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Americans are justifiably nostalgic about World War II. It was a conflict that united the whole country and felt morally uncomplicated. America’s victory marked the absolute zenith of U.S. military, political, and technological strength. It was a time where the U.S. kicked ass and got to feel good doing it.

We won’t quibble about the accuracy of any of these things. For one, Michael Tracey has already been doing that for a month over at his Substack.

Instead, we would like to warn about how the World War II afterglow has warped America’s ability to make war in a rational way. The generation that actually fought World War II has died out, and the generation that even remembers the war will join them soon. Instead, America is ruled by Baby Boomers and GenXers grew up on World War II nostalgia. Psychologically, they crave the chance to wield American power with the same moral certainty of their fathers and grandfathers. They want to win victories that are just as drastic. But to win World War II-style victories, one needs World War II-style enemies. And so, depressingly but predictably, America has conjured these enemies into being even where they don’t exist.

This warped perspective has already led to disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were bad enough. But now, a persistent failure to learn has brought America’s ruling class to the brink of igniting a global nuclear war.

1. Every Bad Leader Is Hitler

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George Bush took pains to compare isolated dictator Saddam Hussein with Hitler. Twelve years before, on the eve of the Gulf War, his father did the same. Heck, H.W.’s administration even compared Manuel Noriega of Panama to Hitler.

Americans in general like to be fighting against Hitler. So before the Russian invasion even began, Sen. Lindsey Graham described Putin’s pre-war behavior as “exactly what Hitler did.” “Is Putin the New Hitler?” asked U.S. government-backed VOA News in March. Former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul had to awkwardly walk back suggesting that Putin was actually worse than Hitler, but the fact he suggested it at all shows the thrust of his mind.

This has important ramifications for foreign policy, and it’s not just because Hitler was evil. Crucially, Hitler was also a madman (at least in the popular imagination), so even if one could negotiate with him, one shouldn’t. A madman can only be destroyed or rendered harmless. So when one’s only frame of reference of “bad enemy leader man” is Hitler, it’s a perspective that pushes the nation towards larger and more all-consuming conflicts. In Ukraine, this means the war cannot end with some mundane settlement. Instead, it must end with Putin out of power, or else the Hitler-esque madman will simply come back to invade more countries right away.

In reality, it’s worth remembering that Adolf Hitler really was an exceptional historical figure. Hitler was unprecedentedly aggressive: between 1938 and 1941 he invaded, occupied, or annexed ten neutral countries that neither Germany nor its allies were previously at war with. He signed non-aggression pacts and then violated them with all-out invasions 22 months later. Hitler not only committed atrocities, but his government went out of its way to commit some of the most calculated and extreme atrocities in history. And, most importantly, Hitler really had no survival instinct for himself or his state, and when the war went south he dragged all of Europe down with him in flames, committing suicide in the rubble of a destroyed Berlin.

Most leaders (and that certainly includes Putin) are not like this. They have a survival instinct, for themselves and for their states. And this means, even if they are violent or immoral men, they can be negotiated with. But Americans are addicted to the idea of a righteous struggle against an insane, uncompromising enemy. As a result, we become the uncompromising ones.

2. The Need for Nuremberg

Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) recently wrote about what he considers necessary conditions for any peace deal in Ukraine:

Putin may not survive defeat on the battlefield. But Russia’s kleptocratic, imperialist regime is far more durable than any individual. My big worry is that a post-Putin junta fools the West, offering a “reset” in relations in return for a ceasefire in Ukraine and a resumption of gas supplies. The right answer will be a firm “no”. The only acceptable peace must involve reparations, war-crimes trials, unchallenged NATO membership for Ukraine, and the return of occupied territories.

The State Department-funded Atlantic Council has pushed the same view: any resolution of the Ukraine War requires a tribunal for Russia’s leaders:

Over the past six months, international support has proved vital for the Ukrainian resistance. … It is now equally vital for the international community to make sure that Russians do not escape punishment for their war crimes in Ukraine and other flagrant violations of international law.

American psychologist Philip Zimbardo has identified in his research that deindividualization and impunity are to a great extent responsible for mass crimes committed by soldiers in wars. This is why the inevitability of punishment has to be our guiding principle if we want to discourage new Russian atrocities in Ukraine and defend the basic human rights that form the foundation of the international security system.

This need to end the Ukraine war, not merely with victory, but with direct moral punishment for Russia’s leaders, derives from the aftermath of World War II. The allies put Nazi and Japanese leaders on trial, convicted, and executed them not just for specific wartime atrocities, but for the war itself.

For centuries before World War II, it was not common to seek the execution of an enemy country’s political leaders as a central war goal. The Treaty of Versailles punished Germany harshly for World War I, but its political leaders were left unscathed and the Kaiser himself simply went into exile. Napoleon ended his life in exile on Elba.

This wasn’t just sentimentality. Sparing the leaders of an enemy government provides incentives for negotiations and not simply fighting wars all the way to the bitter end. This is a major reason that World War I ended while German soldiers still occupied parts of France, and why the Napoleonic Wars ended with Napoleon’s abdication instead of a block-by-block bloodbath in the streets of Paris.

