The best analogy for Russia-Ukraine War may not be what you think…
As a Russian-Ukrainian-American, I’ve made the mistake of falling back on my heritage and made extensive historical analogies in my past articles with the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War, as well as the Eastern Front of WWII. Of course, many of the readers here have very little context when dealing with those events. So how about something closer to home? Though lost in historical obscurity, shadowed by the American Civil War that followed, the Mexican-American war of late 1840’s may be the best illustration of what is happening now.
I don’t need to describe the events and the aftermath of that war — head over to Wikipedia and read the article. There are a lot of parallels there. But before you get too excited and jump to the conclusion that Russia is now headed for its own Civil War, there are some major differences as well. This is a wider point of transient nature of power in the West vs the need for political continuity in the East, which I will come back to in another article soon. That’s not my point here. I simply want to show an example of a nation with superior military capabilities that already possessed more than enough of its own land and resources that nevertheless deemed it necessary to engage a weaker enemy in what many called an unprovoked and needless aggression at a high cost to itself.
I think it would be really hard to argue now, almost 200 years later, that the territorial gains for the US were not worth it. California alone represents 10% of the overall US population and carries a huge weight financially and industrially. But wait, how many of you remember that US went as far as occupying Mexico City?? There was serious talk of annexing the entire county. Why did it not happen? Why leave all that land behind?
So why did it make sense for the US, who was far more in control of the situation that Russia is now, to leave what it already had? Why is there Mexico today? Why is Russia losing the war, according to the Western media, when it leaves the West bank of the Dnieper? When it leaves Kyiv alone, after standing on the front porch in the first week of the invasion? So many have jumped in to tell me how I’m wrong in saying Russia has already got what it wanted…
Why do the above maps make sense to everyone, while the ones below do not? I’m not even trying to argue complicated points, like natural resources, strategic locations, trade routes, local population ethino-linguistics, regional and global alliances, etc etc. Just territory. Nothing else. Oversimplified. US had Mexico by the neck and let it go. Russia had Ukraine by the shoulders, and is letting it go. Why not? It’s been done so many times in history. Nit one person would argue with me today that Mexico, not the US came out victorious. It’s absurd. They lost an incredible amount of highly valuable land, and never recovered. This is what I said will happen in Ukraine from the start. 200 years from now, this moment in history will get a similarly minimal coverage on the Wikipedia of its day, assuming we are still around as a species…
As Metallica said: sad, but true.
