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World War I was the war that broke Europe. The Russo-Ukraine War has broken the American public's patience with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, and maybe even with NATO — and, like WWI three years in, there's still no end in sight.
The parallels are disturbing.
Europe's soldiers marched toward each other in August 1914, confident of victory in weeks or months at the very longest. Germany's Schlieffen Plan (not really a plan at all) called for the capture of Paris in six weeks, followed by a redeployment to the East to defeat Imperial Russia.
Paris never did fall, and it only took months for the Western Front to settle into a bloody stalemate that would last for years.
By 1916, the slaughter was almost too much to bear, and Germany quietly sent out peace feelers. Nothing came of them, in no small part because Berlin's view of "peace" was keeping most of what they'd already taken. Had Kaiser Wilhelm II the imagination to see what was already at risk, he'd have been much more serious about peace.
The classic sunk-cost fallacy applies to wars, too. So much blood had been spilled, so much treasure spent — and so little gained — that neither side believed it could afford anything less than total victory. So the war dragged on until enough American troops began arriving in early 1918 to settle affairs on the Western Front.
And Another Thing: For a full treatment of the last months of fighting on the Western Front, I highly recommend Nick Loyd's "Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I." It underscores both the American contribution to victory and just how thoroughly beaten Imperial Germany was in the field. Anyone who still entertains antisemitic "stab in the back" notions about the Allied victory needs to read this one.
Imperial-sized egos were on the line, too, further complicating finding a tolerable peace.
In the end, Britain and France got off comparatively lightly. They "merely" lost over two million soldiers between them, and a loss of national confidence from which neither country has recovered. Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Imperial Russia all ceased to exist.
There were no winners. What the Brits call "sheer bloody-mindedness" and the sunk-cost fallacy ensured that nobody would find an off-ramp from the fighting. Even President Woodrow Wilson's "peace without victory" plan was rejected in early 1917, long after it was clear there would be no victors, regardless.
All the European parties involved dismissed the spiraling risks of Total War and paid the price.
There was a time for Germany to abandon its maximalist war aims of establishing hegemony over Europe, and it was long before the Kaiser fled to exile in the Netherlands. There was a time for France to give up reconquering Alsace-Lorraine, and that time was before the millionth soldier died and the country suffered permanent psychic scars.
We entrust our political and military leadership with the power to make life-or-death decisions, but it's amazing how glib they are about that terrible responsibility — or rather, it would be if they didn't fail so regularly to show any kind of restraint or wisdom.
A few classic examples.
When Hitler ordered a start to Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Plan A was that, as Hitler put it, "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." After a month of combat, German generals realized they'd underestimated Soviet strength and they'd nearly exhausted their initial supplies. There was no Plan B, other than slugging it out.
When Imperial Japan's military clique decided on war with the United States, Plan A was that a devastating surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor would force the Americans to the negotiating table — avoiding a protracted fight that Japan could not win. There was no Plan B, other than slugging it out.
When Vladimir Putin ordered a four-pronged attack on Kyiv in February 2022 — three by land and one by air assault — the expectation was that the Kyiv government would be quickly decapitated and the war over in weeks. If there had been a Plan B, other than slugging it out, we've seen no sign of it in three years. The two sides are still grinding away at one another, a virtual high-tech replay of World War I's slow-moving trench warfare.
How ground down are Russian forces after three years of combat that nobody seems to have planned for? It's been about a month since the first reports emerged of donkeys being used behind the front lines.
The Russian Army has started using donkeys instead of trucks due to insurmountable losses.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 9, 2025
A Russian logistics platoon lost their last Ural truck to a drone a week ago & was sent a donkey as replacement by the Ministry of Defense to move ammunition to the frontlines. pic.twitter.com/4mdrtYdiYF
From the photos, it isn't always clear whether donkeys are being used for logistics or as "dinner on the hoof." Neither option says much good about the current condition of the Russian military. Various analysts in 2023 and 2024 warned that Russian trucks were running on bald tires and that it wouldn't be long before there weren't enough of even those to keep supply trucks running. It looks like that day might have come.
None of this is to say the Russians are doomed. Artillery has long been a Russian strength and the most recent estimates indicate that Russia is firing 2.5 to 3 shells on Ukrainian positions for each one Ukraine fires. The West has had three years to amp up artillery shell production but little has come of it. Eighty years ago, it only took the U.S. three and a half years to ramp up and defeat Japan and Germany.
Russia has made serious advances in drone warfare, too.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn't innocent in all this. Mid-2023 was the point of maximum leverage for Kyiv and an opportunity wasted. Three stunning counteroffensives had forced the Russians out of Ukraine's north (Kyiv), northeast (Kharkiv), and from the right bank of the Dnipro River in the south. Rather than push for peace then, Zelenskyy bet it all on a fourth counteroffensive in the southeast, aimed at eventually taking back Crimea. It failed. There was no Plan B, other than slugging it out.
