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The great lesson of the First World War is that while there is "a great deal of ruin in a nation," as Adam Smith put it more than a century prior, it is not unlimited — and that total warfare hastens its exhaustion. What happens when that day arrives is best left to the imagination, and it's why a bad peace is often preferable to finding out for sure.
There were many reasons, most of them even plausible, why neither Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, nor London would choose peace. Berlin believed, correctly as it turned out, that Russia was brittle and that continued pressure would break it. It also believed, wrongly, that the German army would still have enough strength remaining to defeat Britain and France in the West. But Berlin also bet big on unrestricted submarine warfare, which helped bring America into the war.
Oops. Kaiser Wilhelm II was lucky to escape to Holland with his scalp intact. The Germany he fled was left ripe for Hitler and Nazism. Only Czar Nicholas II and his family fared worse... and they were on the winning side.
Those are just two particularly tragic examples of how the major players believed that continued war was preferable to an unjust — in each power's view — peace. Whether czar or kaiser, prime minister or president, each leader and his cabinet shared a common fault: an inability to imagine what might become of them and their countries if pushed too hard. Even the war's only winners, Britain and France, suffered psychic scars they've never lost.
If any of this seems familiar, it's ground we covered in greater depth four weeks ago in "Off-Ramps to Nowhere," a look at why both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky would be wise to take up Donald Trump's offer to host peace negotiations "for the good of the world." To my eye, Russia and Ukraine look much like the warring European powers in 1917 — each convinced that victory is just one more push away while failing to imagine the terrible fates they're tempting.
It's been almost a month since Trump offered both leaders a way out and asked, "Why won't either man take it?" It was just this week that we learned both men actively reject it.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday on the director of national intelligence’s (DNI) latest unclassified assessment that Putin and Zelensky "for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement."
For Putin, “positive battlefield trends allow for some strategic patience, and for Ukraine, conceding territory or neutrality to Russia without substantial security guarantees from the West could prompt domestic backlash and future insecurity,” according to the DNI. Of course, the situation was largely the same in late 2023 and all of 2024 — hundreds of thousands of casualties ago for each side.
But here's the kicker:
Nonetheless, both Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy probably understand the risks of a prolonged war. A protracted conflict could drag down the Russian economy and risks “undesired escalation with the West,” while for Ukraine, Zelenskiy likely understands that the future of western assistance is uncertain, the report found.
Both men get it. They just don't get it. It feels almost exactly like 1917 all over again.
Peace ought to be a tasty enough carrot after three years of ruinous but inconclusive warfare that has accelerated both countries' demographic crises. But apparently not. So now it's time for the sticks. Let's discuss what form they ought to take.
Ukraine is the easy one because it's been hit by the stick once already. Following Zelensky's ungracious performance at the White House earlier this month, Trump withheld military and intelligence aid from Kyiv. It didn't take very long to bring Zelensky back into line. Zelensky said his treatment of Trump and Vice President JD Vance was "regrettable" and insisted that "Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.
Even Putin played along, at least a little, agreeing to a freeze on strikes against infrastructure and energy production.
Everybody knows Trump isn't bluffing on withholding the aid that Ukraine needs to get what America needs. But if the DNI assessment is correct, Zelensky is still holding out for security guarantees or even NATO membership. As I explained last time, neither of those is going to happen. Trump's approach — weaving Ukraine's economy into the West's via deals on rare earth mineral production and the like — is the next best thing. Zelensky needs to understand that, and if the first suspension of aid didn't teach the lesson, perhaps just the threat of another suspension will.
Maybe Zelensky believes Europe has the ability or just the will to replace American aid, but that's a delusion. Europe has spent three years promising to increase its defense budgets, but only the smaller NATO members in Eastern Europe have done so — plus Poland, whose defense buildup is on track to become a major player in the next decade. But the big three — Britain, France, and Germany — are still all talk.
That brings us to Putin, who remains as intransigent as he is belligerent. Bringing him to the table won't be easy. That's the bad news that you probably already knew. The good news is that the stick Putin requires has real benefits elsewhere. But stick a pin in the good news because I'll get back to it momentarily.
