians are not being provided with the arms they are asking for because they would be of no utility. Such claims are transparently false. In fact, as the more honest arms-deniers have admitted, arms shipments to Ukraine are being sharply restricted in order “not to provoke Putin.”
In other words, the red line limiting western aid to Ukraine is that it must not make Putin excessively unhappy. But nothing would make Putin more unhappy than having his invasion defeated. Therefore, regrettably, since we all feel great solidarity with the brave people of Ukraine, we must, apparently, allow them to be crushed.
The justification offered for this policy is that if the West takes sufficient action to stop Putin, he will become enraged and attack us. Consequently, appeasement seems to be the order of the day to preserve world peace.
But will it?
The strategy of attempting to preserve peace by appeasing a committed aggressor has been tried before, most notably by the Western allies in attempting to dissuade German dictator Adolf Hitler from his warpath during the 1930s. It failed spectacularly.
Putin and Biden are very different personalities from Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. But they are playing the same respective roles in a remake of the same drama. It is therefore extremely important to critically examine not only what transpired in the earlier performance, but why it led, inevitably, to the tragic outcome that it did.
The best analysis, by far, of the 1930s Western foreign policy disaster is that presented by Winston Churchill in his classic account, ‘The Gathering Storm’. Churchill’s understanding of that period is proven not merely by his stature and inside knowledge of history, but by the fact he predicted what the consequences of mistakes would be. He could do this because he really understood the laws of cause and effect at play. It was for this reason that he stood absolutely firm against nearly universal public opinion to the contrary in denouncing each and every step taken by the appeasers on the road to catastrophe. It is for this reason that his analysis of that disaster makes necessary reading today.
The main theme of ‘The Gathering Storm’ is “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature, allowed the wicked to re-arm.”
Churchill then makes the case.
At the start of the 1930s, Germany was no threat to anyone. It was led by a pacifist party, had no significant armed forces, and was exposed, should it misbehave, to instant invasion through its demilitarized Saar and Rhineland provinces. These safeguards were all undone, as Churchill reports, by a series of steps allowed by the successive McDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain governments.
These included:
- Allowing Germany to be taken over by a party led by a murderous gangster committed to war and genocide;
- Allowing Germany to re-arm;
- Allowing Germany to seize and fortify the Saar and the Rhineland;
- Allowing Germany to annex Austria;
- Forcing Czechoslovakia to make itself indefensible; and
- Standing idle while Poland was conquered.
The appeasers wanted peace above all other goals. But in examining this list, the thing that stands out most is that the actions they took systematically removed the obstacles to war put in place at enormous cost in blood and treasure, by the victors of World War I.
A second world war would have been impossible had Germany not been taken over by a war party and allowed to re-arm. It would have remained nearly impossible, as Churchill takes pains to point out, had Germany’s vulnerability to invasion through its demilitarized Rhineland remained in place.
This can be seen clearly in the shown map, below, taken from The Gathering Storm.
Map, from ‘The Gathering StormStorm’, showing the vulnerability of Germany to invasion from the West before Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland.
However, once Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland and fortified his new border with the Siegfried Line, Germany was no longer readily vulnerable to invasion from France. With his western flank thus protected, Hitler was free to launch aggression to the south and east. This began with the German annexation of Austria, followed by the takeover of Czechoslovakia. This last action, accomplished through the infamous Munich Pact, was particularly decisive because in giving up Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain delisted 35 Czech divisions from the Allied order of battle, while expanding Germany’s war making power through the addition of the excellent Czech arms industry. Then, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Daladier both declared war, but did nothing, allowing a further 50 Polish divisions to be eliminated.
Between these two last acts, the appeasers threw away some 85 allied divisions, a force almost equal to the entire army (94 divisions) defending France in 1940.
Let us compare this history to the current situation involving Russia and Ukraine.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the West had sufficient power over Russia that could have prevented the rise and rearming of Russia’s totalitarian forces, but we failed to act. This brings us on to the third point on the above list of the appeasers’ road to disaster.
Western oriented Ukraine represents a strategic vulnerability for Putin even greater than the demilitarized Rhineland represented for Hitler. Without conquering Ukraine, Putin can’t attack Poland or the Baltic States. That is why he made such a fuss about control of Ukraine being “an existential question” for Russia. It’s true – but only if Russia plans to make war on the West.
Those who say we should understand Putin’s strategic imperative to control Ukraine and therefore give it to him, understand matters exactly backwards. Putin needs Ukraine in order to be able to attack NATO. The correct conclusion to be drawn from this insight is that it is in our vital interests to deny him this wish.
Furthermore, Ukraine has a 450,000-person battle-hardened army, which has shown itself extremely skillful and courageous in fighting Russian aggression with the limited arms available. NATO has nothing like it. Ukraine’s armed forces are triple the size of the Germany army, and ten times the size of US forces stationed in Europe. If properly equipped and backed up by NATO air power, Ukraine’s army would be a formidable force that would paralyze any attempt by Russia to launch attacks elsewhere. Allowing it to be deleted from the West’s order of battle would be folly comparable to the Allies allowing the 85 Czech and Polish divisions to be destroyed prior to their decisive contest with Hitler in 1940.
“The Coming Storm,” written by Winston Churchill (Courtesy)
Letting Germany re-arm and take the Rhineland would only have made sense if the Allies had been certain of Hitler’s good character and intentions. The burden of proof should have rested on the appeasers. But in fact, since Hitler had published his evil intentions in his best-selling Mein Kampf, and made his very wicked character completely clear though his murderous practices before even taking power, there was every reason to suspect that a heavily armed and expanded Nazi Germany might not necessarily be a force for good in the world. As Churchill understood, each concession made by the appeasers would simply increase Hitler’s capacity to make ever greater demands – inevitably leading him to do so. Therefore, far from representing responsible restraint, the policy of appeasing Hitler by giving him the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland was little short of strategic lunacy.
The same fundamental calculus holds today. Putin has shown that he has no regard for human life. He has published his commitment to restore the Russian and Soviet empires by force and arguably plans to build a totalitarian empire stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
How far will Putin go to realize his deranged vision? No one knows. But we certainly can’t be sure of his good intentions. On the contrary, the only sure way to deter Putin is to make conditions for aggression unfavorable. An intact Ukraine allied to the West would make a Russian attack on any NATO country virtually impossible. On the other hand, allowing Ukraine to fall would remedy Russia’s key strategic weakness, add Ukraine’s resources and industrial capability to Russia’s, provide Russia with a broad front to directly threaten Poland, Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and cut the number of committed frontline western ground forces in half. Nothing could do more to enable further invasions.
Far from serving to prevent a third world war, the West’s appeasement policy is precisely what could make it possible.
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book, The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.
The views in this Op Ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Kyiv Post
