US leaders Have Failed to Learn the Lessons of World War Two Regarding How to Prevent Great Power Conflicts

Biden's War in Ukraine and China's Near-Imminent Invasion of Taiwan Threaten to Escalate into an Unnecessary Third World War with the Sino-Russian Military Alliance

Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler watches parading German cavalry troops during Polish Campaign

This weekend marks the 84^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. What lessons has America learned from the true origins of the war and how to avert another world war likely to be ten times more deadly than the last? The answer, unfortunately is that, judging by the Biden administration’s increasingly reckless foreign policy, it seems US leaders have learned none of the most important lessons of World War Two history in terms of how to engage in robust diplomacy and diplomatic negotiations to prevent regional conflicts from escalating into unnecessary world wars.

During the twentieth century, great power alliances transformed two regional conflicts in Eastern Europe (the Austro-Serbian conflict in 1914 and the German-Polish conflict in 1939) into unnecessary world wars at an estimated cost of over one hundred million lives as a result of terrible miscalculations on both sides. Most Americans do not realize that both world wars were avertable, the second more than the first, due to the fact that most of the great powers did not want war. Only France wanted the outbreak of the First World War in order to regain its lost province of Alsace-Lorraine while only the Soviet Union wanted the outbreak of the Second World War in order to conquer nearly two-thirds of Europe and effectively become its hegemon for nearly half a century. In both cases, conflict could have been averted through diplomatic negotiation were it not for the absolutist positions taken by a single country in each instance determined not to agree to the most minimal concessions necessary to avert the outbreak of war.

In the case of the First World War, it was Austria-Hungary that refused to be satisfied with Serbia’s acceptance of nine of the ten points of its July 23, 1914 ultimatum and subsequently its refusal to accept the British proposal for its “Stop in Belgrade” plan that ensured the outbreak of a great power war. In the case of the Second World War, it was Poland that refused to negotiate with Nazi Germany when German dictator Adolf Hitler had not demanded a single inch of Polish territory—only the free German city of Danzig and a road-rail corridor connecting the two parts of Germany which the artificially created Polish Corridor had broken apart since the Treaty of Versailles. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made a foolish decision to guarantee Poland militarily from German attack at a time when Hitler had no plans to attack it and had spent the previous five years trying to court it as a German ally against the USSR that served to ensure the outbreak of World War Two.

Britain’s military guarantee of Poland served to strengthen Polish leaders in their adamant refusal to even discuss the Danzig issue with Germany causing Hitler to do the unthinkable and conclude the Hitler-Stalin Pact with Stalin which divided Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Hitler believed that Britain and France would not dare risk war with Germany without Soviet support. With the total failure of his diplomatic efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Poland over the Danzig issue over the previous nine months, the Nazi dictator made the fateful decision to invade Poland on September 1st, 1939.

Hitler’s offer the next day of an armistice and a withdrawal of all German troops from Poland except the Polish Corridor, which comprised a little more than four percent of its territory, was rejected by Chamberlain. On September 3rd, Britain then declared war in which an estimated 34 million Europeans died in an effort to ensure that nearly half a million Germans in the “free city” of Danzig continued to live under Polish rule despite the fact that many British and French leaders believed Hitler’s demand for the return of the 95% ethnic German city to the Reich to be just. The full account of how close the world came to averting the most terrible and destructive war in history can be found in my groundbreaking article, “Missed Opportunities for Peace-The Secret Diplomatic History of the Second World War.”

In reviewing these events, I am in no way trying to defend Hitler who we all know later became an evil, genocidal maniac. I am merely stating the facts of history which are that Hitler did not want war with Britain, France or Poland. Rather, he wanted to lead an international crusade against Bolsheviksm and carve out an eastern empire for Germany at the expense of western Russia and Ukraine ideally with the British Empire and Poland as German allies.

The chief lesson of World War Two then is not that appeasement begets war, given the fact that Britain had abruptly abandoned its policy of appeasement five months before the war began and opted instead to pursue a policy of uncompromising and unyielding military confrontation with Germany that ensured the outbreak of World War Two. Rather, it is that the refusal to negotiate even the most modest concessions with one’s adversary can cause the outbreak of great power conflicts at the cost of tens of millions of innocent lives and tremendously adverse and mostly unforeseen geopolitical consequences.

