It was Winston Churchill who said those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, though it wasn’t original and he nicked the idea from someone else.
The philosopher George Santayana said it in 1905 although he may also have stolen it - from the Victorian statesman Edmund Burke.No matter.
They were all wrong. History does not repeat itself because circumstances are never identical. It’s history’s similarities we need to keep an eye on.
Donald Trump is an unpredictable, one-off phenomenon who can change with the wind. That makes him a flaky ally. Which is why Europe is waking up to a new world order in which it might be on its own.
The worry is that the US president’s peace plan for Ukraine may be no more than appeasing Vladimir Putin. The danger that presents is more keenly felt in Europe than America.
That’s because appeasement didn’t work with 1930s Germany. No wonder Poland is now the European nation with the highest proportion of defence spending in Nato.
A land border with Russia tends to focus the mind and the zlotys, and what happened in 1939 is still seared into Polish memory.
There is a lot of “Ukraine is not our problem” flying about now, a reminder of PM Neville Chamberlain’s comment in 1938 of “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing” when Hitler elbowed his way into Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
History has not treated Chamberlain kindly for cozying up to the Nazis. Historical fiction writer Robert Harris thought this judgement unfair and said so in his novel Munich.
Britain needed time to rearm before going to war with Germany and Chamberlain was buying it. Notice the similar language about rearmament EU president Ursula von der Leyen is using now.
That does not mean we are heading towards World War III, but the Doomsday clock is certainly ticking closer to Armageddon. Not as close yet as in 1962 when Moscow tried to put its missiles into America’s Cuban heel. War was only averted when the Soviet fleet delivering them turned back before confronting US warships.
As then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk said at the time: “We went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians and the other guy blinked.” Things got sticky again in 1983 when the Nato exercise Able Archer simulated a Defcon 1 nuclear attack. The Americans forgot to tell the Russians it was only pretend and Soviet nukes were being loaded onto planes before the penny dropped it wasn’t a real first strike.
So what is happening now feels a little like here we go again.
President Trump can tell Volodymyr Zelensky he’s holding all the cards till he’s blue in the face. What he mustn’t do is underestimate the stakes. Someone should whisper in his ear Russia is only 55 miles from Alaska.
We must also try to see ourselves as others do if a peace deal is to have its best chance of success.
We might think Nato is a cuddly and benign defensive alliance but it’s Moscow we have to convince it’s not an offensive one.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 Nato shared only 130 miles of its land border with Russia.
That has grown to 1,500 miles, an alarming eastern expansion to Russian eyes. Ukraine’s membership would add another 1,200 miles.
Nigel Nelson has said we have to convince Putin NATO is not an offensive force
GB News
Former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania signed up to Nato, and so did Finland in a panic two years ago which gave Russia an extra 832 miles of land border to defend.
If Putin thought invading Ukraine would stop further Nato encroachment then the tactic backfired spectacularly.
Russia is not the only country which distrusts the West. It seems bizarre to us that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un would spend what little money his impoverished country has on nuclear missiles.
But that does not appear nearly so wacky if you’re Kim sitting in Pyongyang reflecting on what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi when they didn’t have any. Seeing the other point of view does not mean letting Putin off the hook nor excuse his aggression. He illegally invaded a sovereign nation.
If America will not put its cards on the table for Ukraine, Europe still has a hand to play. In October last year G7 countries agreed to use the proceeds from £236billion of confiscated Russian assets in Europe to give Ukraine £38billion.
Our profit share from these investments was £2.2billion which Chancellor Rachel Reeves handed over to President Zelensky at the weekend. That didn’t cost the British taxpayer a bean.
A notion gaining traction is that Europe should filch those assets instead of just freezing them. There would be plenty of money to continue the war and rebuild Ukraine after the peace. Only Germany, and Belgium which holds most of this dosh, seem resistant to the idea.
It would be against international law to do that, of course, but then Russia ignored international law when it broke into Ukraine.
Putin would hit the roof, but once he was scraped him off the Kremlin ceiling and calmed down, he might be persuaded to recognise the irony of history repeating itself.
