President Vladimir Putin has, most likely due to political caution, not made any detailed public predictions on how and why Russia will win the war against Ukraine. If Russia somehow fails, the responsibility will be shouldered by the military or key ministers, and not by the Tsar beloved by the Russian people. The Ukrainian chief of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Kyrylo Budanov, believes that Putin intends to seize the Donetsk by 2026, given the rising problems of army recruitment and the impact of Western sanctions on Russia’s economy. University of Chicago professor of political science John Mearsheimer used the very simple insights of power-based realist theory, to assert that the expansion of a very weak NATO would further provoke a Russian response in 2014. He has since argued that Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield, certainly not through an armored offensive. The U.S. intelligence community, relying not on a theory, but simply tracking the deployment of Russian troops, by satellite and electronic surveillance, was certain by January 2022 that war was an option, but it had no insight into the state of Putin’s mind at the Kremlin. The Biden administration had send CIA director Bill Burns to speak directly to Putin in the Kremlin in November 2021, warning him that he would pay a high price if he attacked Ukraine.
Most predictions of the war by think tank analysts and academic observers failed to predict its outbreak and how poorly the Russian army would perform. One study of failed predictions found that while scholars correctly identified the high costs of such a war, they over-estimated how sensitive Putin was for the survival of his regime, and therefore under-estimated the impact of nationalism on his willingness to take risks. This author correctly predicted the outbreak of war, but only because it was easy to see that the threat of sanctions had little influence in the Kremlin, that it was obvious that Putin was sincerely pursuing Russia’s national interest and not stirring-up a provocation to improve his public standing. Even fewer analysts correctly predicted that Russia’s offensive in February and March of 2022 would go so poorly, but retrospectively it was simply because Ukrainians chose to resist, not because the Ukrainian conscript was a significantly better fighter than the Russian regular or volunteer.
Figuring out how to make good predictions is the shared domain of academics and intelligence analysts, and can often provide powerful insights. The CIA prediction of a Sino-Soviet split at the very beginning of the Cold War, based on the simple realist theory that two powerful non-democratic neighboring states could never remain allies, despite having similar ideologies, influenced the U.S. into not making a concerted effort to conquer North Korea or North Vietnam that would alienate Beijing from eventually becoming a U.S. Cold War ally. The predictions of the erosive impact of an eventual Russian middle class on the survival of Soviet totalitarianism was the driver behind State Department analyst George F. Kennan’s Containment strategy that won the Cold War for the Western democracies. The Pentagon Defense Intelligence Agency’s correct prediction of the length of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the CIA’s prediction of the breakup of Pakistan shortly after Partition, and of the inevitable defeat of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, were less politically impactful but elegant demonstrations of technical and socio-political mastery.
Both the CIA predictions of the Sino-Soviet split and Mearsheimer’s predictions of the inevitable Russian backlash against NATO expansion, were extrapolations of simply observations made by realist theory about the impact of power in international relations.
In his 431 BC History of the Peloponnesian War, historian and original realist thinker Thucydides, cites the famous quote that the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must, whose simple meaning was that smaller states were more preoccupied with survival, whereas more powerful states were free to pursue a wider variety of strategies. A shortcoming of the thinking of Greek historians and philosophers, even into the Roman age, was that they never developed a theory of a balance of power, or the identification of a tendency of most communities of states to spontaneously form coalitions to oppose the emerging new power threatening their independence. This is important because of a recurring mistake made by autocrats in their decisions for war, in almost all periods of history, which is that they choose to ignore the cautionary accounts of the failures of previous wars because of the inevitable rise of hostile coalitions, such as those by Louis the XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Instead, autocrats learn from their early successes of bullying their clumsily disorganized neighbors, that the world operates according to the principles that submission and victory comes from intimidation and recruitment of weaker states, like the USSR and the members of the warsaw Pact. In realist theory, this is called a bandwagoning environment, where smaller states join the country threatening them, in the hope they will be spared, and this endows the more menacing country a growing coalition of allies over time with which to continue intimidating ever larger and larger enemies. This is the mindset of Putin, but also of Xi Jinping’s threats against Taiwan and Saddam Hussein’s menacing of almost all of his neighbors, and is especially true of Adolf Hitler’s conceptions of foreign policy leading to the violence of the Second World War. With war raging in Ukraine, an undeclared war cindering between Israel, Iran and Lebanon, and a precariously defended Taiwan being threatened by Communist China, a new World War involving most of the world’s major powers, is no longer inconceivable. Looking back at the predictive blunders made by analysts leading-up to the Second World, as well as the private prognostications made by Hitler himself, shows us that there was a general failure to appreciate the balance of power dynamic that would slowly but inexorably lead to the emergence of an overwhelmingly powerful coalition that would defeat the autocrat and his war.
