Global tensions: Parallels between the past and present

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/parallels-past-present

Reading time: 15 min

If history teaches anything, it is that ignoring past conflicts invites future catastrophes.

In a nutshell

• World War I’s causes mirror today’s nationalism and territorial disputes
• Global inaction against aggression emboldens authoritarian regimes
• Diplomatic efforts and cooperation remain crucial to preventing future wars
  • In 1905, in “The Life of Reason,” Spanish philosopher George Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Two world wars later, in 1948, Winston Churchill made a similar observation when he told the British House of Commons that “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
    Were Santayana and Churchill right? And if so, are we today failing to see those patterns in history, which could once again culminate in the mass destruction of lives, communities and whole countries? Reflecting on the deaths of an estimated 77 million people during World Wars I and II provides an opportunity to take stock and pull back from the brink. What does the prequel to those terrible conflicts have to teach us today?
    Several contemporary commentators have drawn parallels with the present moment and the run up to World War I. And, up to a point, they are right. In June 1914, the fuse which blew the circuits leading to the lights going out in the chancelleries across Europe was the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
    This was a catalyst – not itself the principal cause – of a conflict which, by the time it had run its course, from 1914 until 1918, left 17 million people slaughtered and 25 million wounded.
    
    Although historians disagree on whether it suited some to go to war – smelling and seizing an opportunity, perhaps even planning a conflict – there were plenty of self-evident contributory factors. For at least the preceding decade, a fearsome witch’s brew had been fermenting with ingredients including extreme forms of nationalism, imperialistic ambitions over territories of other nations, a complex web of alliances and the incessant drumbeat of militarism, especially in Germany. The arms race became a self-fulfilling prophesy – reenforced by the imperative to use the advantage while remaining ahead.
    Throw into the mix the two preceding wars in the Balkans, rivalries in Africa, political events that smacked of never-ending crises, unresolved territorial disputes, the fragmentation of the balance of power and pursuit of world hegemony, issues around ethnicity, race and religion, industrial demands for access to raw materials, and ideology-driven revolutionaries waiting in the wings.
    And in today’s context look no further than Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Sudan, territorial claims over Taiwan, contested access to rare earths and minerals, and China’s quest for global hegemony and its alliances with Russia, North Korea and Iran. It is not difficult to draw parallels between the world wars and today’s circumstances.
    In the runup to the Great War, there was a depressed air of inevitability about the conflict – a sentiment that some contemporary commentators now share. In 1914, writing in the magazine “The Independent,” one perceptive commentator said: “The only unexpected thing about the present European war is the date of it,” adding that “Every European soldier knows where his uniform and rifle are stored; he also knows where he is to fight, with whom and when.”
    Where, whom and when, maybe, but neither “Tommy” or “Fritz” could have had any realization of the scale of the horrific carnage about to be unleashed, nor any understanding of the consequential ruination of whole societies, countries, decimated families, communities and destroyed economies that the demons emerging from the witch’s brew would usher in. That said, Tommy and Fritz may well have had a better understanding of what was happening to their disintegrating world than some of the people claiming to be their leaders.
    The dead may have been buried, but bitter enmities were not: sowing the seeds of another war.
    The novelist Robert Harris recently published “Precipice,” in which he explores the cache of distracted love letters written by the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Herbert Asquith as war broke out – some penned during meetings of his war cabinet. Perhaps with his mind on these other things, in 1913 he painted a rosy picture of British-German relations: “Public opinion in both countries seems to point to an intimate and friendly understanding.”
    In May 1914, with the all-too-typical certainty of the British Foreign Office, diplomat Arthur Nicolson stated that “Since I have been at the Foreign Office, I have not seen such calm waters.” However, that was not how the German General and Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke saw things, having declared in 1912: “I consider a war inevitable. The sooner the better.”
    Tommy (perhaps also speaking for Fritz) would subsequently adapt the phrase, “lions being led by donkeys” to describe some of the incompetent political and military leaders who sent him and his pals to die in in the trenches that would stretch for over 400 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. And once the genie was out of the bottle, they had no idea how to put it back in; no idea (and no great desire?) to stop what they had unleashed. By the Great War’s conclusion, France alone had seen half its young men aged 20 to 32 killed amid unprecedented savagery that left millions more mutilated and maimed for life.
    World War I was a war which never truly ended. After the 1918 armistice, and with the help of their poets, those who survived tried to come to terms with the aching, enduring suffering and the pain of war. Here too, the history of the times has some lessons we forget at our peril.
    What history teaches us
    The dead may have been buried, but bitter enmities were not: sowing the seeds of another war, which would begin just 21 years later. American President Woodrow Wilson was right: “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”
    In January 1918, Wilson set out his ideas for preventing future conflict. He gave Congress 14 points which included ideas for reducing armaments, a better form of diplomacy and what he called “a general association of nations.” But instead of the “peace without victory” that Wilson maintained was required if a future war was to be avoided, the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles contained within its spirit and clauses the makings of a second conflict.
    Ceasefires in Ukraine or Gaza and no more than a frozen armistice on the Korean Peninsula may fare no better – certainly not if Russian President Vladimir Putin can claim victory, given time to rearm with cutting-edge weaponry and if he manages not to repeat the mistakes which led his massive army to being humbled by the valiant Ukrainians. We should also differentiate between Mr. Putin and the Russian people.
    Resentment, nationalism and fascism would prosper by decreasing prosperity and trade tensions triggered in turn by tariffs on imports to the U.S., deepening the global recession. 
    World War II undoubtedly had its origins in the 1919 treaty with its combination of harsh reparations and indifference to Germany’s crippled economy. That in turn provided the fertile ground in which resentment, nationalism and fascism would prosper – accentuated through the 1920s and 1930s by increasing poverty and decreasing prosperity, and by the trade tensions triggered by the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act which imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., designed to buttress America but deepening further the global recession. Today, trade barriers and tariffs are going up.
    Some genuine attempts were made to act on Wilson’s plea for an international effort to serve the cause of peace. This included the ill-starred League of Nations. Despite Wilson receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for its creation, the U.S. declined to join, guaranteeing its ineffectiveness from the very start.
    In 1923, three years after its creation, Britain’s war-time Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, lamented “The League of Nations is the greatest humbug in history. They cannot even protect a little nation like Armenia. They do nothing but pass useless resolutions.” While it passed its resolutions, its inability to forestall Japanese expansionist policies in China, or its failure to prevent German and Italian territorial acquisition and aggression, created a climate in which aggressors believed they could act with impunity.
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  Into this international vacuum – worsened by American isolationism – a new formal axis of like-minded powers and hostile states marched. Their democratic opponents did not forge a comparable pact, no doubt chastened by the all-embracing and all-involving nature of World War I alliances. Is this so different than today?
  In 1917, in persuading Congress to take the U.S. into World War I, President Wilson famously said:
  The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
  Wilson was correct that the real struggle is between democracy and dictatorship. The only true basis for peace must be built on Aristotelian columns of democracy and the foundations of liberty and freedom. It was a wise speech that was right then and is right now: a speech that today’s resident of the White House might – along with the rest of us – usefully reread.
  Wilson admonished those who believed that it was possible for the U.S. to wrap itself in a version of Swiss neutrality:
  Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force, which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. … Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
  True then, true now.
  
