In just under two weeks Donald Trump will become the 47th President of the United States. Much of the world holds its breath in anticipation of what he will do once he has the reins of power, and he has dropped quite a few hints. Those hints should not be taken as statements of fact rather than rhetoric from a robust businessman to indicate a desired direction of travel, but the one we can take seriously is his pledge to end the fighting in Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine are both exhausted after nearly three years of conflict which Vladimir Putin hoped would be only three days. Ukraine is running out of manpower to resist the aggressor in what has become an attritional war. But surely, most world leaders will think, peace can only be a good thing? War is bad for business.
However, peace at what cost? We need to look back into history to see the potential consequences.
In 1905 the Russians sued for peace at the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War that had seen the Russian Far East and Baltic fleets destroyed – the latter at the end of an 18,000-mile journey. The Tsar was humiliated and reforms in the Russian forces followed. The building of a new, modern, huge Russian military began.
The problem was that the German General Staff, watching this from a Germany which had finite resources, came to the conclusion that they would be unable to defeat the Russian army by 1916. If Germany was to have a chance of winning the coming war, it had to happen no later than 1914. And so it did.
The peace will allow Putin to survive in office and claim a form of victory. His undoubted direction of travel will be the same as that of the Tsar before him: to re-organise and re-arm with cutting edge weaponry, learning the lessons of the battlefields on which the Ukrainians have humbled the much larger Russian army just as the Japanese crushed the supposedly more powerful Russians at Port Arthur and Tsushima. Once Putin’s army is rebuilt, his next decisive move can be only years away: though of course the Ukrainians may make the same calculation as the Germans, and attempt to strike before he is fully ready.
In just under two weeks Donald Trump will become the 47th President of the United States. Much of the world holds its breath in anticipation of what he will do once he has the reins of power, and he has dropped quite a few hints. Those hints should not be taken as statements of fact rather than rhetoric from a robust businessman to indicate a desired direction of travel, but the one we can take seriously is his pledge to end the fighting in Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine are both exhausted after nearly three years of conflict which Vladimir Putin hoped would be only three days. Ukraine is running out of manpower to resist the aggressor in what has become an attritional war. But surely, most world leaders will think, peace can only be a good thing? War is bad for business.
However, peace at what cost? We need to look back into history to see the potential consequences.
In 1905 the Russians sued for peace at the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War that had seen the Russian Far East and Baltic fleets destroyed – the latter at the end of an 18,000-mile journey. The Tsar was humiliated and reforms in the Russian forces followed. The building of a new, modern, huge Russian military began.
The problem was that the German General Staff, watching this from a Germany which had finite resources, came to the conclusion that they would be unable to defeat the Russian army by 1916. If Germany was to have a chance of winning the coming war, it had to happen no later than 1914. And so it did.
The peace will allow Putin to survive in office and claim a form of victory. His undoubted direction of travel will be the same as that of the Tsar before him: to re-organise and re-arm with cutting edge weaponry, learning the lessons of the battlefields on which the Ukrainians have humbled the much larger Russian army just as the Japanese crushed the supposedly more powerful Russians at Port Arthur and Tsushima. Once Putin’s army is rebuilt, his next decisive move can be only years away: though of course the Ukrainians may make the same calculation as the Germans, and attempt to strike before he is fully ready.