First of all, it is extremely challenging to predict the when and how wars will breakout, especially as war plans are often decided within only a few months or weeks of the decision to begin the attack. The First World War erupted into war on July 28 1914, only a month after the June 28 Sarajevo assassination or Archduke Ferdinand, and was accompanied by frenetic diplomatic efforts at peace. All of the major powers: France, Imperial Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary, had mass conscription numbering in the millions, and were spring-loaded for rapid mobilization of these soldiers into uniforms and delivery to the front by train. British member of parliament Winston Churchill, in a warning in his 1933 speech about German rearmament, was correct that Europe was less prone to a sudden breakout of war between major powers than in 1914, but also prescient that generally “Wars come very suddenly.” Hitler’s plan to invade Poland on September 1, 1939, which started the Second World War, was formulated just five months earlier on April 3. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, according to U.S. estimates, was only made in October 2021. Has Xi Jinping decided yet on the date of China’s invasion of Taiwan?
Mis-predicting which countries will join or stay-out of an alliance, is the result of the failure to appreciate that with each successive global conflict, since the Seven Years’ War, has an ever-increasing number of countries that are affected by the war, so that no major power conflict can be confined to a single region. During the Second World War, two army divisions of Brazilian soldiers fought to defeat Germany in Italy, and the Mexican Air Force flew out of bases in the Philippines to destroy Japanese aircraft in Taiwan.
Will North Korea and Pakistan fight with China? Will India play Moscow and Washington off against each other? Leaders who start wars but fail to predict these outcomes consistently lose to the larger coalitions, as did the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, and Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. There is, so far, no reliable political science formula for accurately determining what combination of countries choose neutrality, which states jackal bandwagon (join wars for profit), which states simply bandwagon (are intimidated to submit by the greater powers), and which states stubbornly fight alone.
Risk acceptant leaders like Louis XIV, Bonaparte, or Adolf Hitler, see the uncertainties of the international system as an opportunity for rapid territorial conquest before the inevitable but delayed formation of a counter-coalition of defending countries. Confrontations and wars involving major powers (typically countries that possess ten percent or more of the world’s share of economic and therefore military power) have always been difficult to keep from spreading geographically because powerful countries have a major incentive to get involved when territorial changes look like they will increase a state’s power, like the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan, a Japanese conquest of China, or a Chinese conquest of Taiwan. The 1854-56 Crimean War is a rare example of a major power war that was geographically contained, involving the Russian, French, and British Empires, but excluding Prussia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, China, and the U.S.
The root of Adolf Hitler’s defeat was his mistaken failure to recognize that Europe was no longer the main locus of great powers, but that he could keep major powers from outside of Europe from stopping him seizing the entire continent. According to biographer John Toland, Hitler’s ultimate strategic goal was the same as historian Fritz Fischer found for the First World War, which was to conquer Ukraine’s farmland so that Germany could become a continental power like the United States. Chicago University Professor John J. Mearsheimer, in his 2001 Tragedy of the Great Powers, would describe any plan, including Hitler’s, to seize control of an entire continent, bounded by water, to be rational, because of the enormous defensive payoff. This is consistent with Putin’s shoring-up of Russia’s frontiers and Xi Jinping’s goal of reuniting Taiwan with China.
U.S. journalist William L. Shirer found that Hitler had an accurate appreciation of the balance of power processes limited to Europe, and was justifiably confident that his diplomatic strategy could avoid a two-front war by playing the USSR off against the democracies. But neither Hitler’s guiding text Mein Kampf, nor his later imagination could find a solution to the intractable problem of how to neutralize Great Britain and its alliance with the U.S. The day London provided its unilateral security guarantee to Poland, on March 31 1939, Hitler was seen despondent all day at his desk. He knew enough history to understand that the British would never submit to a united Europe, and that they had an intangible historical talent to organize coalitions. He also knew the British would have a brief period of complacency he could exploit. In the words of John F. Kennedy’s 1940 Why England Slept: “The idea that Britain loses every battle except the last has proved correct so many times in the past that the average Englishman is unwilling to make great personal sacrifices until the danger is overwhelmingly apparent.” Most of Hitler’s senior entourage, including Chief of the Command Staff Wilhelm Keitel and foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop, were far more ignorant and victims of their own wishful propaganda that the U.S. was too degenerate to enter a war. In contrast, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini warned Hitler that the U.S. would find an excuse to enter the war within just months. Hitler’s risky solution was to seize Moscow before Washington could come to London’s aid.
