No, the war in Ukraine is not like Brexit. No, the Russians are not Nazis, nor are the Ukrainians. No, Boris Johnson is not Churchill or Pericles, and the third world war has not begun, unless we choose to begin it. Such comparisons are odious. As a guide to the present, let alone the future, history is for smart alecks and podcasts. It is bunk.
The only quarrel I have with Ukraine’s astonishing resistance to Russia is with its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s, recourse to historical parallels. It is understandable that Ukraine should want to browbeat Nato into joining its cause against Russia. Its struggle is existential. But to summon images of Europe’s blood-drenched 20th century is no way to do it. As for Johnson portraying the Kremlin as on a par with the EU – an organisation Ukraine wants to join – it is like having a playground idiot running the country.
Most wars are the result of history distorted and harnessed to the cause of some individual or group ambition, greed or pride. Vladimir Putin was able to characterise his previous incursions into Crimea and Donbas as having their roots in local politics. The invasion of Ukraine seems a personal obsession, based on his reading of history and requiring oppression and massive deception of the Russian people to maintain consent. That deception has embraced constant parallels with the coalition’s “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad in 2003 – a parallel that seems to have been too much for western censors of Moscow’s RT channel to stand.
History warned Nato in 1989 not to test Russia’s paranoia after its defeat in the cold war by advancing to its borders in the Baltic states. Nato ignored that warning. Today it has read history differently and has wisely refused to join its forces with Ukraine. It has declined Putin’s invitation to validate his view of Nato as the aggressor. In doing so, it has had to endure a barrage of hawkish parallels with 1938 appeasement. But the US president, Joe Biden, is not Neville Chamberlain. Nor is Putin Hitler or Napoleon or Stalin. Comparing any dictator to Hitler is enticing, but the enticement is to allow emotion to swamp reason. We may have to await psychologists to explain Putin’s present actions, but we are living in 2022, not the 1930s.
Nothing is more disastrous than giving history primacy over geography. History is subjective and selective. Geography is fact, truly the queen of sciences. Just as Ukraine has always been a victim of its geography, so too may be Russia as Putin’s quest for historic glory grinds to a halt in the mud of the great European plain. And while Nato remains a creature of 20th-century history, at least its strategists have looked at the map. They have understood that Russia’s border with Ukraine is no place to start a wider war that would unquestionably be without parallel.
• This article was amended on 23 March 2022. The bombing of Iraq was not a Nato operation, but a coalition one which included some Nato members.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
