What Putin didn’t learn

What makes history both interesting and galling is the way it confirms the philosopher Hegel’s view that, “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

Washington in Valley Forge, the spirit of American resistance
Canadians and Brits resist an American invasions
A Vietnamese resister captured by US forces awaits his fate

Take the Brits in the 1770s. They’d fought three wars against France in the century and, with allies, won all of them. They’d built the world’s greatest navy. A bunch of colonists with little in the way of military equipment and less training were clearly no match for their power.

And yet, those North American colonists held Britain at bay for ten years. They even won a few set-piece battles. What’s more, British victories were never conclusive, but only bought them a little time while the colonists prepared for their next encounter.

Britain had also made the mistake of saddling itself with a cost-cutting government, which had run down its military power. When France, Spain and Holland joined the war against it, resources were stretched to breaking point. For the first and last time in the last four centuries, enemy fleets sailed in the English Channel unchallenged.

That meant that Britain couldn’t stop France coming to the aid of the colonists and winning the battle that ended the war as an American victory. Britain could certainly have fought on, but far too many people at home had decided that it was pointless. They were battling a whole people, with a huge landmass at its back, and deep resources, human as well as material, from which it could replace whatever losses Britain could inflict on them.

Britain might have been able to win army-to-army, and certainly fleet-to-fleet, battles. But army-to-people? Not a chance.

It was a harsh lesson America had inflicted on Britain. It seems, however, that it didn’t learn it itself. Just three decades later, the two nations came to blows again, in the War of 1812. This time, the Americans were sure they only had to step over the border into Canada, in particular the nearest part, then called Upper Canada, which was predominantly settled by English-speaking Protestants, to win that territory from Britain. The population would greet them with joy, as liberators. 

To their astonishment, not to say shock, the Americans discovered that the Canadians weren’t that keen on being absorbed into the United States. Instead, they took arms to fight alongside British troops and drive the Americans back out. Meanwhile, though the Brits could certainly invade US territory and do some harm – like burning Washington DC – they couldn’t hold anything or defeat the much less experienced American forces. Who, indeed, inflicted several painful defeats on them.

There are plenty more such examples. But let’s fast forward nearly a century and a half. The Vietnamese have just won a stunning victory over the forces of their colonial masters, the French. But, instead of gaining their independence, they find their country divided artificially in two, with the Americans pouring in men to try to protect the unpopular regime in South Vietnam.

The Americans fought on for 20 years. There were going on for 1.5 million deaths, 58,000 of them American soldiers. The scale of the Vietnamese deaths reveals that this was again a war by an immensely powerful nation against a people. The powerful side, America’s, could win battle after battle and inflict huge casualties. It could never win the people round, and they would always step forward to replace their losses.

A lesson repeated down the ages. You can be a powerful nation. You can kid yourself into thinking that the people of another nation will welcome your invasion with open arms. You can rightly believe that it hasn’t the forces to defeat you in conventional battle. And you can then come unstuck when the people who were supposed to welcome you in fact resist your invasion, and keep replacing the gaps you’ve made in their ranks.

It’s even worse if the country is geographically huge, like the North American colonies Britain tried to bring to heel. Or if, again like the Brits, you’ve allowed your armed forces to decline in strength. Especially if, like them, you find that other nations rally to your enemies’ support.

So here’s the question. What on earth was Putin thinking of? With so many examples to learn from, with his constant calling on models from history, how could he have been so short-sighted as to go to war against a geographically colossal nation, Ukraine, kidding himself that the population would welcome his forces, and using an army that is woefully below par? And hopelessly underestimating the West’s readiness to support his victim?

Ukrainian resistance, Russian losses

That’s the first lesson from history, that people like Putin don’t learn lessons from history. But there’s a second lesson. Which is that there are no bounds to human stupidity. And it isn’t a disqualification from getting into positions of enormous power.

As Putin so strikingly shows.