As we mark the 100th anniversary of World War I, Belfer Center experts suggest important lessons today’s leaders should draw from the outbreak of the "war to end all wars."
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"Just because war would be folly and self-defeating does not mean that it cannot happen. None of the leaders of Europe in 1914 would have chosen the war they caused—and in the end all lost. By 1918, the Kaiser had been dismissed, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the czar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of the flower of its youth and treasure. Given a chance for a do-over, none of the leaders would have made the choices he did. Combinations of assertiveness and ignorance, risk-taking, overconfidence, and conceit produced an outcome so devastating that it required historians to create a new category: world war."
"The real lesson of history is that a relatively small crisis over a chunk of third-rate eastern European real estate will produce a global conflict only if decision makers make a series of blunders. As it happens, I think it is a blunder to use sanctions to give President Putin no choice but folding or fighting. But – assuming there are no more MH17s – the price for that blunder will be paid mainly by the people of Ukraine. The blunders of a century ago led to the deaths of more than 10m people, mostly young men, drawn from all over the world. As we commemorate the outbreak of the first world war, let no one swallow the old but tenacious lie that their 'sacrifice' was a necessary and noble one. On the contrary, the war is best understood as the greatest error of modern history. That is a harsh truth that many historians still find unpalatable."
–Niall Ferguson in Financial Times
"History is typically assumed to be the result of great forces, strategic trends, well-thought-out plans, but is often a function of unimportant and unintended events, a “shot heard around the world.” This is certainly the case in the Mideast where a car accident ignited the first Intifada, the humiliation of a Tunisian fruit seller began the upheaval which is changing the face of the region, and Israel today fears a small border incident becoming a major conflagration."
"A salient lesson of World War I for decision-makers should be humility about predicting consequences in a transitional epoch. The leaders of the era were wrong about almost everything – the effectiveness of ultimatums, the value of the alliance system, the duration of the conflict, the tactics and strategy required in a new industrialized war, the social and cultural impact of mass death and the stability of empire. These mistakes, driven by hubris, had catastrophic impacts during the Great War itself, led to the horrific 30 years war in Europe and have echoed down the century across the globe (USSR...Middle East...)."
"Many of those making fateful choices in 1914 (as well as the elites around them and the publics they governed) were influenced by a toxic stew of pernicious beliefs. Fortunately, many of the intellectual and internal pathologies that made war more likely and made the July crisis difficult to resolve peacefully are absent from the current environment. On the international level, however, the stage is clearly set for rivalry. If U.S.-China relations turn significantly more hostile and competitive, there is a clear potential for arms racing, for destructive diplomatic maneuvering, for Cold War, and for conflict. To make their way to war, leaders in Washington and Beijing do not have to echo the beliefs and reproduce the realities and mistakes of 1914. They can invent their own flawed beliefs and make their own mistakes. One of the lessons of 1914 is that wisdom does not always prevail."
–Steven E. Miller from forthcoming book The Next Great War? The Roots of World War I and the Risk of U.S.-China Conflict
"Historical analogies, though sometimes useful for precautionary purposes, become dangerous when they convey a sense of historical inevitability. WWI was not inevitable. It was made more probable by Germany’s rising power and the fear that this created in Great Britain. But it was also made more probable by Germany’s fearful response to Russia’s power, as well as myriad other factors, including human errors. But the gap in overall power between the US and China today is greater than that between Germany and Britain in 1914. Among the lessons to be learned from the events of 1914 is to be wary of analysts wielding historical analogies, particularly if they have a whiff of inevitability. War is never inevitable, though the belief that it is can become one of its causes."
"The single most important conclusion that one can draw from the WWI experience (as it might apply to us today) is the ambiguity that allies present. Confronting China in the future, the United States will need all the strong allies it can get, yet supporting those allies (like Japan for instance, which has major territorial disputes with China) can get us involved in conflict just as Russia’s support of Serbia or Germany’s of Austria did in 1914. We have to find new ways of supporting a key ally without at the same time undertaking to defend it come what may."
"In this important year of international reflection about the lessons of a war which tore the world apart, it is important to focus on what we should now do together….And for me this is about being alert to the reality that profound change can happen suddenly, and that we should not simply be seduced into complacency that peace is somehow the natural condition of humankind because it has been that way for so long. It is about the importance of a creative diplomacy that always seeks actively to solve problems, rather than simply passively describe them, or worse assume they are insoluble and allow the options for any solution to melt away. It is about the responsibility of political leadership on the profound questions of war and peace to always lead public opinion, rather than just follow it. It is about building the institutions that encourage the habits and culture of common security, rather than believing that these habits will somehow naturally evolve out of the ether."
–Kevin Rudd from address at German Historical Museum
"The main lesson to draw from the onset of the Great War is that serious miscalculation leading to war is possible even in a modern world that is well connected and deeply integrated. The suggestion made often today that commercial interdependencies will preclude war was proven wrong exactly a hundred years ago. Europe in 1914 was in many ways like the world today – integrated in commerce and politics; with many shared goals and interests that should have made war unthinkable. Yet, somehow the leaders of 1914, with all the pertinent information at their fingertips, and with a capability to talk to one another instantly, miscalculated; setting Europe ablaze and putting the world on a path to even greater conflict two decades later."
"'You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,' Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops in August 1914. Yet, before autumn had ended, a million combatants lay dead. Fifteen million more—soldiers and civilians—would perish before the armistice. Empires shattered. Borders dissolved. Europe’s statesmen failed to imagine the immensity of the tragedy they were to cause. In Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, such unquenchable fires may again be aflame."
"The chaos in the Middle East and much of Africa is the unwanted offspring of the first world war. A Europe of empires – Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian – collapsed and a new German empire was foiled. After the war, senior politicians imposed their own map on Europe and the Middle East based on the interests of the victors. That map will have to be redrawn. Without an international understanding, new empires lurking in the wings could assert themselves, resurrecting again the threats that my mother’s generation worked so hard to lay to rest."
–Shirley Williams in The Guardian
More lessons from WWI are featured in the Summer 2014 issue of the Belfer Center's journal International Security:
"The Lessons of 1914 for East Asia Today: Missing the Trees for the Forest"
International Security : 7–43.
Posted online on 14 Aug 2014.
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (160 KB) | PDF Plus (189 KB)
"Domestic Coalitions, Internationalization, and War: Then and Now"
International Security : 44–70.
Posted online on 14 Aug 2014.
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (118 KB) | PDF Plus (130 KB)
"Better Now Than Later: The Paradox of 1914 as Everyone's Favored Year for War"
International Security : 71–94.
Posted online on 14 Aug 2014.
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (103 KB) | PDF Plus (108 KB)