In hindsight, it now seems likely that Putin would have rejected an early peace — but we'll never know for sure, will we?
But the point is that even war's defenders and victors make serious errors. I'll point out two that we made during our most famously winningest war ever.
In "Inside the Third Reich," published after the war, Hitler's chief architect (and later armaments minister) Albert Speer wrote:
In July 1943, the [Allied air] attack on Hamburg with incendiary and high-explosive bombs had created a firestorm that killed over forty thousand people. If the air raids had been continued in the same manner, all armaments production would have been impeded and the war effort would have been critically weakened. The effectiveness of these attacks was shown by the chaos they created: if three or four more cities had been subjected to the same sort of attack, Germany’s capacity to continue the war would have been seriously threatened. The refugees alone would have sufficed to paralyze the country.
The "terror-bombing" of German cities, as some call it, could have proven a war-ending mercy. But we gave up on them and instead concentrated on bombing Germany's war production. Results were mixed.
We had also considered launching a bombing campaign on Germany's electrical grid but decided against it. It was believed at the time that the grid was too resilient and decentralized to bother with — that it could be quickly and repeatedly repaired. After the war, the facts on the ground discovered by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) told a different story. As it turned out, we could have turned off the lights and returned the German economy to the 18th century. Their armies would have collapsed in the field for lack of support.
Imagine a European Theater where victory came six or even 12 months earlier, sparing tens of thousands of American and Allied lives. Even after eight decades, it's enough to tug at the heartstrings, particularly if you are related to anyone who died on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge... or had family murdered in the final frantic months of Hitler's final solution.
The men who made those decisions were well-intentioned, to be sure, and only hindsight is 20/20. The point that must be driven home again and again is this: Nobody isn't wrong about war.
That's why providing off-ramps for both Putin and Zelenskyy is so vital, as is giving each man a firm shove in the proper direction.
Yet Putin's peace terms remain as maximalist as ever, after three years of grinding losses and increasing reliance on donkeys. He insists on Ukraine surrendering territories that Russia has failed to conquer, an effective veto over Ukraine's government, and the demilitarization of a country he's invaded twice in recent years. None of that is reasonable.
On the other side of the negotiating table (that neither side is willing to come to) is Zelenskyy. His peace demands are also maximalist. He wants Russia to leave territories Ukraine cannot reconquer, the presence of tripwire allied forces, and NATO membership. None of that is plausible.
Both leaders, if not actually divorced from reality, are at least enjoying trial separations. The most obvious example is Zelenskyy's "WTF Were You Even THINKING?" (Hat tip, Florida Man Friday) performance at the White House on Friday. The deal had been pre-negotiated, giving America an economic stake in Ukraine that not even Putin could afford to ignore. All Zelenskyy had to do was put on a damn suit, smile, sign the papers, and enjoy lunch afterward with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
What followed, as I'm sure you already know, was the biggest geopolitical self-own since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 praising himself for delivering "peace in our time."
Did I exaggerate with the Munich comparison? Probably. But only time will tell by how much.
Back in December, I wrote about Syria, the Russo-Ukraine War, and the rising risk of a "gray swan event." That's an event, as Charles Hugh Smith defined it, "that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur." The longer a major war drags on, the greater the risk of a gray swan event occurring.
Ukraine is running out of men and Western largess. Russia's economy, as detailed by The Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and other sources — not to mention those donkeys — appears to be increasingly brittle. A gray swan collapse of the Ukraine Army could end in total capitulation. There would also be a refugee crisis unlike anything Europe has seen since 1945. A gray swan economic collapse of a nuclear power like Russia... that's the stuff of nightmares.
Yet neither will budge from war aims that remain as maximalist as they are increasingly unlikely. Maybe Putin and his donkeys can wear the Ukraine army into nothingness and take the whole country. Maybe Zelenskyy can last longer than the Russian economy. But those are awfully big "maybes" considering the growing risks to both sides of a 1918-style national calamity.
Any comparison you care to make between Putin or Zelenskyy and Europe's failed kings and ministers of a century ago is increasingly apt because each is still willing to risk everything in pursuit of the nearly impossible.
So here is Trump, doing his best to act as an honest broker between warring European nations, much as Wilson did. The difference between now and then (aside from Wilson being a proto-fascist unfit for the White House) is that 21st-century America is a superpower, still with plenty of muscle to flex and favors to give.
"I’ve had very good discussions with President Putin," Trump said before Friday's meeting that was supposed to have been "a very good discussion" with Zelenskyy. Trump continued, "I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anybody. I’m aligned with the United States of America. And for the good of the world."
There's the off-ramp. Why won't either man take it?
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