Paper Tiger
Two hundred years ago, if you wanted to project military power, you marched or rode across the countryside. Your troops would fight what they could see, but only if it was close enough to hit with a musket ball. A real “world war” was impossible.
A hundred years later, it was inevitable. War had been revolutionized. In a hundred ways, new technologies and mass production, ocean-spanning naval and aerial firepower, created the possibility of mass death.
Within a single generation, two cataclysmic wars obliterated the lives of more than one hundred million people. Combatants and civilians alike were shot, gassed, blown up, crushed under buildings, roasted alive by napalm, and, at the end, vaporized. Like something out of dystopian fiction, once thriving cities were reduced to uninhabitable rubble, populations dying of hunger.
The First World War was once called the War to End All War. It was followed closely by a second, even larger war, and in the smoking aftermath the surviving nations knew it must not happen a third time.
Two pillars of what became known as the “post-war era” were aimed at preventing another outbreak, as much as anything else. One of those pillars was free trade, a recognition of the dark role played by punitive tariffs and trade embargoes in provoking armed aggression.
The second pillar was insistence on the inviolability of national borders.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, territorial conquest had always been an expected, if painful, aspect of international relations. And it was global. Stronger nations seized land from weaker neighbors, even as they colonized distant lands that were not able to drive them away.
It was precisely these mercantilist, imperial ambitions that had become too dangerous to tolerate in an age of mechanized warfare. It had to stop. But borders are only lines on a piece of paper unless there is the means – and the will – to defend them.
This is where treaty organizations like NATO and SEATO came from. Their founders weren’t playing board games. They were working to prevent the recurrence of mass death.
From the standoffs of the late twentieth century came the saying that, to prevent war, you must be prepared to fight it. But unless you are willing to fight, all of the billions spent on defense are only a massive jobs program, a pig-trough of lucrative careers and political patronage, a dangerous waste of material. During the Vietnam War, America was called by its enemies the “Paper Tiger”, munificent in arms but lacking in will. And in the end that was true. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
Eleven years ago, a man named Vladimir Putin decided to test whether, in the twenty-first century, armed aggression could succeed on the European continent. He started small, and after initial success in Crimea, proceeded with an armored invasion of Ukraine.
He was resisted. For three years, Europe and America (equally) supplied munitions and aid, and equally stood back while Ukrainians shed their blood and felt the bombs. Like many wars, the invasion of Ukraine became a war of attrition. The Russian economy showed unexpected resilience, but the ultimate outcome (on paper, at least) of a contest between the combined economic dynamos of the West and an economy half the size of California could not be in doubt. The only question was how far and how quickly a nuclear power could be pushed back without wider catastrophe.
Then Donald Trump was inaugurated.
Almost immediately he capitulated, turning on Ukraine and resurrecting the ancient mercantilist calculations once thought safely dead and buried. The sheer treachery of this moment, and the dark shadows suddenly hanging over civilized nations, should not be underestimated: Nations defended by paper tigers become prey.
The fact that the post-war era was so easily undone is frightening. The peace and security we once took for granted turns out to have been borrowed. Armed aggression is being rewarded rather than punished. And, most frightening of all, democracies everywhere seem completely bereft of vision.
Clearly, the world has a lot to learn.
One only hopes we won’t have to learn everything all over again, the hard way. But the beginnings of this new era, and it does indeed look to be a new era, are not auspicious.
We have a lot to learn.
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