Madness, madness,” says Count Sergei Witte, elder statesman and advisor to Czar Nicholas II, when Nicholas follows his generals’ advice and orders the mobilization of millions of Russian soldiers in late July 1914, in the dramatic movie Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Witte in the movie is played brilliantly and accurately by Sir Laurence Olivier,
who foretells the tragedies that will befall the Romanovs and Russia if the general mobilization leads to war. But the Czar ignores the elder statesman and joins Europe’s other “sleepwalkers” (Christopher Clark’s term) in the descent toward world war.
In America, President Woodrow Wilson at first resisted calls (by former President Theodore Roosevelt and others) for the United States to become a belligerent in the Great War, but in 1917 he and Congress committed this country to the conflict, and in a relatively brief period of time we sustained roughly 320,000 casualties,
including more than 100,000 dead. The outcome of the war settled nothing, which is why we were at it again twenty years later, and this time we suffered more than a million casualties, including more than 400,000 dead.
The geopolitical outcome of the Second World War was to replace one murderous, expansionist totalitarian dictatorship (Nazi Germany) with another (the Soviet Union), and soon we were waging Cold War all over the world and fighting hot wars in places like Korea and Vietnam, with a combined American casualty total of nearly a half-million, including more than 90,000 dead.
The common denominator in all of these wars is that great powers were involved to varying degrees, which explains the high casualty figures noted above. The deeper the United States becomes involved in the Ukraine war, the greater chance that we will sleepwalk our way into a wider, great power conflict.
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