2023-06-15
40 分钟I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
The danger is going to be a rush of that.
There's this deep sense of business that they have been badly treated.
The tendency would be to blame not their own leaders, but the tendency to blame outside forces,
which is what happened in Germany after the First World War.
Ukraine's counteroffensive is shaping up to be the biggest military operation in Europe
since World War II.
There is a lot of focus on drones and satellites and other new technologies, but if you squint,
the battlefield scenes from Ukraine look like they could be from the Western Front in 1916.
The historian Margaret McMillan writes in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that the resonance of World War I goes well beyond the images.
The history can help us understand what might come next in the war itself,
just as importantly it holds a warning about what happens after the fighting stops,
when the end of one war can lay the groundwork for another.
Margaret, thanks so much for doing this.
Well, thanks for asking me.
So you have an essay in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs that considers the lessons of World War I especially,
but also the World Wars more generally in the period between them and tries in a subtle but fascinating way to use those lessons to make some sense of where things will go from here in Ukraine and also in great power relations more broadly.
What was really striking to me in looking back at those months leading up to the war in Ukraine is that there were basically two analogies invoked.
One was Versailles and one was Munich.
Those in the Versailles camp would focus on NATO expansion and argue that we had failed to adequately take account of Russian security concerns in the wake of the Cold War and that had led to the rise of Putin and Putin's revanchism.