Walking Towards the Apocalypse

    Vladamir Putin and Xi Jinping shaking hands. Photo credit: Mikhail Tereshchenko via AP

By Cale Gressman 

            It’s been reported recently that the Chinese government has been sending lethal aid to Russia by routing them through third-party countries, in this case, Turkey and the UAE. This brings up the specter that China might be ready to start sending weapons and supplies in-masse to the Russian military. Needless to say that this would have a dramatic effect on the war. But this is to an extent old hat, the Chinese have been sending “duel-use” material to Russia over the course of the war. These are things like the plane parts that could go to a commercial plane or a jet fighter. The civilian drone could be armed. 

This brings up the problem of what are we in the West going to do? While manufacturing has begun to shift away from China, all of the West’s economies are tied to that of the Chinese. Divestment would take time and most importantly it would hurt. Badly. If we sanction them, then they respond with their own. Worse yet, they might double down and just start openly sending the beans, bullets, and bandaids that the Russian Army is in constant need of. Worse yet that could prompt countries that have so far been somewhat unaligned to openly side with the Russians. I had a philosophy professor state that the U.S would never go to war with China, and vice versa, because our economies are so intertwined and interdependent. It’s funny but this story has happened before. 

It might seem bizarre to say today, but prior to the First World War, it was considered inconceivable that Europe would fall into a continent-wide conflict. Not since the Napoleonic Wars had Europe faced such a situation. While there were brief episodes of violence such as the Crimean War, the Wars of Italian Reunification, and the Wars of German Unification among a few others, these wars had been the exception and not the rule. Even as the powderkeg that was Europe seemed ready to erupt prior to the outbreak of the First World War, many commentators assumed that the war would be over by Christmas. The argument by these commentators was simple, those who engaged in a European-wide war would bring about unimaginably terrible economic consequences for their own nation. Europe was too integrated. As the late, great historian John Keegan put it: 

Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on International Exchange and cooperation that a belief in the impossibility of general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms.  In 1910 an analysis of prevailing economic interdependence, The Great Delusion, had become a bestseller; its author Norman Angell had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of almost all informed opinion, that the disruption of international credit inevitably to be caused by war would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end. (The First World War pg. 10) 

 Keegan goes on to explain the various international organizations that had formed in order to facilitate commerce and credit. It was simply inconceivable that someone would be willing to throw away all of this prosperity for the sake of some scrap of land or prestige. Or even if a war did break out it would only last a few months before dying out. 

However, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, would spark off a crisis long brewing in Europe. Germany, a latecomer of sorts in Europe, only officially becoming a unified state in 1871, felt that it had been cheated out of an empire by the other European powers like France and Germany. What’s more, it shared a long and dangerous border with the Russian Empire. Needless to say, Germany felt that it was being cheated out of an empire. For this reason, it was more than happy to take advantage of a crisis in Austria-Hungary. 

After Ferdinand’s assassination, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity. Everyone was in a sense desperate to avoid the mass outbreak of violence that they saw coming. Everyone that is, except the military high command, who marched into war with a sense of madness or perhaps mutually assured destruction. The thinking went that if the German military did not immediately begin mobilizing and bring the Schiefflin Plan into motion, then the German Empire would be crushed between the Hammer and Anvil of a combined France and Imperial Russia; both Russia and France thought the same.

The plan was simple, strike first to destroy the French in a matter of weeks, as they had done in 1871, and then turn their full weight on Russia. As anyone with an inkling of knowledge of the period knows, this didn’t work out. After initial German successes in Belgium and the Battle of the Frontiers in Northern France, the war in the West descended into a slog. And a war that was supposed to only take months, went on for years. An army that was supposed to be the mightiest in Europe was ground to dust. And an Empire whose dawn had only just arrived crumbled. 

To my eye, the war in Ukraine seems far more comparable to the conditions of the First World War than the Second. Perhaps it is Thucydides' Trap taking effect, that “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the most likely outcome is war.” Perhaps it was inevitable that there would be war in Ukraine. Perhaps too it was inevitable that WW1 would occur as well. No matter how many wished for it not to be the case.