What Can History Tell Us About Ukraine’s Future?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

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 MacMillan 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. 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Well, thanks for asking me. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

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, and 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 it led to the rise of Putin and Putin’s revanchism. On the other hand, you have those who point to our failure to respond adequately after the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, or the annexation of Crimea and initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and point to Munich and our failure to stand up to bullies in a way that invites further aggression. 

So as you look at those analogies, what’s the right way to understand them and the right way to use them to make sense of the path that got us to this war?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think I’d say don’t try and fit them onto the Ukraine-Russia situation too neatly. What happened at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was unfortunate. It did leave many in Germany feeling that the country had been very badly treated and feeling, of course, that they hadn’t lost the war, which in fact they had. And with the Munich analogy, this was, for its time, a decent—and, in my view, reasonable—attempt to try and avoid a second World War. The people in power in countries such as France and Britain—the leading democracies—were very well aware of what the war had cost.

What I think we’re leaving out when we try to impose the analogies is the decisions being made by people in power at the time. And so when I look at what happened at the Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles—and other treaties with the defeated nations, but the Treaty of Versailles was the important one because it was with Germany—what people have assumed is that it led directly to the Second World War, which left out an awful lot of decision-making, left out the fact of Hitler. I don’t think we can subtract those who are in power, making the decisions, from what actually happened. And I think the same thing is true of Munich; that if the leaders of Britain and France had been dealing with anyone other than Hitler, the Second World War might not have happened.

So I think although the West was perhaps tactless, and I think often blundered in the way it dealt with Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War, I don’t think the expansion of NATO in itself was sufficient grounds for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It didn’t provoke Russia to invade Ukraine—it became an excuse, rather than a provocation.

I think what you really have to do—and I think it’s the same with the outbreak of the Second World War—is to look at who was actually making decisions at the time, and what those people were thinking. And in the case of Ukraine, I would call it President Putin’s war. I think if someone else had been in power, it might well not have happened. And I think he was motivated not so much, although it existed, by the deep sense of humiliation that he personally and many Russians felt as a result of their treatment after the end of the Cold War. Going from being a great power—as Britain is finding today—to being a lesser power is never easy, never leaves people feeling satisfied. But I think he was motivated by something much more. He was motivated by his own understanding of history, by a willingness and a desire to rebuild the empire of the tsars.

He models himself—he talks about Peter the Great as his predecessor. He talks about Ivan the Terrible as someone to be admired. He talks about Stalin as someone to be admired. So I’ve always thought—and perhaps this is a historian’s bias—that who is actually in a position of great power, of making the decisions, matters; and that personality, and that thinking, and whatever their ideas and assumptions are, actually matter.

If Putin had been another sort of Russian leader, he would’ve done a calculation and said it’s not worth invading Ukraine. I can destabilize it, I can deal with it in other ways—as Russia had done with Georgia, for example—but I don’t need to invade it. It would cost too much. But he didn’t make those calculations because he was thinking of other things.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you could say the same about Zelensky. If anyone other than Zelensky—there’s plenty of other leaders other than Zelensky who would’ve been in power in Ukraine, and you could imagine that history playing out on very different terms as well. 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Many statesmen in the world have and continue to compare themselves to Winston Churchill, and usually I find the analogy flawed. But in the case of Zelensky, he was the right man at the right time. And I think that was true of Churchill—who wasn’t always a great political leader, but Churchill was there in May and June of 1940 when France fell. And I think without Churchill as prime minister, it’s unlikely that Britain would have been able to fight on. I’m not sure anyone else could have rallied British public opinion and given the British confidence that ultimately they would prevail.

And I think the same thing is true about Zelensky. He’s even more of an improbable wartime leader than Winston Churchill was—who, after all, was an experienced politician who knew a lot about war. I mean, Zelensky was someone who had made his name in the entertainment business. He’d been very successful, he’d run his own company, but he was not seen as a serious political figure. And I think his determination and his physical courage when he said he wouldn’t leave in the war, that he was not going to get out in the face of the invasion—although of course we know he was under threat of assassination squads and from the Russians.

