We Need Leaders Who Swim Against the Currents of History
The parallels between the Russia-Ukraine War and World War I are striking. The war in Ukraine has become a grinding war of attrition, dependent on new technologies in the skies (drones instead of planes), long range artillery, and tanks. The military stalemate—punctuated by counteroffensives and high-casualty skirmishes—is matched by political and diplomatic paralysis.
In The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, historian Margaret MacMillan asks: Are we subject to historical forces beyond our control? Or can individuals stand up to make a difference? Consider these excerpts from her introduction:
Somehow any explanation of how the Great War came must balance the great currents of the past with the human beings who bobbed along in them but who somehow changed the direction of the flow.
It is easy to throw up one’s hands and say the Great War was inevitable but that that is dangerous thinking, especially in a time like our own which in some ways resembles the vanished world of the years before 1914.
MacMillan’s book is animated by the question of how leaders get to the point when they accept that “war becomes more likely than peace.” And further “why don’t they pull back?”
Inertia, momentum, inevitability—much of history is explained by processes that once started, fulfill their ultimate destiny. A perennial ethical question is why do some processes proceed unchecked, and are some questioned and stopped? Here, the details and the particulars matter deeply.
The tragedy of World War I is that no leader was able to stem the flow of the historical wave. Are we in a similar moment today?
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