  President Wilson could have had today’s China and Russia in mind, or the theocratic ideologues in Iran whose objective is to destroy and occupy the state of Israel, or the megalomaniacs in Pyongyang who threaten their neighbours in South Korea and Japan, when he rightly insisted that “[s]elf-governed nations do not fill their neighbouring states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions.”
  Certainly, in the interwar years, the inability and unwillingness to act, largely turning a blind eye to the emboldening of aggressors, led to one hostile act followed by another.
  The rise of individual demagogues and populist leaders in the 1930s parallels today’s realities.
  And that can certainly be paralleled with today’s appeasement of Mr. Putin’s Russia, President Xi Jinping’s China, and the increasing confidence of their acolytes in North Korea, Iran and other totalitarian countries who threaten the world order. And if appeasement leads us to abandon Ukraine – and to ignoring Mr. Putin’s war crimes – it will be a green light for subsequent attacks on other smaller nations including NATO partners.
  The rise of individual demagogues and populist leaders in the 1930s – and the systemic weakening of more plural forms of democratic governance and leadership, accompanied by instability and chaotic policymaking – also parallels today’s realities.
  Hitler’s threefold objectives – his racially motivated “Lebensraum” to provide more “living space” for Aryan German people through displacement of “inferior races”; the uniting of all German-speaking people regardless of existing national borders; and the destruction of the hated Treaty of Versailles – have echoes in Mr. Putin’s 2023 televised interview with Tucker Carlson. The puff piece bears comparison with Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce, whose pro-Hitler broadcasts were sponsored by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), who infamously began with the words “Germany calling, Germany calling.”
  In 2025, Lord Haw Haw’s messaging, misinformation and disinformation is amplified on social media platforms with a lie travelling the world in seconds.
  As with Hitler’s core message, President Putin’s is equally and chillingly simple: Moscow’s war of aggression on Ukraine is justified as the reclamation of territory which he believes to be part of Russia’s rightful empire – and liquidating Ukraine in the process is both justifiable and necessary. He compares himself to Peter the Great; perhaps a comparison with Ivan the Terrible would be more apposite.
  Just as Britain and France then ignored Hitler’s provocations when he sent his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, when he united Germany with Austria through the Anschluss, and then seized the Czech Sudetenland, Western democracies more recently took little action as Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula and began its occupation and annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk. Little wonder that Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and other Ukrainian territories have followed. Today, around 20 percent of Ukraine and upwards of 3.5 million Ukrainians are estimated to be living under occupation. Our apparent indifference merely emboldens President Putin.
  
