If you want to keep a little cheerfulness in these warlike days, you should not browse too much in the work of historians who have become wise through the hard times.
That’s how I made the mistake of buying the book How Wars Begin from 1979 by the prominent British historian AJP Taylor (1906–1990), in the Dutch translation How wars start by Jan Stoof and with a foreword by Jan Blokker, who described the somewhat controversial Taylor as a creative, challenging and therefore extraordinarily adventurous historian.
Wars arise more often from fear than from the urge to conquer, Taylor notes in his introduction. “Every great power distrusts every possible or even impossible enemy. What appears to one defense will always appear to another as aggressive preparation.”
I see Putin nodding vigorously here, because that is how he experiences the attitude of NATO. Taylor doesn’t believe this mistrusting behavior has anything to do with human nature; he sees it as the inevitable consequence of the existence of sovereign states.
Taylor continues: “Every major power relies on weapons as a deterrent. This deterrence has often been successful and has brought Europe long periods of peace. There comes a moment of impatience or misjudgment and then the deterrent doesn’t work. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the balance of power has been replaced by the balance of deterrence. This only means that the chances of war have diminished, not that they are no longer there. In the past, deterrence was effective in nine out of ten cases. Now maybe in ninety-nine out of a hundred. But if we can go by the experiences of the past […] will surely come the hundredth time.”
While Putin was still nodding vigorously, I began to swallow at least as heavily. When I first read these words in 1979, I must have thought rather irreverently: ‘Come on, Taylor, don’t be too gloomy, we’ve had the Vietnam War behind us, it won’t be that fast for a while, even if the Russians are now entering Afghanistan.”
At the end of his book, Taylor sharpens it again mercilessly: “When people ask me, ‘Is there going to be another world war?’ I tend to answer: ‘When the people in the future behave exactly as they did in the past, there will be another war.’ But of course it is always possible that people behave differently. Personally, I feel that this is unlikely and that there will be a third world war. One day the deterrent will no longer deter.”
More than forty years after these words and with a bloodthirsty Putin on the horizon, Taylor’s prediction suddenly takes on a much more ominous charge. You can now better imagine how Putin in his Moscow bunker villa increasingly furiously asks his closest associates: “Why do we get so little against Zelensky’s bunch of amateurs?” “It is because of the arms supplies of the NATO countries,” they will answer anxiously.
“Tinglijers!” shouts Putin. He takes a black metal box from his desk and steps out of the room. “He doesn’t have the key, does he?” asks Minister Lavrov. Resignedly they wait, just like us.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 9, 2022