If Putin hopes to come close to his maximalist war aims, he'll need to rely on what I've long called "the West's short attention span." Even three-plus years into his stupid war, Russia alone outproduces the U.S. and all the other NATO countries in artillery shells by three to one. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said last month, "We are not producing enough. And this is a collective problem we have, from the U.S. up to and including Türkiye, and including the whole European Union, Norway, UK, we have fantastic defense industries, but we are not producing enough."
Rutte was talking about artillery shells, but the same is true for drones. Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy's, outproduces the entire West. Putin has heard three years of tough talk but seen very little ramping up. If the West, for all its bluster, can't muster the will to produce cheap items like drones and artillery shells in numbers large enough to matter, why should Putin believe that we're serious about anything else?
That's what Trump needs to change. Executive action plus a public call to Congress to ramp up production of war material — mostly the comparatively cheap stuff Ukraine needs to level the playing field for firepower — would go a long way toward showing the Kremlin that "jaw, jaw is better than war, war." A backchannel message to Putin that failure to talk might mean arming Ukraine with everything short of nuclear weapons might go even further.
The hope isn't to arm Ukraine to the teeth and risk escalation. The idea is to show enough resolve — the kind Biden never did, both inviting and prolonging this war — to bring both sides to the table.
Looking at the global picture, increasing our defense production of the basics is something we need to do, regardless. We might as well get peace in Europe out of it. That's because the irony in all this is that while the Russo-Ukraine War threatens to become something much worse, it's still a sideshow compared to the threat looming in the Pacific. Beijing has quietly watched all the developments in Ukraine, from the rapid evolution of drone warfare to the lack of seriousness shown by the West. What Chairman Xi might have in mind only he knows for sure.
During his first term, Trump succeeded in giving Putin second thoughts about invading Ukraine. If you don't remember this story, it's a personal favorite — and I don't mind repeating it briefly here. Trump recalled a conversation he had a while back with golfer John Daly:
They’re all saying, ‘Oh, he’s a nuclear power. It’s like they’re afraid of him,’” Trump told Daly, referring to Putin, in the call posted on Instagram Friday.
“You know, he was a friend of mine,” Trump preened. “I got along great with him.”
But Trump insisted on the call that he also played tough with his buddy. If Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump claimed he warned him: “We’re gonna hit Moscow.” And “he sort of believed me, like 5%, 10%,” Trump added. “That’s all you need."
Now, Trump needs to give Xi second thoughts about starting hostilities in the Pacific. He's on the right track, pushing to make American shipbuilding great again. "We are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding," Trump said in his recent joint address to Congress. "I am announcing tonight that we will create a new Office of Shipbuilding in the White House and offer special tax incentives to bring this industry home to America, where it belongs."
But we also need more of everything from ships to jets to missiles to the basics like artillery shells to generate enough deterrence. If all this sounds too warlike for your tastes, I beg to differ. It's all about creating peace in Europe and keeping the peace in the Pacific.
There's an old line that defined my foreign policy views that I've spent years trying to dig up. But even with modern AI tools, I've come up short. It was an off-the-cuff quip, I believe by Jack Kemp on CNN's Crossfire. The year was probably 1987 or '88 when Kemp was running for the GOP nomination to succeed Ronald Reagan (but he sadly didn't win). The topic must have been foreign policy, almost certainly involving the Soviet Union, when Kemp said something that might have sounded more hawkish than he meant. "Don't get me wrong," he quickly added, "I'm a dove. I'm just a very well-armed dove."
Trump has the same stance, but it's hamstrung by a military and a defense production base with a posture that invites aggression instead of keeping the peace. "Our country will soon be stronger, wealthier, and more united than ever before," Trump told the World Economic Forum days after his re-inauguration, "and the entire planet will be more peaceful and prosperous as a result of this incredible momentum."
If we're going to get there, it starts with the Russo-Ukraine War and ends with the war in the Pacific we never have to fight.
Previously on the Thursday Essay: Burning Down the House
