The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century, and he wrote two lengthy books on the events that led to the outbreak of that war: The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order and The Fateful Alliance. He also included one of his lectures on the First World War in his book American Diplomacy. Reading these works of history gives one a better sense of the root causes of that war, which included policies, decisions, and events that occurred decades before June-August 1914.
When the war began in the Balkans after the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, few foresaw that the conflict would eventually engulf most of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and result in the toppling of four empires (Romanov, Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, and Ottoman), the deaths of more than 10 million combatants, the aerial bombing of cities, the use of poison gas, the carving-up of territories in the Middle East that would engender conflicts that continue to this day, the creation of revolutionary secular ideologies that led to an even more destructive war and a Cold War that followed it. When Kennan reviewed the major diplomatic and international events in the rest of the century, he remarked that “all the lines of inquiry” led back to World War I.
Today, with wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a gathering storm in the western Pacific, there is concern that the world is lurching toward another world war. All three conflicts involve at least one nuclear armed power. Some respected strategists and observers believe that an “axis” of autocracies (Russia, China, Iran, and perhaps North Korea) are collaborating to undermine the global order produced by the end of the Cold War, and are urging the United States and its allies to become more deeply involved in these conflicts. Some have even urged the formulation of a “grand strategy” for winning the Third World War. The “lessons of Munich” have been invoked along with Churchillian-like warnings about the need to confront aggressors now to deter future aggression. Those who counsel prudence or restraint, or who promote diplomatic solutions to these conflicts are often labeled “appeasers” or worse.
In The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, Kennan wrote that the origins of World War I could be traced to at least 1875, when the future Franco-Russian alliance first germinated in the minds of the statesmen of both countries. A hallmark of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s diplomacy was to prevent an alliance between France and Russia. When Bismarck left the scene in 1890--forced into retirement by the brash Kaiser Wilhelm II--his alliance structure gradually fell apart. During the next two decades, France and Russia grew closer, eventually entering into what Kennan called the “fateful alliance” in 1894. Germany, meanwhile, allowed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to lapse, grew closer to Austria-Hungary, while simultaneously scaring Great Britain by challenging it at sea. Yet, almost to the very day in August 1914, that Germany declared war on Russia, and the alliance system quickly brought other great powers into the war, few believed that the regional war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia would spread across Europe, into Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and draw into the maelstrom of conflict combatants from Australia, North America, and elsewhere.
In The Fateful Alliance, Kennan explained what he characterized as a “whole series of . . . aberrations, misunderstandings, and bewilderments that have played so tragic and fateful a part in the development of Western civilization over the subsequent decades.” He continued:
One sees how the unjustified assumption of war’s likelihood
could become the cause of its final inevitability. One sees
the growth of military-technological capabilities to levels
that exceed man’s capacity for making any rational and
intelligent use of them. One sees how the myopia induced
by indulgence in the mass emotional compulsions of modern
nationalism destroys the power to form any coherent, realistic
view of true national interest. One sees, finally, the inability
of otherwise intelligent men to perceive the inherent self-
destructive quality of warfare among the great industrial
powers of the modern age.
Kennan worried that in the nuclear age, these developments could result in “a catastrophe from which there can be no recovery and no return.”
In his seminal history of World War II, The Second World Wars, Victor Davis Hanson described how a series of smaller, regional wars--an Italian-Ethiopian war, a German/Soviet-Polish war, a German-Norwegian war, a German-Danish war, a German/Italian-French/British war, a German-Yugoslav war, a German-Greek war, a German-Soviet War, a Japanese-Chinese War, a U.S./Britain-Japan War--expanded into a global conflict of unprecedented proportions and destruction.
Today, the wars between Russia-Ukraine/NATO/US, Israel/US-Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, and the China-Taiwan/U.S. dispute are regional conflicts that if not limited and resolved may expand into a global conflict among nuclear powers--a Third World War, which, to paraphrase George Kennan, would be a catastrophe from which there would be no recovery and no return. Yet, the United States under the Biden administration seems intent on continuing and escalating its involvement in Ukraine, even as it sends mixed signals about our intentions in the Middle East and the western Pacific. Adding to the danger is a growing perception both here and abroad that the American president is cognitively unfit for the job of commander-in-chief and chief diplomat.
Should, God forbid, World War III evolve out of these regional conflicts, historians of Kennan’s depth and insight may trace its roots to the early post-Cold War years when successive administrations expanded NATO and positioned the alliance on Russia’s European borders despite vigorous protests from successive Russian leaders (Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin), and prophetic warnings from Kennan and several other experts on Russia and international affairs (including Richard Pipes, Edward Luttwak, Jack Matlock, Jr, Paul Nitze, Fred Ikle, Sam Nunn, Marshall Shulman) that NATO enlargement would produce an aggressive Russian reaction. Those same historians may also cite the foolish and failed post-Cold War engagement of China which helped facilitate the rise of our next peer competitor even as it drove Russia into the arms of that peer competitor while we were distracted fighting peripheral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and clearing the way for greater Iranian influence in the Middle East in our quest to remake that region in our own image (the so-called “Arab Spring”).
Now, some in the West are calling on the U.S. and its allies to invite Ukraine to become a member of NATO even as Ukraine’s war with Russia gives no sign of ending. This caused more than 60 foreign policy specialists and scholars to pen an open letter to NATO leaders urging them not to invite Ukraine into the alliance. “Moving Ukraine toward membership in the alliance,” the letter states, “could make the problem worse, turning Ukraine into the site of a prolonged showdown between the world’s two leading nuclear powers and playing into Vladimir Putin’s narrative that he is fighting the west in Ukraine rather then the people of Ukraine.” Such a move, the signers contend, “would reduce the security of the United States and NATO allies, at considerable risk to all.”
Let us hope that a future George Kennan will not describe a U.S.-NATO-Ukraine Treaty as a “fateful alliance.”
Francis P. Sempa is a regular contributor to RealClearDefense and writes the Best Defense column each month. Read his latest: "Rise and Fall of American Naval Mastery."
