Journalists writing on international affairs in the 1920s and 1930s referred to the era as “postwar.” They saw events through the prism of the Great War that had devastated Europe just a few years earlier.
Historians writing today refer to these same years as the “interwar” period, for the simple reason that they analyse what happened during those years as part of the lead-up to the even more destructive World War II. If only those journalists writing in 1930s Europe had the clarity of hindsight.
We should all have that clarity today. Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine is one of those moments that impels us to reinterpret our own era: what we called the 30-year peace that followed the Cold War (tending to forget, consciously or unconsciously, the wars in the former Yugoslavia) has now ended. Future historians will look at these last decades, by and large, much like they look at the interwar period, as an opportunity squandered.
The sooner we all admit it, the better we can prepare for what comes next. Unfortunately, a kind of self-serving denialism pervades Western capitals and prevents us from seeing the obvious. Passionate pleas to defend post-Cold War European order have no meaning because this era is over.
In the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, Angela Merkel, then-chancellor of Germany, talked to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and reported to President Barack Obama that, in her view, Mr Putin had lost touch with reality. He was, she said, living in “another world.” Today, we are all living in it. In this world, to quote Thucydides, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
How did we get here? First, we must understand that this is not Russia’s war. It is Mr Putin’s. He comes from a particular generation of Russian security officials that never managed to reconcile themselves with Moscow’s Cold War defeat. In front of their eyes, the Soviet Union vanished from the map without military loss or foreign invasion. For them, the current assault on Ukraine is a logical and necessary inflection point. The imperial table can once again be reset. These people are not interested in writing the future, they want to rewrite the past.
While watching Russian missiles attacking Kyiv in a mood of powerless outrage, I suddenly realised that many Russians must have felt the same way when Nato was bombing Belgrade two decades ago. Mr Putin’s invasion may be more about revenge than grand strategy.
There’s a distinction between revisionism and revanchism. Revisionists wish to build an international order of their liking. Revanchists are driven by the idea of payback.
They do not dream of changing the world but of changing places with the victors of the last war.
If Mr Putin is succeeding today, the West can blame only itself. While Western public opinion was hypnotising itself with the idea that Russia is in steep decline — “a gas station with nukes,” some liked to call it — the Russian president began to realise his strategy.
For years, Mr Putin has been consolidating his sphere of influence over the former Soviet Union, starting with his war on Georgia in 2008 and through his annexation of Crimea in 2014. More recently, he has tightened his grip on Belarus and Central Asia. Now he has undertaken the next, dramatic step.
—The New York Times
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