World War II, Ukraine and the Future of Conflict

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/books/blood-and-ruins-richard-overy.html

Version 0 of 1.

BLOOD AND RUINS: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945By Richard Overy

“Books have their own fates,” the Romans taught. Running for just under a thousand small-print pages, “Blood and Ruins,” too, has had its own fate. After 40 years of painstaking scholarly effort, Richard Overy was overridden by Vladimir Putin. Russia’s murderous assault on Ukraine makes the subtitle, “The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945,” ring premature. After 77 years of relative peace in Europe, the longest ever, conquest and slaughter are back. So are sorrow and pity.

“You may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you,” runs a quip attributed to Leon Trotsky. Overy thought that large-scale war for land and booty had breathed its last, at least in the so-called “civilized” world (as did this author along with many historians). War was still interested in us, but mercifully not in Europe. After 100 million dead in two world wars, this scourge seemed to have yielded to “tailor-made” force: hybrid warfare, “little green men,” tightly targeted drones. Precision, not mass, would rule the battlefield.

Putin has proved the experts wrong. Still, let’s praise Overy’s stupendous achievement. Anybody interested in the why and how of boundless violence in the 20th century should make space for “Blood and Ruins” on his or her shelf. It will help you to grasp and revisit the carnage of 1931-45 as the largest event in human history. No continent, no ocean was spared, and Overy deftly weaves all the subplots into one planetary tapestry of merciless ideology and industrialized extermination. This book is not Eurocentric, but truly geocentric.

Start with the nine maps juxtaposing Stalingrad, Midway and El Alamein in our minds. We learn in filigree detail how the Axis armies swept across the globe, and how they were ground down at a cosmic price. The author rightly reminds us that World War II had actually started in 1931 when the Japanese embarked on their highway of death across Asia. Nor did it all end on V-J Day. The Allied victory triggered a slew of anticolonial wars reaching into the 1960s.

World War I was the greatest empire slayer of all time. Down went the Russian, German, Hapsburg and Ottoman versions, and then Europe’s dominions after World War II. Overy quotes the British historian Margery Perham, who said in 1961 that during 60 centuries of recorded history, imperialism was “taken for granted as part of the established order.” No more. Now, the nation-state has moved to center stage. Starting out with 51 members, the United Nations has 193 today.

So, Overy is right about 1931-45 as the “last imperial war” in the sense that the nation-state has bested empire and the lust for territorial theft. But students of history may take issue with fingering traditional imperialism as the cause of World War II. True, Japan was out for colonial empire in Asia. True, also, that in the West Hitler murdered millions to make room for the “master race.”

Yet it gets tricky when it comes to the fundamental sources of both world wars. Exploitable real estate was not the mightiest driver of global mayhem, whatever the rhetoric. In support of his thesis, Overy can invoke the Kaiser’s imperialist grandstanding and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918, when the German diktat chopped off the Baltics and Ukraine from the Soviet Union.

Land über alles? Note that war aims expand after initial victories; they should not be equated with the underlying cause of bloodshed. Greed has to carry too much explanatory weight, though Overy insists that in the 1930s, “the critical factor for Japan, Italy and Germany was territory.” Looking at the two world wars together, theorists of international politics stress more systemic factors, which outlive classical imperialism. The strongest is an old acquaintance. Thucydides argued 2,500 years ago that “the real reason” for the Peloponnesian War “was the rise of Athens to greatness and the fear it caused in Sparta.” And thus in Europe in the run-up to the second Thirty Years’ War, 1914-45, there was a muscular upstart in the game: rapidly growing Germany. And with wealth comes ambition; nations turn rich, then rowdy — as did the United States circa 1900. The Spanish-American War was for pre-eminence, not plantations. McKinley held on to the Philippines to pre-empt America’s great-power rivals in the Pacific.

Power politics is not the same as imperial greed. When the balance tilts, states worry about survival. The war in the Pacific was not about real estate as such. The true culprit was unchecked Japanese power, culminating in the assault on Pearl Harbor. California next? Nor did France and Britain declare war on the Third Reich for the sake of their overseas properties. The motor was existential angst after Hitler’s attack on Poland as prelude to the conquest of Europe.

So, “imperial wars” should not be conflated with “systemic wars,” which are fought for balance of power and the survival of nations. The United States did not wade into World War I to safeguard Samoa. The mortal threat was the Kaiser’s U-boat warfare directed against America’s Atlantic lifeline. Did the Soviets grab Eastern Europe after 1945 for its wheat fields? No. They wanted to bottle up American power in Western Europe. America’s postwar “empire,” its far-flung (and costly) alliance system, was not intended to enrich the United States, but to stave off the Soviets. The central game is usually about strategic competition, not arable land and cheap labor, though governments often do invoke riches to mobilize nations for war.

Fast-forward to 2022. Putin did not thrust into Ukraine to reconquer this fabled “breadbasket.” The quest was for a certified sphere of predominance from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea. Unopposed for years, he did it because he could, and he could because the West had cashed in its peace dividends after the suicide of the Soviet Union in 1991. The American military in Europe, once at 300,000, had dwindled into 65,000 before Putin pounced. Germany’s 3,000 panzers had shrunk into 360. Opportunity, not acreage, beckoned.

Alas, 1931-45 was not the “last imperial war.” History never ends; it just reappears in new guises. And the past is the prologue that reveals the dynamics of all power politics. “Blood and Ruins” dissects the sinews of war with the sharpest of scalpels. With myriad facts, it is not for the night stand, where it must compete with Netflix. But it is history at its best, down to the finest points culled from a dozen archives around the world.

While watching the talking heads on CNN, keep this masterly work by your side. Ukraine gets over 30 entries in the index. Regard Map 7, which depicts the Soviet-German war after 1941. To understand the bombing of Kyiv and the destruction of Mariupol, read up on the annihilationist sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad.

In my worst nightmare, I could not have foreseen the slaughter of the innocents in Ukraine. Not in a Europe apparently pacified in perpetuity. The tragedy is that World War II was not the “final stage of territorial empire,” as Overy sums up on the last page. It was just the beginning of the end of colonial empire. That was yesterday. Expansion as competitive aggrandizement seems to be an anthropological constant.

Ours is also a good time to read up on Nietzsche, who calls the state “the coldest of all cold monsters.” This is why Putin flattened cities while the West downgraded moral duty in favor of icy self-interest. Justice is good, no-war in the shadow of nuclear weapons is better, at least in the short run. In Munich, Messrs. Chamberlain and Daladier gave away the Sudetenland in 1938. World War II erupted 10 months later.

BLOOD AND RUINSThe Last Imperial War, 1931-1945By Richard OveryIllustrated. 990 pp. Viking. $42.

Josef Joffe, a co-founder of American Purpose, teaches international politics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.