This is a lesson that neoconservatives will likely never learn as for them the year is always 1938 and every potential concession to our adversaries is another “Munich moment” in reference to the Munich Agreement in which Britain and France appeased Nazi Germany with the over 90% ethnic German Sudetenland that along with Austria had voted for Anchluss with Germany two decades earlier. Similarly, the myth that World War Two was “the Good War” despite the fact that we engaged in an unholy alliance with the Evil Soviet Empire and it ended with the US and UK assisting Communism in enslaving one-third of the world’s people and territory from Berlin to Beijing has essentially become a cultish religious tenet for leftists across the world as suggested by groundbreaking World War Two historian, Sean McKeekin, author of the outstanding book- “Stalin’s War: a New History of the Second World War.”

Today, America’s modern-day great power alliance system threatens to transform a third regional conflict in Eastern Europe, this time in Ukraine, into an unnecessary and avoidable Third World War that could cost the lives of a billion more people. The stakes for America and the world could hardly be any higher. Last year, at a fundraiser held on October 6^th, President Joe Biden told Democratic donors that the risk of nuclear war and “Armageddon” is now higher than at any time in the past sixty years and that Putin may need a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict.

President Biden is the first US President who has deliberately opted to pursue a dangerous and reckless policy, which I have denounced as amounting to a policy of ‘national suicide’ that threatens to provoke a direct nuclear superpower conflict. During the entirety of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, America was led by sober minded, foreign policy realists who were loathe to risk the outbreak of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and refrained from interfering in Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe as agreed to under the Yalta Agreement of 1945. Presidents John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon were both committed to peace. During the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy cut a deal with the Soviets for them to withdraw the nuclear missiles in Cuba in exchange for the US withdrawing its nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey and agreeing never to attack Cuba militarily potentially saving 100 million American lives in the process. He wisely concluding that the key to averting a Third World War, which would quickly escalate to the nuclear level, was to provide our nuclear superpower adversaries with a face-saving diplomatic exit, a lesson Biden would do well to heed with regards to ending the danger of nuclear escalation with regards to his proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Nixon advocated the US engaging in peaceful accommodations of Russia and China that recognized their vital interests in which both sides would provide reciprocal concessions. President Ronald Reagan successfully implemented Nixon’s foreign policy vision during his second term with negotiated agreements to manage the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union resulting in America’s victory during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Since the Cold War ended, every US President over the past thirty years, with the notable exception of President Donald Trump, has opted to forsake America’s Cold-War winning realist foreign policy and pursue a messianic foreign policy of liberal hegemony focused on expanding our liberal empire to the borders of the Russian Federation and Communist China. exporting democracy to the world’s nations by force. For the past two decades, the US grand strategy of liberal hegemony has brought us one disaster after another including a preventable Global War on Terror and tragic, unnecessary regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now, arguably, in Ukraine at an appalling humanitarian cost.

This tragic and failed policy began in 1999, when President Bill Clinton opted to expand NATO to Russia’s borders for the first time in history against the advice of his own Secretary of Defense and many other renowned foreign policy experts at the time provoking Russia to formally ally with Communist China two years later creating an existential threat to the US and its allies, making us far less safe and secure. The PRC has since become a nuclear superpower on par with the US with the largest army, navy, coast guard and nuclear capable ballistic missile force.

Subsequently, in 2008, President George W. Bush greatly compounded Clinton’s blunder by pressuring NATO to issue the Bucharest Declaration which stated that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO provoking Russia to invade Georgia. In 2014, the Biden-authorized, CIA-backed Maidan Coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine provoked Russia to invade Ukraine. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Biden discarded all the lessons of America’s three greatest foreign policy realist Cold War Presidents by crossing nearly every Russian redline in America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, except for deploying US military forces there. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has spent the last eighteen months throwing a diplomatic temper tantrum against Russia refusing to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict, let alone even talk to the Russians about how we can avoid an escalation of the war.