  It is hard not to draw a parallel between today and the 1930s appeasement of supine leaders who believed that ceding other people’s territory would satisfy the appetite of autocrats who cravings would prove insatiable.
  Finally, just like the catalyst in Sarajevo in 1914, Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 blew all the remaining fuses, leaving the “peace in our times” diplomacy of Munich on the scrap heap of history. Britain and some of her allies entered a second world war – which would prove to be the deadliest conflict in history, leaving nearly 85 million people dead and giving birth to the first military use of atomic weapons.
  
  When that war was over, the world made new attempts to create Wilson’s “international concert.” In 1945 the United Nations was born – with one Secretary-General wryly remarking that its task was not to get people to heaven but to stop them from going to hell. Three years later came the Convention on the Crime of Genocide – created from the ashes of the Holocaust by a lawyer who saw more than 40 members of his own family murdered by the Nazis.
  Then came the International Criminal Court (without the U.S.) and valiant attempts by some to create a new world order based on rule of law, human rights and democracy. Conventions emerged on everything from the rights of refugees to the treatment of children. Clearly, all of them are works in progress, but they have pushed us to be better than we were.
  
  And there have been notable international agreements on the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons – along with the Geneva Conventions of 1949 on the treatment of civilians and soldiers in war. The post-war emphasis on humanity emerged in 1948 when the world promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  In today’s world, with its dangerous axis of authoritarians and dictators, that consensus from 1948 has been smashed to smithereens. But, the dictators – Presidents Xi and Putin, along with the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and their ilk – will not necessarily have the last word.
  
  The universal declaration has been and can be a touchstone for the sort of grassroots movements that toppled totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, saw off apartheid, emboldened the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and, in much of the world, replaced colonialism with independence. That should give us some cause for hope. So, too, should the increasing understanding of religious leaders of their roles as facilitators for dignity and not as promotors of sectarian and fevered hatred.
  The declaration’s Article 18, which insists on the right to believe, not to believe or to change your belief, may be honoured in the breach in many places. Still, it does at least offer the Uighur and Rohingya Muslims, Nigerian Christians, Iranian Baha’is, Falun Gong, Hazaras, Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities a point of solidarity in taking on the perpetrators of rank persecution and injustice.
  Nothing is inevitable.
  Yes, too many elements of the UN and its many unenforceable declarations are open to the same criticisms that were levelled at the League of Nations. Yes, the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court, all have infuriating flaws. Yes, countries still enviously try to seize territory by force, to build dangerous military alliances, to threaten the world order. And, yes, there are too many uncertainties, too many crises, too many unknowns.
  But there is still time to put things right and to vow to avert a third and potentially final world war. Nothing is inevitable.
  In “A Much Repeated Repetition,” G.K. Chesterton said that history need not repeat itself if we are determined to prevent it from happening. He said:
  There is a certain amount of the divine in every government or society. In most societies and governments, it is a very small amount; indeed, but there is just enough of it to do the noble and needful work; there is just enough, that is to say, to make the government or society go where it doesn’t want to go and produce something entirely different from what it had intended.
  At the heart of his argument is that each of us has free will. Yes, we seem trapped in a maze, unsure of the entrance and the exit. But in looking again at humanity’s 20th-century story, we can use these experiences as maps and a compass to find our way out.
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