More and more people are seeing what I’ve been seeing for a while: in the opinion of our Ruling Class, every foreign enemy is Hitler, every crisis in Munich and everyone who doesn’t get on board with fighting the new Hitler is Chamberlain. This is what they’ve sold us again and again since 1945. To be fair, nobody wants a repeat of World War Two. Six years of killing, 60 million people dead, uncountable physical damage to the civilized world. It is just too horrible to contemplate going back into such a shambles. But, here’s the thing: a repeat of World War Two has always been highly unlikely. The ingredients are hard to come by.

The first ingredient has to be a Great Power defeated but not destroyed. Germany was completely and utterly defeated in World War One. Had the Germans not called it quits in November of 1918, then the Spring of 1919 would have seen a massive allied invasion of Germany with a 3 million man American army in the van and the total allied armies equipped with tanks and planes to make mincemeat of any German defensive lines (and, as it turns out, the first airborne troops – US General Billy Mitchell envisioned dropping thousands of US soldiers behind enemy lines as the offensive started). Had the Germans fought on then the only result would have been more killing and a destroyed Germany. The Krauts quit to prevent that. They shouldn’t have been allowed to do that.

To be fair, the Allies didn’t have our luxury of hindsight so they couldn’t know that right after the war the Germans would cook up the “stab in the back” legend which excused German military failure and laid the blame for defeat on first the socialists and, later, the Jews. But some Allied leaders did have some foresight…notably Marshal Foch and General MacArthur both pointing out that the peace treaty was, at best, an armistice of twenty years. They could see this because while Germany was defeated even the supposed harshness of Versailles did nothing to cripple Germany’s latent power. It was still a united nation. It still had its industrial base. It retained an army which anyone could see would be exceptionally first rate as the Germans retained only the best of the best in the ranks. All Versailles did, really, was to clear the board and allow the Germans to start building from the ground up a new and more deadly force – and the Germans started working on this within a year of the peace (the Germans built new U-Boats in Holland and tested out tank and plane designs in the USSR, for instance). There’s the first necessary ingredient.

Second is a charismatic leader able to spellbind the Great Power’s people and forge them into a united force for conquest. Can such a person rise again? In theory, yes. But the thing about oddities is that they’re, well, odd. Not easily replicated. Plus in the German case you not only had to get that leader, he had to dovetail in with decades of the preaching of racial superiority by others who came before him…in other words, there had to be plowed ground ready to be seeded with the charismatic leader’s ideology. We do not have in any foreign leader that particular sort of person with that particular sort of ground to work with. Keep in mind how totally Hitler captured the German mind: German soldiers would throw themselves on enemy machine guns shouting “Heil Hitler” while they died. Even at the very bitter end the soldiers desperately fought completely hopeless battles for their leader. The chances we’ll find another like this are very low – almost nil.

And now comes the really hard part: once you’ve got your Great Power defeated but still intact and looking for revenge combined with your charismatic leader you need the most crucial thing: a huge run of luck. I mean like hitting the lottery five times in a row luck. The sort of luck where an observer looking back on it goes, “just ain’t possible!”.

The luck of being appointed Chancellor just as his popularity was waning. The luck of Hindenburg dying just as he’s reaching for total power. The luck of the French not destroying him in 1936 over the Rhineland. The luck of the Anglo-French agreeing to remove the Czech threat to the heart of Germany in 1938. The luck of the Anglo-French delaying Polish mobilization until August 31st, 1939. The luck of Stalin agreeing to back up Germany’s invasion of Poland. The luck of France’s massive army remaining immobile against a German military screen in the West as Poland was destroyed. And then the greatest stroke of luck of all – when Germany invades France and hits the weakest part of the French line in the Ardennes the French general on the scene totally flubs the response even though he had an armored division in place to pinch off the German offensive before it could get going. You can see why Hitler thought himself a providential genius after all that.