Predicting who will join a particular alliance is forgivably difficult because of the number of factors that influence leaders and the resulting lags and indeterminacy of how states aggregate into coalitions. Historian Ernest Dupuy and U.S. intelligence analyst George Fielding Eliot’s unprecedentedly detailed 1937 If War Comes, explicitly focused on how the Second World War would be conducted almost three years before its outbreak, and is as impressive for its theoretical clarity in applying the principles of war, as it is almost completely wrong for failing to follow through on its sound deductions. For example, Dupuy and Eliot erroneously predicted that Italy would block the Austrian Anschluss, and therefore wrongly anticipated that Czechoslovakia would fight, failing to consider that German occupation of Austria permitted the outflanking of Prague’s mountain fortresses from the south. Given that that Czechoslovakia was expected to fight, Poland would not have been attacked, and so France would not have faced so large a German army, and so Paris would concentrated against Italy, freeing the British fleet to block the Japanese in Asia. Though Dupuy and Eliot provided the most detailed forecast of how the Second World War alliances would be configured, they had not anticipated the complex interconnectedness of the balance of power system.
Hungarian professor Ivan Lajos, in his 1939 Germany’s War Chances, argued that the underlying assumption for Hitler’s war plan, and support for it among Germans, was the wishful thinking that discounted the likelihood of the U.S. entering the war. He noted there was an active suppression effort among press editors against the idea, and that this was an identical error committed in the lead-up to the First World War. Churchill argued that Hitler did not understand that Great Britain could appeal to U.S. sensibilities through a shared sympathy for the values of disarmament, commerce and the League of Nations. Lajos wrongly predicted that the U.S. would quickly follow Great Britain to war, with an actual delay of 27 months.
Fritz Sternberg, in his 1938 Germany and a Lightning War (also the book to first mention Blitzkrieg), was one of the few authors to articulate in detail how Hitler’s plan had critical shortcomings. He recognized that Hitler had an accurate appreciation for combined-arms armored warfare, was intending to apply it to rapidly to escape a two-front war, and was likely to enjoy a series of early victories. Sternberg cites Mein Kampf to suggest France would be struck first, followed by the USSR, given the likelihood that Paris would support Moscow in the event the order was reversed. He predicted that Berlin would fail in its attempt to divert Japanese attention from China to the USSR, as Tokyo saw the Soviet purges as an opportunity to defeat China instead, thereby dividing the Axis.
Sternberg noted that while Hitler had a general notion of the need to keep the Anglo-Saxon democracies from assisting France and the USSR, Hitler under-appreciated the provocation his shocking defeat of France would cause in the U.S. This and the Munich Crisis altered the U.S. mindset faster than the stalemate of the war in Europe in 1916, even though the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor had a more visceral effect than unrestricted U-Boat warfare and the revelations of the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917. The effect was that even those opposed to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, supported his policy of aiding Great Britain. Sternberg predicted that even with Italy as an ally, Germany would eventually find itself back in a situation of a risky two-front war.
Weaker states may quickly change sides, as Romania, Bulgaria and Thailand did during the Second World War, and diagnosing the domestic sentiment in the larger states is important. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen, all states seeking dissatisfied with how they are dissuaded from making territorial changes in their regions, but mobilised on ethno-nationalist propaganda, are likely to form a loosely coordinated alliance with each other. Their neutral allies may include Belarus, Thailand, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Myanmar. Despite their common interest, the severe disagreements between them, makes coordination for war as difficult as it was for Germany and Japan during the Second World, who both fought the USSR, but failed to do so at the same time. The U.S., and its NATO and Asian-Pacific democratic allies, will likely become belligerents within a week. Weaker post-colonial states that are indifferent to the democratic alliance, but are dependent on Western-controlled Oceans for commerce and energy imports, like much of Africa, the Middle East, and South America, are likely to be neutral bandwagoners with whomever has the larger local fleet. The major post-colonial powers, like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Egypt, and Vietnam, that depend on trade, will likely free ride on the West’s maritime protection and take the opportunity to assert their regional influence. States with bifurcated electorates, such as Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa, may become targets for domestic interference by foreign powers.
For the U.S. and its allies to preserve the peace and their independence, they need to tailor a deterrence strategy based on accurate predictions about how the next war is likely to breakout and escalate, and then package these responses as warnings to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping. The leaders of the democracies must also anticipate the most likely new members of the Russo-Chinese revisionist coalition, and peel them off with economic incentives, or threats if necessary, in the same manner that the U.S. drew fascist Spain of Francisco Franco away from Germany during the Second World War. What concessions need to be offered to the Philippines, Pakistan or Indonesia, or what threats against the Solomon Islands or Myanmar?