Today, America faces risks of provoking World War Three both with regards to the war in Ukraine and what appears to be a near imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Ending the war in Ukraine would be a relatively simple feat to accomplish as it would only require suspending all Western aid to Ukraine until it signed and implemented a permanent cease fire and an armistice agreement with Russia. A Ukrainian government official recently admitted as much. Cutting off all US aid alone would likely be sufficient for Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia as they are so heavily dependent on us not  only for their war effort but also to fund their government operations as noted by the fact that the Ukrainian government has stated the US has provided $196 billion in aid of which only about $47.9 billion has been direct US military assistance with an additional $6.2 billion planned not including Biden’s latest $24 billion Ukraine aid supplemental which includes another $13.1 billion in military assistance.  

Like many if not most past major conflicts, the war in Ukraine was also easily avertable. In an attempt to avert the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Russia offered the US and NATO comprehensive peace agreements in December 2021. Despite popular misconceptions, neither agreement called for NATO to be rolled back even one inch. It’s draft mutual security with NATO was entirely acceptable from a US national security perspective though their draft mutual security agreement with the US was not. Nevertheless, the US could have accepted most of the provisions of the agreement that were in accordance with US national security interests.  

All the Biden administration had to do to avert the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to change its “Open Door Policy” to what I have termed a “Half-Open Door Policy” stating that NATO membership would continue to be available for Finland and Sweden and other European nations but providing a written guarantee to Russia that NATO would never be expanded into any additional former Soviet republics. Then the US could have canceled its Strategic Partnership with Ukraine which it signed in November 2021, withdrawn all NATO troops from Ukraine, ended NATO training of Ukrainian forces and ended future joint military exercises with Ukraine. Doing so would have deprived Russia of any justification for invading Ukraine and would have caused Putin to send his troops home.

Had the US subsequently pressured Ukraine to fully implement the Minsk II agreement, it would have enabled Ukraine to regain full control of the Donbass region following the withdrawal of Russian forces leaving it in control of 97% of its international recognized territory as opposed to only 82% today. Instead, the Biden administration opted to reject in its entirety Russia’s proposed mutual security treaty, in late January 2022. Biden’s subsequent refusal to issue Russia a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO, which was Putin’s minimal requirement to call of a Russian invasion served to make war inevitable.

The Biden administration chose war and then chose to prolong the war after Russian began implementing the terms of its March 31^st peace agreement with Ukraine by withdrawing its troops from over one-third of Russian occupied territory including three of eight Russian occupied oblasts including Kyiv, urging Ukraine to repudiate its tentative peace agreement with Russia and cease any further diplomatic negotiations. This fact is confirmed by Fiona Hill who has been a stalwart support of Ukraine’s just war of self-defense against Russia’s illegal aggression in her August 2022 Foreign Affairs article. The administration’s decision to torpedo Ukraine’s tentative peace agreement with Russia in early April 2022 has doomed Ukraine to suffer hundreds of thousands more destroyed lives and many more destroyed cities unnecessarily.

It is said that those who refuse to learn from the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. The Biden administration refusal’s absolutist refusal to negotiate a peace settlement acceptable to Russia in which Russia retains de facto control of any internationally recognized Ukrainian territory including Crimea, has effectively served to guarantee the war will continue indefinitely at an increasing appalling humanitarian cost to Ukraine. A peace deal unacceptable to Russia would only serve to ensure Russia resumes its aggression against Ukraine in the near future. While US and arguably NATO national security interests are not at issue in Ukraine given that Putin has demonstrated no intent to capture a substantial amount of additional territory since summer 2022, continuation of the war and increasing NATO heavy weapon shipments to Ukraine threaten to escalate horizontally to a direct war between NATO and Russia or even escalate vertically to the tactical and perhaps even strategic nuclear level. 

Many Western pundits continue to claim that Ukraine is winning the war. However, the reality is that the war has been an unmitigated disaster for Ukraine as it has lost 36% of its population including eight million citizens in the Russian annexed territories since 2014 and eight million refugees, 30% of its GDP and 18% of its internationally recognized territory along with 50% of its energy production with a quarter of its citizens unemployed. While it has suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed in action and lost a couple thousand tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, Russia has expanded the size of its active-duty military forces by fifty percent since the war began to Soviet-era levels. There are also 100,000-300,000 Russian reservists deployed across the border from Kharkiv oblast available for a new Russian fall/winter offensive after Ukraine’s counteroffensive peters out which could succeed in capturing a large amount of additional Ukrainian territory. Russia has won the sanctions war, managing to grow its economy to be the fifth largest in the world according to the World Bank since the war began.

