A One Way Street

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Irredentism—the romance of reclaiming “unredeemed” old lands—is a symptom of messianic presidents and premiers, and national paranoia and insecurity. Leaders demagogue about the recovery of ancient territories that previously had weakened the nation’s imperial grandeur and power.

Supposedly long-scattered and oppressed peoples with common linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities are recombined—usually by violently overthrowing their contemporary governments and forcing them into a new ethnic super state. Yet irredentism is often a one-way street. Supposedly homeless expatriates—the Greeks of Constantinople, Italians in Malta, Germans in the Sudetenland, Serbs in Bosnia, and Russians in Ukraine—are said to be even more zealous nationalists than their kindred in the motherland. But just as often the territory to be reunited in a grand imperial scheme can be more reluctant than the would-be uniter.

So, Mussolini sequentially grabbed Ethiopia, expanded out from his Libyan colonies, invaded Egypt, Albania, and Greece—until finally Britain and America destroyed Mussolini and his fascist fantasies.

Adolf Hitler was the 20th century’s most ambitious and most barbaric irredentist. He came to power by screaming about a drawn-and-quartered German Reich, carved up by the Versailles Treaty, with millions of German speakers and lands scattered and lost to his native Austria, to Poland, to France, and to Czechoslovakia. In Hitler’s mind, these were all “unredeemed” lands that he alone in his genius would reclaim for the German Volk. He even included the ancient Volga Germans in the distant domains of the Soviet Union as legitimate claimants on a new Third Reich.

Unlike Italy, Hitler had the military, the economy, and the population for a brief moment to bully his way into reclaiming almost every German-speaking minority in Europe and blowing up the borders of the continent. Finally, Hitler engulfed the world in a war that cost 70 million dead, by invading all of Europe, the Soviet Union, North Africa and encouraging Japan to do the same in Asia and the Pacific. By 1941, the expanded Third Reich numbered over 80 million Germans. It had obliterated Poland and Czechoslovakia. And Berlin ruled over an area larger in population and territory than the current European Union. Only Britain was left to be destroyed.

But in truth Germany had already overreached, drunk on easy victories and blind to the resources and manpower of his new enemies, the Soviet Union, and the United States. By 1944, the United States alone had produced a military larger than all the Axis militaries combined, a GDP larger than those of all the combatants, friend and foe put together, and a navy larger than all the aggregate navies of the world.

When the wreckage of the war cleared, Hitler’s dream was a satanic irony, as millions of Germans were dead, and millions more expelled from once annexed nations and forced to walk back into a vastly shrunken Germany.

Putin is history’s most recent and first nuclear irredentist. He believes any group of Russian speakers anywhere, or former residents of imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, or Russian orthodox worshipers, all belong to Putin’s new Russian Empire. Even if Russian speakers are independent or happy as minorities in other countries, Putin has a grandiose plan toforce them into his new mother Russia.

Only that way can a huge new Russia of 270-300 million people, with a vast area comparable to the old Soviet Union, become again a player on the superpower stage to rival China and the United States.

In Putin’s mind, he has already forced Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine back into the Russian fold. Many of the old Soviet Republics are already his de facto satellites or puppets. If he can get back all of Ukraine, the crown jewel of the old Soviet Union and Mother Russia—41 million people, 230,000 square miles of territory, the best farmland in Europe, rich in oil and minerals—Putin feels he would achieve his irredentist goal. The remaining few lost Russian territories then will either be easily absorbed, or their puppet governments will obey Russian orders. Then, he believes, the former Warsaw Pact nations, in terror, will supposedly shed their NATO alliance or at least become no-fly-zones.

Now shamed by prior inaction, emboldened by the unexpected Ukrainian resistance, and egged on by the Churchillian emergence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, European Union countries like Germany have suddenly all but apologized for their former appeasement, nihilist cutbacks of oil and gas production, and virtual disarmament.

In truth, Ukraine is vastly outnumbered, out equipped, and outmanned. It was armed by the West far too late. It should have received tens of thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles months ago. Last summer, the United States should have increased daily oil and gas output, not cut it back. The EastMed pipeline into Italy should have had the full support of the Biden Administration. Joe Biden should have stopped with the gratuitous “killer” and “bully” Corn Pop rhetoric, spoken softly, and instead upped targeted defense spending and stopped the commissariatization of the Pentagon. Ukraine should have kept out of U.S. politics and impeachment psychodramas—and especially kept clear of the toxic Biden family grifting syndicate.

But for now, all those “shoulds” and “coulds” must be considered after Putin is stopped. He believes he can and will eventually swallow Ukraine, regardless of the costs in Russian blood and treasure or the barbaric killing of innocent Ukrainian civilians. He has pivoted from the failed “easy” Georgia-Crimea model to the messy Chechnya fallback plan—and thus is going medieval in Ukraine.

Remember, all of these irredentists of the last 100 years have failed—and imploded in suicidal fashion. History suggests that Putin will not find a happy solution either. The West woke up and discovered that Europe and the United States are slowly learning a new paradigm to check aggressions like Putin’s: crippling new global financial and commercial sanctions; a new confidence in sophisticated asymmetrical weapons that can nullify tanks, planes, and helicopters; a new attitude that the United States and Europe can remain closer than they had thought; and a new ability to inflict international psychological and cultural ostracism that can range from the loss of oligarchic yachts to the use of ATMs.

China is watching the fate of Ukraine. If it is crushed and Putin reasserts his power abroad, then Beijing sees a pathway to absorbing what would be left of a much smaller Taiwan. But if a larger Ukraine survives and Putin is permanently crippled, then Xi Jinping may worry that the Taiwanese could fight like Ukrainians, that China might be sanctioned and ostracized like Russia, that new deadly weapons will be airdropped into Taiwan. He may recall that unlike Russia and Ukraine there is a sea between China and Taiwan—and that a moonscaped Taiwan would not be worth the cost that Putin may pay for Ukraine.

It would be far wiser to quietly send far more weapons, to produce far more oil, to enact far more sanctions—and to stop the loud assassination and NATO interventionist tough talk.

Read more here: https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/06/vladimir-putin-the-latest-of-the-failed-irredentists/