I have taught strategy in war colleges in the United States and other countries. Like most instructors, I describe strategy as an endeavor that strives to match ends and means in a rational way, a dialogue between soldiers and politicians seeking to use force for political purposes. That is certainly what the senior officers who attend such institutions believe.
A recent multiweek swing through European capitals, however, has emphasized for me that among the most important influences on the choices that countries make about war and peace are ghosts: memories—be they accurate, fanciful, or, more typically, something in between—of historical experiences and personalities from a remembered past, sometimes reaching back centuries.
Several days in London spent speaking to all manner of generals and spymasters, scholars, and advisers to government, for example, brought home the long shadow of empire that still shapes British military policy, for good and for ill. It was tangible while walking through the House of Lords and seeing the coats of arms of field marshals and admirals of the fleet, as it was during the celebration of V-E Day by veterans, admittedly of later wars, wearing the regimental ties and bonnets of defunct but storied regiments.
Imperial self-assurance and memory helps explain Britain’s remarkable leadership in dealing with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Boris Johnson, whatever his peccadilloes, channeled Churchill’s ghost by dashing off to Kyiv, pushing advanced weapons on Ukraine well before America did, and offering a security guarantee to Sweden as it began to move toward NATO membership. Not only Churchill but Palmerston or Pitt the Younger would have approved of such statecraft. Johnson is well read and eloquent enough to summon their spirits.
Unfortunately, however, the reality of actual British power does not match its reach. The U.K. possesses outstanding niche capacities in the world of special operations and intelligence gathering, but its navy now has barely a quarter as many surface combatants as it did during the Falklands War; its nuclear force is obsolescent; and its army is tiny, albeit of high quality. The suggestion by British politicians that the U.K. could regularly deploy a brigade—say, some 4,000 soldiers—as part of a reassurance force to Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire was privately mocked by experts. The U.K. does not have enough troops to do that.
The countries of Eastern Europe wrestle with different ghosts. Estonia is haunted by the Soviet Union’s brutal occupation after World War II and the mass deportations of tens of thousands of Estonians, including the family of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s current high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. After the war, as in the other Baltic states, partisans fought the Soviets for another decade, and in some cases even beyond. The memories of those deported, killed, imprisoned, or tortured are with current leaders; so, too, are the ghosts of those who achieved a precarious independence after World War I only to lose it again to the Muscovites. It has led Estonians not only to arm themselves to the teeth and commit utterly to Ukraine’s aid, but to disdain the condescending lectures of West Europeans who sought reconciliation with Russia after the Cold War.
“I was studying in Sweden in 1975,” one retired Estonian statesman told me, “and no one then referred to the Federal Republic of Germany as the ‘former Nazi Third Reich.’ But somehow the West Europeans, 30 years after we regained our independence, think it’s okay to refer to us as ‘former Soviet republics.’” The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has changed much of that, but the ghosts of the Soviet period still haunt the relationship between edgy and exposed frontline states and those more comfortably situated to the West that never felt the Russian lash.
Finnish and Polish ghosts are rather different. Conversations with Finns about the Russian threat invariably turn to the Winter War, the spectacular fight that Finland put up against the Red Army in 1939–40. The heroism, the sense of having to be ready to fight alone and the payoff for being prepared to do so, has shaped Finnish strategic culture to the present day. But NATO membership—and with it the need to fight as part of an alliance elsewhere than along the 850-mile Russian-Finnish border—is something Finns struggle with.
For Poland, the national strategic ghosts are those of betrayal. France and Britain failed to do much while Poland was crushed between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. In the Polish understanding, the country was betrayed again at the Yalta Conference in 1945. If past glories lead British statesmen to offer more than they can deliver, past horrors incline Poles to be suspicious of requests to do more than they deem prudent. When discussing whether Poland should contribute to a reassurance force stationed in Ukraine (rather than just over the border), a Polish general first explained the operational requirements of Poland’s large army to fend off various other threats and then offered this response: “You Americans asked us to follow you into Iraq. I lost men there, whom I still mourn. And now you want us to do this, when you are not willing to do it yourselves?”
He had a point. But a rich and increasingly powerful Poland, with the best and largest land army in Europe outside Ukraine, will need to assume a leadership role for which its history has not prepared it. Europeans now speak of an E-4, composed of Britain, France, Germany, and Poland, that may steer the West’s support to embattled Ukraine. That is a step in the right direction, at least.
The millions of Ukrainian ghosts, victims of suffering at Russia’s hand, explain Ukraine’s extraordinary tenacity. Russia’s predatory imperial ghosts, who have gathered in legions over centuries of conquest of neighboring lands, have lured Vladimir Putin into a project to restore the Russian empire, one that Russians insist to this day “has no borders.” The ghosts who fell in America’s ill-starred wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are among the reasons (including others far less worthy) for J. D. Vance’s and Donald Trump’s snarls about renouncing the use of American military power abroad. But even Trump’s government cannot quite dispel the worthier ghosts of its past—the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, recently avowed America’s commitment to the alliance, despite “America First,” in a speech in Tallinn.
In Europe, at least, some of the ghosts may be gradually dissipating. Germany’s new government is willing to break with its past in sacrificing thrift for the imperatives of continental defense. It is also willing to put to rest some of the (self-serving) ghosts of guilt-based aversion to military spending. Sweden has set aside its romanticized history of neutrality for participation in an alliance, although not without misgivings. As one shrewd Swedish strategist put it, “There we were in our sailboat, the good sloop Nonalignment. A storm blew up, and we were delighted to be rescued by the mighty ocean liner SS NATO. The other passengers were wonderful, the bar excellent—and then we learned that there was a new captain who has decided he wants to play games of chicken with icebergs.”
“War has a way of masking the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote. Although it is true that we can never quite escape the ghosts, be they benign or malignant, that surround strategists, it is also necessary to lay many of them to rest, if only to find the ways and means to protect this and later generations from murderous madness. For Ukraine and the European future, this exorcism is a moderate sign of hope in a world that is indeed haunted by perfectly reasonable forebodings.
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