So yes, I think he’s made a huge difference. And I think he has surprised, perhaps, his fellow Ukrainians, and certainly surprised most of the rest of the world, by the way he’s done it. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You wrote a piece very early in the war for Foreign Affairs that focused on this question of leadership and how we factor individuals and their unique attributes and the characteristics they bring to the war, and tried to make sense of it. There was a great line that I’ve come back to frequently since the war started. I’m quoting you here: “Although the question of leadership is an old one—think of the attention paid to Alexander the Great or Napoleon—it has tended to be overlooked as experts focus on systems or quantifiable measures of power.”

On the one hand, that seems very compelling. On the other hand, it does seem analytically challenging, in that when you look at individuals you can often end up engaging in armchair psychology or literary analysis and trying to make sense of what will happen. What’s the right way as a historian—as someone trying to make sense of events in the world today—to factor those individuals in and try to consider how their own attributes, their understandings of history and their national position, are going to drive events?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s a very tricky question, and I’m not sure I have a very good answer, but I think what you have to do is try and strike a balance. I think perhaps historians have always been more conscious of the role of leadership, simply because we’ve looked in detail at how the processes actually work. And I think political scientists have sometimes been uncomfortable with it because they want to make analytically sound models; they want to be able to demonstrate that they are based on sound research. 

And dealing with an individual, of course, is tricky. You can’t quantify it. I notice, however, there is more interest among those doing international relations—and political scientists, in particular—in leadership. These days it seems that more articles have been written trying to assess the role of individuals—but we can never, of course, abstract individuals from their own times. They are products of the forces of their own times; they come out of certain worlds; they think in certain ways. They certainly have certain individual characteristics, but even those characteristics will have been shaped and molded by their own worlds, and by their own experiences.

I think of models of the ways in which to balance this; the great biographies that Ian Kershaw, the British historian, did of Hitler; and the extraordinary biography—which I think is as great, which is still underway—that Stephen Kotkin is doing of Stalin. Kotkin’s biography of Stalin—I’ve been reading the first two volumes and waiting anxiously for the third—really seems to me a model of how you balance the individual with the times. And he makes us understand that Stalin was a product of the tsarist era. That he probably—as was Lenin—that they couldn’t have come out of another sort of world, and that they were formed partly in response to that world.

So, yes, I think we have to avoid focusing too much on the individual leaders if they have complete freedom and autonomy to do whatever they want. They work with the circumstances with which they find themselves—and they also are products of those circumstances. Even though in the end they may change the worlds in which they live, they come out of certain worlds. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Once the war started—there have been a lot of surprises since the early days of the war, but one of them has been the ways in which this war looks a lot like wars a century ago. On the other hand, you see lots of new technology at play in this war; you have Starlink satellites, you have lots of drones. So it seems like this sort of interesting combination of old and new. Are you surprised by the ways in which this does resemble the wars you have studied historically much more, and how do you make sense of this interplay of the old and new?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It’s absolutely fascinating. I don’t think most people, including me, certainly would have predicted the war would turn out like this; and that what has mattered is that when you actually have an invasion, you have to send people in. You have to control the territory you’re invading. And I think we’ve forgotten that that cannot be done entirely—or at least at the moment, cannot be done entirely—by technology, that you actually have to have boots on the ground. And the war in Ukraine has resembled the First and Second World Wars, that actual physical control by the invaders of the territories that they wanted. 

Of course, they thought it would be easy—when the Russians thought it would happen quickly, I think they thought they’d be having a victory parade in Kyiv within about a week after the invasion started. And apparently lots of the FSB [Federal Security Service], from the secret police, had already chosen which particularly nice apartments they were going to occupy in Kyiv. There was an assumption on the part of the Russians—and it has turned into this slog on the ground. But yes, it does have these extraordinary elements of very high technology. 

One of the—surprises is perhaps too strong a word—but one of the things that really I think has struck a lot of people is the role of drones. They were being talked about, and their military importance is being talked about, but the ways in which drones have been used, the adaptations that Ukrainians, for example, have made to drones—they’re now producing their own through 3D printing. The ways in which social media has been used, both for disseminating propaganda and misinformation, but also used to pinpoint where the enemy are—I think that’s been very striking. So no, it is a war that both harkens back and looks to the future. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Was that true of World War I? Were people struck by the same strange mix of old and new when watching events play out in the 1910s?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Yes, I think they were. We tend to think of the First World War as very much an infantry war on the ground, but what was happening—before the First World War, but as wars will do, it expanded enormously—was the rate of development of new technologies sped up. Things like the machine gun, which had been developed in the late nineteenth century, became much more important in the course of the war than anyone had imagined they would. 