Given the failure of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive combined with the increasing threat that Russia could capture a significantly higher percentage of Ukrainian territory and perhaps even make another attempt to take Kyiv using hundreds of thousands of recently mobilized Russian army reservists, a Korean War-style armistice agreement along the current line of control, would seem to be the best option left available to Ukraine. Under such an agreement, the US, UK and France would guarantee Ukraine’s permanent neutrality outside of NATO and commit to respond to any future Russian aggression by resuming massive military arms and munitions shipments to Ukraine.  

Such an agreement would constitute a significant victory for Ukraine and the West as it would accomplish the West’s primary stated objective of preventing Russia from conquering Ukraine or replacing its government with one that was more pro-Russian in outlook while also serving to significantly weaken Russia militarily, if not economically. It would also enable Ukraine to keep all its hard-won military gains in liberating forty percent of its Russian occupied territory while ensuring the security and independence of 88% of Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory, enabling its eight million refugees to return and begin the arduous task of beginning to rebuild its economy.

Preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and likely war with the US would be more of a challenge because it is likely undeterrable even with a US military guarantee given Chinese President Xi Jinping’s timeline for reunification with Taiwan by 2025 by force if necessary. The only way to prevent it would be for the US to provide the same strategic clarity to China on Taiwan which President Biden provided to Russia on Ukraine which is that the US would not defend Taiwan militarily in the event of war. Such a declaration would force Taiwan to negotiate a reunification agreement with Taiwan with a near-term timeline. Optionally, the US could mediate such a reunification agreement on the best possible terms. As it stands today, Biden’s pledges to defend Taiwan militarily may provoke the PRC to engage in a pre-emptive strike against US military bases in the region and possibly even a massive cyber and space first strike on the US homeland itself before invading Taiwan.

Voices of reason on both the right and the left who continue to champion an end to all the needless bloodshed in Ukraine are immediately denounced as “shameful” or “unpatriotic” much as they were during World War One. Failure to accept Germany's offers to end World War One with a compromise peace in 1916-1917 led to the Nazi and Soviet conquests of most of Europe and the deaths of a couple hundred million people. What geopolitical disaster will befall America and the world stemming from the Biden administration’s refusal to even discuss peace with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, let alone President Biden’s refusal to take back his dangerous and reckless pledges to defend Taiwan militarily potentially provoking a direct war with both of our nuclear superpower adversaries simultaneously? I would rather we not have to find out.

Recent Media Interviews

August 16th—Going Underground show on GHAF TV hosted by Afshin Rattansi to discuss Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and how to end it. This interview should be available soon.

August 18th—Interview with Jonathan Hollerman on EMP Task Force Channel to discuss the EMP threat from the Sino-Russian alliance and the likely outcome of the war in Ukraine.

August 22nd—Interview with Carlos Carrillo on the Living Hope Esparanza Podcast discussing the chances of whether the war in Ukraine will escalate to World War III with Russia. Here is a link to the interview.

August 25th—Interview with former Polish Sejm Deputy Mateusz Piskorski to discuss the war in Ukraine and how to end it before it escalates to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO.

August 26th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on the Republic Broadcasting Network discussing the death of Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. Here is a link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Appearances

September 5th—Interview on the Chayse Leavitt Podcast to discuss the war in Ukraine and potential war with China over Taiwan.

September 8th—Studio Interview on Jason Preston’s “We Are the People podcast focusing on the threat from Communist China and how to win America’s Cold War with them.

September 11th—Interview with Dr. Pascal Lottaz on his Neutrality Studies podcast to discuss my new China-Taiwan Compromise Peace Plan

September 14th—I will deliver a presentation in Logan, Utah to the Utah Citizens for the Constitution and Cache County Conservatives on the history and future of US Foreign & National Security Policy

© David T. Pyne 2023

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster." He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.