In contrast, the Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” is a major reason the war ended in the near-total destruction of Germany and the atomic annihilation of two Japanese cities. Hitler and his cronies could expect no mercy from the Allied powers, while the Japanese feared the overthrow of the emperor, and so both chose to go down in flames.

Perhaps unconditional surrender was worth it in that case. But what matters today is that this attitude has infected America’s military ventures ever since.

There is nothing wrong with wanting good rewarded, and evil punished. But for America’s ruling class, when it comes to Ukraine and many other dilemmas, the desire for moral just desserts on individuals overrides more important priorities like achieving peace and the wellbeing of the American people.

3. Appeasement paranoia

A central lesson of the World War II story that people pick up on as children (if they pick up any history at all, that is) is the dangers of appeasement. During the 1930s, Britain and France avoided forceful confrontation with Hitler’s Germany even as he repeatedly crossed the line, hoping that by granting Hitler’s territorial and other demands he might be placated enough to prevent a redux of the Great War. This strategy culminated in the Munich Agreement, where the two countries allowed Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia for a false, quickly-broken promise that Hitler would make no further demands.

In the end, not only did this policy fail to prevent a war, but it likely made that war far longer and more destructive. Had Britain and France stood up firmly to Hitler in 1936, his still-fragile regime likely would have collapsed before it conquered even a single country.

But as mentioned above, Hitler was not typical. He was a special case, crossing a new line every few months and constantly escalating his demands, and plunging Europe into war by his sixth year in power. Hitler really was a leader who seemed determined to act aggressively over and over until he was finally stopped.

But Americans have overlearned the lessons of Munich, and now see any form of negotiation and compromise as repeating the mistakes of World War II. In real life, compromise (and yes, appeasement) really does prevent wars and save lives. Even the most aggressive, warmongering leaders are not like Hitler. During the Cold War, America defused tensions in Europe by agreeing to make Austria a neutral non-NATO country, and it backed away from the brink of World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis by removing missiles from Turkey and promising not to invade Cuba.

But alas, the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t dominate America’s consciousness like World War II does. So the power of negotiation has been forgotten while the specter of “appeasement” looms larger than ever.

For months before Ukraine invasion, Russia made it perfectly plain what its desires were, and they didn’t involve annexing a single additional piece of Ukrainian territory. Russia’s pre-war demands focused entirely on its security position vis-a-vis NATO: It asked for America to remove military forces from post-Cold War NATO inductees, it asked for no offensive weapons (namely, missiles) to be deployed on Russia’s border, and it asked for a promise Ukraine would never join NATO.

But no negotiations ever happened, as hawks repeatedly warned that any openness at all was, you guessed it, appeasement. Tom Cotton called Biden an appeaser, as did Ted Cruz. An article in Foreign Policy called any negotiations over NATO a brand of appeasement that would invite war. Most glaring of all is Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who considers it appeasement even to say that World War III would be bad.

4. Fantasies of world conquest

Hypothetical Nazi invasion of America (Life Magazine, 1942)

Even back in World War II, the chances of a German or Japanese invasion of America were zero, but it was at least understandable to think otherwise. In the days of World War II, it was easier to launch sweeping conquests of whole countries. Armies were larger and cheaper, and warfare was about industry, so an industrial power like America or Germany could produce not twice as much, but five or ten or a hundred times as much as a weaker state. So in World War II, Germany was strong enough to, in the span of just two years, conquer and occupy almost all of mainland Europe.

America’s permanent military buildup, and the massive emphasis on preserving and expanding the NATO alliance, is premised on the idea that such sweeping conquests could happen again at any time. But the threat has passed.

The Ukraine War hasn’t just shown the difficulty of Russia conquering Ukraine. Is has demonstrated the massive difficulty that any country would have seizing large swaths of territory anywhere. Vladimir Putin couldn’t conquer more than a fifth of Ukraine with close to 200,000 men, about one-fifth of Russia’s active-duty military. But before one gets too smug, remember that America only barely kept control of Iraq with 150,000 troops, and steadily lost ground to the Taliban in Afghanistan even with 110,000 troops. Both of these wars cost Americans more than a trillion dollars to fight.

Compared to 80 years ago, armies are smaller, and far more expensive per solider to maintain. They’re dependent on high-tech precision weaponry that rapidly runs out in a real fight. Simply supporting Ukraine’s fight has caused the Pentagon to run low on many types of ammunition, from HIMARS rockets to 155mm howitzer rounds. In World War II, ramping up artillery production was comparatively easy. But today, simply getting U.S. stockpiles back to where they were at the start of the year might take several years.

This is all a good thing. When fighting is expensive and the prize is just a destroyed wasteland, it makes war a bad idea. At this moment, Russia is learning just how bad of an idea it can be. But it’s time for America to learn the same lesson as well. If it had learned that lesson earlier, and realized that Russia had no chance of launching a grand campaign of conquest, then it would never have had to constantly menace Russia as it did, and today’s war might never have happened at all.

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