And also the uses that were put to the new technology of the airplane; if you look at the change in aircraft between 1914 and 1918, it’s absolutely extraordinary. The range, the power, the fact that they become armed, the fact that they’re capable of dropping bombs. The tank is another example. So yes, the First World War saw things that people hadn’t thought would be important becoming enormously important. And at sea with submarines; submarines were a novelty in 1914. By 1918, they were part of every major navy. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The mostly disquieting history of World War I has been invoked frequently by policymakers and military officers and observers of all kinds since the start of the war in Ukraine, and even before. I’m curious for your reactions to the various analogies and the way that they’ve been applied. 

The first of these that stands out is from General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has often talked about World War I to warn about the costs of a long war—and to implicitly argue that we should be looking to end this war in Ukraine sooner rather than later, even if that means limiting Ukrainian objectives to some degree. He’s often pointed out that even in the war’s second year, the battle lines have hardened in a way that looks a lot like the first couple years of World War I. And as he notes, things didn’t change that much after that moment, and yet the human toll was enormous. Is that the right reading of World War I? How would you make sense of that history and that analogy as we watch Ukraine today? 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think he’s right. And I think it isn’t just the human cost of the war—which is of course what we should always focus on—but it’s also what the war did to societies, what the war did to economies, what the war did to political regimes.

By the end of the First World War, Russia had fallen into pieces. The tsarist regime had gone, and a civil war had broken out. Austria-Hungary had disappeared. The Turkish Empire—the Ottoman Empire—was about to disappear. And in a number of countries—Italy, Germany, for example—there were violent demonstrations and protests. So it was a time of tremendous turmoil, and that was a direct result of the First World War. 

So yes, I think General Milley is right. The problem, always, is to end a war as the losses mount, and it’s very, very difficult. After the first year of the war—the first few months of the 1914-18 war saw some of the highest casualties, and it was very difficult for governments and generals then to turn around to their publics and say, “We think we should stop now. No one’s going to win. There’s going to be a compromise.” You had the fear of public opinion, but also the hope that they’d renew the fighting in the spring, and then they’d renew the fighting again, and there would be victory. 

I think there is a terrible logic, as [Carl von] Clausewitz said, to war—that they just drag on and it’s very difficult to stop them. How the Ukrainian war will stop, I think, is still very much an open question. But it took four years for the First World War to stop. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You noted that Vladimir Putin had assumed that he would be in Kyiv—his forces would be in Kyiv—within a few days. There were, of course, lots of policymakers and leaders in the beginning of the First World War who thought the war would be quick and short and decisive. Why do leaders always seem to make that same mistake? It seems like a simple study of history would warn you against it, and yet we fall into it again and again.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think one reason is a fascination with the military—but also I think, because that’s their job in a way—with political leaders in the decisive battle. 

We look back at great, big battles like the Battle of Cannae that the Romans fought against Hannibal, and we look back at the Battle of Waterloo; we look back at some of these great victories. What we should remember is that war is often won not by these smashing victories, but by attrition.

In fact, the Carthaginians and Hannibal won the Battle of Cannae, but lost the war. And the Germans won big battles at the beginning of the First World War, but lost the war. And it was through attrition. But I think it’s very hard for people to imagine that. And I think the hope always is that we’ve got a sure formula for victory. And I think also with the military in the First World War, and possibly with the military today—their job is to bring victory. We could also argue their job is to fight defensive wars, but that has rarely been seen as attractive as an offensive war. It’s the job of the military to think of the ways in which they can bring victory. 

And I think what also happened in the case of Ukraine was that Putin and many others just did the counting. They looked at what Ukraine had and they looked at what Russia had; I mean, Russia was bigger in terms of population, amounts of military, aircraft, military equipment—all of these measurements. And people just looked and thought, well, when you actually look at it, there’s no way Ukraine can deal with it. And what of course was more difficult to measure—but became very apparent was important—were questions of morale and questions of command and questions of logistics, where it turned out the Ukrainians actually had great strengths and the Russians did not.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note in your new essay that “the longer a conflict lasts, the more important allies and resources become.” When you look at the prospects of both sides in a long war in Ukraine, I think you can read it in a couple different ways. On the one hand, this looks pretty good for the Ukrainians—the industrial base of its supporters within the United States and Europe and east Asia is certainly bigger than that of Russia. Russia has not exactly unstinting support from a few countries, including China.