This belief, by the way, is what did Hitler in. He really thought he was unbeatable…that a string of very bizarre luck was something he willed into existence. The luck ran out first over the skies of Britain and then in the rubble of Stalingrad. But, still: horrible war. Never want to do that again. And provision should be made in case someone else starts to get on a run of luck like that. But this doesn’t mean that every foreign enemy is Hitler and every crisis is Munich. We must stop being stampeded into bad actions by people who are not only lying to us about the threat but are, themselves, very stupid and ignorant people. That’s why they overuse the Hitler analogy, by the way: they’re too stupid to come up with anything else. We stop letting them use that on us and it’ll stop being used.

Absent a Hitler, any foreign crisis is just a thing to be dealt with based upon our perceived needs at the time. It isn’t the precursor to World War Three…it is just Russia wanting the Donbas. Do we let her have it? Try to stop it? These are empirical questions to be answered on a case by case basis. Subsidiary questions are: if we let her have it, what price do we extract from Russia? If we try to stop it: to what extent? That is, how far are we really willing to go to keep Russia out? Rational arguments can be made both ways on this – and it is in the rational argument where we’ll eventually arrive at the best solution. Shouting its Hitler II and you’re a Putin stooge if you don’t drop a hundred billion into arguably the most corrupt nation in Europe is…bad. Unwise. In fact, it is so bad and so unwise that only a complete moron or a con artist would go that route.

As I’ve endlessly yammered on about lately, it is time to rejoin the real world. Paraphrasing Bismarck, if I am convinced that well-reasoned national policy requires it, I’ll see American soldiers fire on Russians or Iranians or Chinese without batting an eye. If we are pressed to it, then war to the knife. But I also believe that cool headed diplomacy backed up by force-in-being will resolve most foreign crisis. Do keep in mind that if Germany and France had between them a military force of, say, 600,000 ready to go in 2022 then a joint declaration by them that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be casus belli then almost certainly there would have been no Russian invasion. But, also, it doesn’t mean that Russia would get nothing…because if the Russian demand is that Ukraine turn over the Donbas to Russia or Russia will invade, then it is time for the Great Powers to get together at the table and see if a solution short of war could be found. In the real world, diplomacy is backed by force. In the fantasy world, it is backed by a Clinton Administration memo which means nothing. A powerful EU confronting a powerful Russia probably means Putin gets half a loaf. Maybe a quarter of a loaf. But he doesn’t get nothing. And war is avoided because everyone is well armed and ready to use it to make sure that Russia doesn’t try for the whole loaf.

And do keep in mind that the Russo-Ukraine crisis can become a World War if things are managed badly. Much like WWI growing out of a fracas in the Balkans. Nobody really willed that war into existence but a whole string of dumb decisions came together to make it happen. It might well be a dumb decision for us to go to the mat to stop Russia because that might draw in other powers who don’t want Russia humiliated and soon we might find the lights going out all around the world. Much better, as noted, to have armed diplomacy to come to a reasonable solution before things get out of hand.

And now to a last point on this: NATO was a huge mistake. Never should have entered into it. The theory was that Soviet Communism could only be deterred by collective security…and that does have some basis in fact if the USSR was militarily aggressive. But it wasn’t. Certainly not right after WWII and for a couple decades afterwards. Russia had been wrecked by the war. Sure, Stalin and his successors would have fought if they thought it necessary…but they weren’t about to go launching into WWIII any time soon. They couldn’t (people forget that without massive Anglo-American material aid, the USSR would have been compelled to peace in 1943, if not sooner). All NATO did was allow the Europeans to skimp on their own defense. All through the Cold War the NATO allies failed to really live up to their commitments. Sure, their armies in the 1980’s were massively larger than now…but not as large as they were supposed to be. All of them sought cuts in defense spending to use on social programs…all of them coasted along on the back of American military power. Absent NATO, the British would have had to retain a very powerful Navy (powerful enough to secure Britain’s trade unaided) while the French would have had to retain a very powerful Army (powerful enough to stop any theoretical Russian invasion at the Rhine). And our part of defending the West could have been a mere diplomatic note stating that the operation of a hostile naval force around the UK or the invasion of France by a hostile power would trigger American intervention. The Europeans would still have been backed up by us…but not dependent on us. And Europe would have been strong enough to force a diplomatic resolution to the Russo-Ukraine crisis.