Ukraine

I would recommend reading the whole article. I’m familiar with the vast majority of the historical parallels they lay out, and I agree. If you’re less of a history nerd than I am, it’s an excellent brief on the high-level geopolitical and economic lead-in to WW2, and how disturbingly similar it is to what’s going on since 2022 (or really, since 2014) Ukraine.

There may be parallels but there are also such huge differences that I cant really buy into that comparison. Most of all before WW2 no one had nuclear weapons. It's a difference that can't be underestimated. You may think that Putin is a lunatic but you can be sure that above all he cares about his own survival. So why should he do anything that could provoke a 3rd world war? The moment that there's an open war with NATO... He knows that he's a dead man.

Moreover, Russia is in no position to fight against let alone occupy any NATO country. They couldn't even occupy half of Ukraine so far and they've lost so many troops. Yes they're trying to build a war economy but Russia has no population that's expendable. They're already in a deep demographic crisis and this war will only cripple their economic outlook for a long time to come.

I really don't see how Russia is supposed to pull of the Hitler playbook. Putin would risk everything without a prospect of success. They'll keep fighting in Ukraine and continue their hybrid FUD war but that's all there is.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires.

In a sign of the times, Michael Roth, the SPD chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee and a supporter of arming Ukraine, is quitting politics, saying he found it was like stepping into a refrigerator to hold the views he did inside his own party.

Critics say this fatalistic narrative – dovetailing with Russia’s main objective, which is to convince the US that further aid is futile – also makes little attempt to identify the lessons of the past two years about the failure to organise a war economy in Europe.

Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.

Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted to a conference last month that after two years “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory with our plans because political leaders had not yet told them the objective”.

It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in Washington in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him – with all the risk that carries, including for China.

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