But on the other hand, you can tally global GDP or population—and look at the reactions of large parts of the global South especially—and see a lot more ambivalence about punishing Russia, and a very different view of the war in Ukraine. So as you look at the dynamics of these coalitions, and the dynamics of attrition in the two world wars, what does that tell us about what might play out as the war in Ukraine goes on?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

It seems to me not yet clear which side has the balance of resources. Russia has been getting help from a number of countries—and it’s almost impossible, given the size of Russia and how many land borders it has, to stop equipment getting into Russia. And I think that’s something that the Western powers have recognized.

On the other hand, Ukraine has received a great deal of support—perhaps a surprising amount of support—from the European Union, but above all from the United States. The key questions in the next months and possibly years are going to be which side can continue to get the resources it needs and keep up the fight.

And of course, one of the big concerns for the Ukrainians and for those who support them is what happens in the next American presidential election. This again is a moment where politics matters, and who is actually in office matters. At the moment, the American president—President Biden—is committed to supporting Ukraine. His successor might be a Republican who may not be committed. We don’t know yet. It’s very, very difficult to tell. 

At the moment, I would say that Ukraine is getting enormous amounts of support, which has made it capable of continuing to fight. But there is a question mark over how long that support will last, and whether Russia will be able to continue to get the materials and equipment it needs—and a big question there will be how much will China want to support it. The Chinese are now sponsoring this African peace delegation, and I think the signals that have seemed to be coming from Beijing is that the Chinese would very much like to see this war over. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One really striking change in the rhetoric about the war in the United States and Europe, especially between a year ago and now, is how we talk about the rest of the world. I think there was a moment early in the war when the message, at least, was that the entire free world was uniting behind Ukraine, and Russia was going to be isolated. That has changed a lot as we have seen a wider variety of reactions from countries in sub-Saharan Africa and south and southeast Asia who just see things differently.

Did that surprise you, given the history of the two world wars that you’ve studied more closely than anyone? We call them “world wars,” but obviously they affected some geographies much more intensely than others. And I imagine that there was a more complicated set of reactions than the mythologized history of those wars suggests.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Yes, I think there is a mythologized history there. You know, it was good against evil, particularly the Second World War. We have more mixed feelings about the First World War, but even at the time, people thought the First World War was about matters of great principle. It was seen as a war of democracy against tyranny. You don’t have to agree with that, but that’s how people talked about it at the time and immediately after the First World War. 

What is different today is that there are far more independent countries. A great many parts of Africa and Asia and the Americas had little choice about whether they went to war in the First and Second World Wars because they were part of great Western empires, or part of the Japanese empire, and so they simply were brought into the war without very much consultation; a bit more in the Second World War. 

I think there was an assumption in the West that the war in Ukraine was so clearly wrong, so clearly against international law, that the world would rally around and condemn Russia immediately. And I think that was a certain insensitivity and obliviousness to some of the many concerns of countries in Africa, for example. A lot of Africans have said—and I think with justification—that the West and the rest of the world didn’t pay much attention, and hasn’t paid much attention, to some of the dreadful wars that are going on in Africa, and continue to go on in the Great Lakes region. And so why should they suddenly get worried about a war that’s happening in Europe?

I happen to think that that attitude could be challenged, and should be challenged. In fact, the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations made a very eloquent speech at the beginning of the war in which he said that an unjustified invasion is a worry for us all. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it or where it’s happening; the fact is that it is a very bad precedent. 

And there is a very important principle at stake here—but I think it’s understandable that a lot of the rest of the world would think, “This is a war in Europe. What does it have to do with us?” And I think Western powers have perhaps not been as good at explaining and dealing with that response as they could have been. They’ve tended just to assume the world would follow along. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One other dimension of this war that seems familiar from that history is the debate about diplomacy—and whether we should be talking while also fighting, how diplomacy affects the battlefield, how we think about negotiations. 

This has become a controversial topic in the context of Ukraine, but I know that there were moments in, certainly the First World War, and I believe the Second [World War] as well, when there was debate about what kind of diplomacy and what kind of negotiations would make sense. What is the history of that debate? How did this question of diplomacy and fighting while talking figure into those conflicts, and what does that tell us about what the role of diplomacy could be in Ukraine today?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think diplomacy was more possible in the First World War than in the Second. In the Second World War, after the Casablanca meeting in 1943, the Allies had a policy of unconditional surrender. Basically, they said, “We’re not going to talk.” They said to the enemy nations, “You surrender, and that’s it.”

In the First World War, I think, there was more opening and more possibility for diplomacy. There were various peace deals sent out, and there were attempts by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, and attempts by the Pope at the time, to try and bring the two sides together, which didn’t get anywhere because one of the problems, always—I believe strongly in diplomacy and I think you should always be willing to talk, but both sides in the conflict have to be willing to talk. And one of the problems in the First World War was that when the Allies were perhaps willing to talk about making some sort of agreed peace, the Germans and their allies weren’t, and vice versa. 

And the same thing during the Cold War with the United States and China—it took them a very long time to both want to talk at the same time. And in the current conflict, it seems to me that at the moment there is very little willingness on the part of the Russians to talk. And as the war goes on, I think there will be less willingness on the part of the Ukrainians to talk. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note in your pieces just how rare it is that a leader accepts defeat without a true threat to the homeland or the capital being seized, or some really decisive victory that makes it indisputable that the cause is lost. When you look at wars across history, but especially World War I, what can you see about how leaders make this decision about when to stop fighting, or what causes them to give up in the end? 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think it depends on the type of war and the type of society. We saw some total, all-out wars in the nineteenth century; the American Civil War, for example, and certainly the First and Second World Wars, make it very difficult to think of stopping, make it very difficult to think of saying, “Let’s try and get a settlement,” because the stakes have become so high. 

It is possible to have limited wars, and there were limited wars in the eighteenth century, where you fight until you grab the bit of land you want, and then both sides decide, that’s it, we’ve wasted enough—this was certainly true of the European limited wars—we’ve wasted enough resources. We’ve managed to hold onto a bit, we’ve got a bit that we want, let’s sit down and make peace. But what made it easier was that there weren’t that many people involved in the discussions. In wars which involve a great deal of passions and involve the public, then it becomes more difficult to settle for anything less than full victory. 

So at what point do leaders in the sort of total wars that we’ve seen—and I think we’re possibly seeing in Ukraine—at what point do they decide that they want to make peace? When their own domestic opinion begins to fracture. When you begin to get challenges to the regime—and in the case of Russia in 1917, the overthrow of the regime. Or when defeat is so absolute that there’s clearly no prospect of fighting on, which was the case with Japan and Germany in the Second World War. 

But in the case of Italy in the Second World War, what you got was a fracturing of support for Mussolini, and a sense that there is no point in us staying in this war—we’re gaining nothing from it, we’re being devastated. And so it depends on the type of war. It depends on the type of society. And it depends on how prepared those on the winning side are to settle and talk, or if they’ll go for complete victory.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But that suggests that the end comes if and when Vladimir Putin feels that his grip on power might be threatened by continuing the war. Is that fair? 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think that’s a strong possibility. And there are certainly signs in Russia that among the elites—it’s difficult to gauge Russian public opinion at the moment, but there is certainly some evidence that the Russians are becoming concerned about the cost of the war and the losses of lives. But among the elites, you’re now getting open attacks, not on Putin himself perhaps, but certainly open attacks on his government—most of them coming from the right, which is concerning for anyone who wants peace, because if Putin is to be replaced—which is possible, people do get replaced—he might be replaced by someone even more determined on full victory in Ukraine, and even less willing to talk. Very hard to tell at the moment. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That brings to mind a really powerful and grim observation in your new essay. Let me read a passage that really stuck with me from the piece. You write that “the past also offers an even darker warning—this time, for the future, when the war in Ukraine finally comes to an end, as all wars do. Ukraine and its supporters may well hope for an overwhelming victory and the fall of the Putin regime. Yet if Russia is left in turmoil, bitter and isolated, with many of its leaders and people blaming others for its failures, as so many Germans did in those interwar decades, then the end of one war could simply lay the groundwork for another.”

As we look to the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, even assuming a positive outcome for the Ukrainians, what kinds of dynamics will you be looking for and what would you advise policymakers to do as they think about trying to prevent a similar outcome in the wake of the war in Ukraine?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Well, the hardest thing will be to treat Russia generously if it eventually concedes. We don’t know yet what’s going to happen, but it will be hard because of the anger and because of what Russia’s done and because of how it’s behaved in Ukraine. The evidence of war crimes is getting stronger and stronger all the time. But Ukraine has a very long border with Russia and doesn’t want a Russia that goes into something like breakdown of society, becomes a failed state, has a civil war. 

Russia still remains potentially a very important power. It still has nuclear weapons, it still has a military that is organized. These are things that have to be taken into account. And the danger is going to be a Russia that—there’s this deep sense of bitterness that they have been badly treated. The tendency would be to blame not their own leaders but to blame outside forces, which is what happened in Germany after the First World War.

The Germans lost on the battlefield, but this was something that a lot of Germans simply didn’t accept—including key members of the military, who very sedulously fostered this idea that Germany had been stabbed in the back by traitors at home and had not really lost on the battlefield. And that played into German politics. It isn’t entirely responsible for the rise of Hitler, many other factors came in—but it certainly helped to drive supporters towards the Nazis. And I think that’s a danger. 

The other danger I see is the world is going to say, “Well, that’s over and done with. Ukraine is still an independent country, we hope; maybe they’ve lost some territory.” The effort of rebuilding Ukraine—and if the rest of the world loses interest, particularly the Western supporters of Ukraine, then I think I’d be really worried, because Ukraine is going to need enormous support. So, the danger is not just a bitter and resentful Russia, whatever happens in Russia. The danger is also Ukraine, which is impoverished, immiserated, in which people feel that the war has left them in this awful situation and no one is helping them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You wrote a magnificent book about the U.S.-Chinese relationship and Chinese leaders. Xi Jinping and others in Beijing have been watching the war in Ukraine very, very closely. And I’m curious, as you look back across wars in the past century and beyond, how leaders make sense of wars happening elsewhere. What do you think Xi Jinping is thinking as he’s watching this war? 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

If I were to guess, I think at the beginning of the war, he probably thought, as other leaders of countries on the sidelines in wars have thought—and I don’t want to sound cynical—what’s in it for us? Should we get involved? Should we stay out? What is potentially going to help us? 

You saw this in both the First and Second World Wars. A number of countries made a very conscious choice to stay neutral, and some were able to enforce that. And you had others that joined in when they felt they could see which side was going to win, and felt that they wanted to be able to gain something out of it. Italy, for example, came into the First World War in 1915 on the Allied side thinking that this would benefit Italy and help it achieve some of its territorial ambitions. 

I think leaders often make what sound to us like very cold and heartless calculations, but they’re thinking of the interests of their own country. In the case of Xi Jinping, he’s very conscious that China is a great power. I think he wants China to remain and become an even greater power. But was it in China’s interests to get involved in this particular war? And I think it must have been something of a quandary, because China had very good relations with Ukraine. It had invested a lot of money in Ukraine, and the Russian invasion was threatening, among other things, to those investments.

But Russia is a great power. It has a very long common border with China. It has resources that China very much needs. And I think the calculation he made was that China would benefit from backing Russia; not becoming its full ally, but playing a clever game supporting Russia until it won, which most people thought would happen very quickly; but not alienating Ukraine completely. And I think what the Chinese are discovering is they’ve made a bit of a mistake. They went perhaps too far at the beginning in strong support for Russia, and they’re finding a country that doesn’t seem to be able to wage war very successfully. 

But on the other hand, it’s left them in a much stronger position vis-à-vis Russia. One of the unintended consequences for Putin of this war is that he has left Russia very much as a junior partner, now, of China—very much more dependent now on China, which is not a good place for Russia to be, given the respective resources of both countries.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What do you imagine policymakers could be doing in the years ahead as they seek to manage and possibly disrupt the sino-Soviet convergence that has become really striking in the last few months?

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I think the U.S.-Chinese relationship is stronger, in my view, than the Russian-Chinese one. For all the tensions between them, the two countries have come a long way together. Their economies are much more intertwined. They have a much better understanding of each other. A great many Americans have been in China, lived in China, speak Mandarin; and a great many Chinese have studied in the United States. So the relationship, although tense at times—and people worry about it a great deal—is one that seems to be far more than just an alliance of convenience.

The relationship with Russia—I don’t know. The Chinese and Russians have not been friendly in the past, so I don’t see this relationship as developing in any deep and meaningful way. I don’t see the same sort of exchanges and contacts between populations that you had with the United States and China. And I think the Russians are—and should be—very concerned about the fact that they have a dynamic economy just to the south of them. They have far more Chinese than Russians living in the far east. And they have a China which is conscious of its own past and conscious of territory it once controlled. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m struck, when you look at the history leading up to the United States opening to China the last time around, that U.S. policymakers seem both aware of those insecurities and very adept at fanning them, that they kind of went out of their way to point out to policymakers on both sides what the sources of tension and vulnerability might be. And I suppose the advice to young diplomats today would be to look out for similar vulnerabilities than securities in China and Russia now, and look for ways to fan them and exploit them in the years ahead. 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Yes. Or look to ways to assuage them, if you want to establish better relations. What was very important for the U.S.-Chinese friendship—one of the difficulties they had was that both sides didn’t know much about each other because they hadn’t been in communication for so long. And I think both sides realized they were going to have to try and find out about the other. 

Mao set up a special commission of generals and allowed them to read dangerous periodicals such as Time magazine so they could actually get some sense of the United States. And in the United States, Henry Kissinger, who was going to be the key negotiator on it all, spent the summer before he went to China educating himself on China. He borrowed as many books as he could, and he tried to find out as much as he could. I think that’s absolutely crucial. If diplomacy is going to succeed—either by putting pressure and exploiting the vulnerabilities of others, but also by trying to sometimes mollify them and deal with those insecurities—you’ve got to know. Knowing about each other is enormously important. 

One of the things that any country needs to do is make sure that it has a very good diplomatic service—but also that it has the research knowledge and the capacity in its universities to understand the other. I was at a conference the other day in London, and people were very worried about the decreasing numbers of students doing foreign languages. If you don’t know foreign languages, you are cutting yourself off from a source of finding out about other people. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to close by stepping back even further. We recently had General Milley on the podcast and he talked about these kind of cycles of history, as he saw it. He noted that today, no policymakers or military leaders have any real memory of what great-power war looks like and the unimaginable toll it takes on societies, and that that makes it all the more likely that we’ll end up back in another war. How do you see those fears? Do you worry about the same thing? 

MARGARET MACMILLAN

I do, and I guess my short answer would be: study history. Not looking for clear blueprints and lessons, but simply to warn you that there are times when people thought everything’s going fine, and we know where it’s going—and then suddenly something comes along, something goes wrong. Things can go wrong, and we can have accidents in human affairs, in international relations, in domestic societies. 

And I do worry. What always makes a difference is if you have leaders who have actually themselves been through a great catastrophe, they perhaps have a direct sense of it. The leaders in the Second World War knew what had gone wrong in the First World War because they’d lived through it; a number of them had fought in it. And they’d lived through the Great Depression. And that’s why they wanted to set up—certainly the Americans wanted to set up—a different sort of economic order in the world, to try and avoid that sort of catastrophe again.

So yes, I think it matters, it helps that leaders have experience. You don’t want catastrophes to happen so that they get experience. But what you would like is leaders who have some sense that the world can change; that the world is not a stable place. 

You do get these periods of great complacency. Before the First World War, people thought in Europe, “We’re too civilized. We’ll never have a terrible war again like the Napoleonic Wars. Wars are fought by other people, not by us.” And I think we had the same feeling, perhaps, before the Ukraine war: “If wars happen, they’ll happen in Africa, but they won’t happen in Europe. There won’t be a major ground war in Europe.” There was this sense that it’s not going to happen here. I worry about that because wars—they come, and we try to avoid them, but we can’t always avoid them, or we haven’t so far been very good at it. I think we have to take it very seriously, the possibility of avoiding war, because we can inflict such damage on our world.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, in studying history, I hope people will start by reading your essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, “How Wars Don’t End,” as well as the slew of wonderful books that you’ve written about much of this history over the last several years. Margaret, thanks so much for the great piece, and for joining us today.

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Thank you very much for such a nice conversation.