Vladimir Putin is not the first dictator to threaten Europe. In relatively recent memory another dictator threatened Europe. His name was Adolf Hitler. It is worth comparing the democratic response to these two dictators, because democracies are making the same mistakes now that they made in the 1930s.
Putin and Hitler are seemingly different on the surface. Putin is smoother, more rationally calculating, but much less charismatic dictator than Hitler. But these differences are trivial compared to their similarities. They both had and have the same expansionistic strategic goals and tactical action steps. Hitler wanted to expand his sphere of influence and empire. and Putin wants the same.
The mistakes the democracies are currently making with Putin are ominously similar to the mistakes democratic leaders made with Hitler in the 1930s. Hitler came to power in 1933 and between 1936 and 1938 he expanded the Nazi Empire four times; first the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia. Each time the Western European democracies protested, sometimes threatened, but ultimately did nothing. The most humiliating democratic response occurred when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to negotiate an agreement with Hitler. The upshot of the agreement was that Hitler could invade the Sudetenland in exchange for his promise to henceforth stop expanding the Nazi empire. Chamberlain returned to London trumpeting “peace in our time”, naively believing Hitler, who was of course lying.
There is a fundamental lesson here, arguably the most important lesson of the 20th Century. In 1936 Hitler could have been easily stopped from taking over the Rhineland by the French and British armies. In September 1939 when the democracies finally awoke to the threat, it would take five-and one-half years of brutal warfare and millions of dead to defeat Hitler.
Now Putin.
He is a former KGB officer who cam to power in 1999. He wants to reestablish the Soviet Empire, and he has taken several steps toward that goal. In 2008 he invaded Georgia, a former Soviet state, to assure pro-Russian governance and policies. In 2014 Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula and other portions of southern Ukraine. Since 2014 Putin has supported pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, creating a long-running civil war. In 2021 Putin sent Russian troops into Belarus to prevent the overthrow of the pro-Russian dictator. In 2022 he sent troops into Kazakhstan for the same purpose.
Now he has massed troops on the eastern Ukraine border, threatening to invade. At each step the democratic response has been the same: protesting, threatening, sometimes imposing economic sanctions, but otherwise doing nothing. As far as the United States is concerned, this passivity extends over five different presidential administrations of both political parties. All five presidents have repeated the same weak responses made by democracy leaders in the 1930s. The Biden administration has proactively done the most, perhaps because the threat is the greatest. Biden is at least helping to arm and train the Ukrainian military. However, he has made a major mistake by repeatedly stating that American ground forces would never be sent to Ukraine.
When will we ever learn? Dictators only respect force. They have contempt for democracies, perceiving them as weak and decadent. They perceive our efforts to find ‘diplomatic solutions’ as opportunities to manipulate the democratic impulse to avoid war. They do not negotiate in faith. It seems to shock each new generation of democratic leaders that dictators are pathological, manipulative liars. This incredible naivety is destructive to global freedom and ultimately to world peace.
Delaying a forceful response to dictatorial landgrabs only worsens the destruction when democracies finally respond in force. The Russian military is much stronger now than it was in 2008. If we had confronted Putin in 2008 the price in lives and resources would have been much less than it will be now. Perhaps democratic leaders would be better prepared to deal with dictators if they did tow things: seriously study world history over the last two hundred and twenty years, and study the psychological profile of dictators, which are all remarkably similar.
Image by ? Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay