Putin's Lessons of WWII

There are 3 major histories of WWII. The first, the Churchill version, is that Churchill led the UK to victory over the Axis. Churchill did thank the US for providing a spot of help that shortened the war by a few months, but credit for the victory goes to Churchill's leadership.

The US version, of course, was that the Axis had conquered the entire eastern hemisphere when the US finally saw its duty and single-handedly liberated the eastern hemisphere from the Axis.

The third version is that the USSR did almost all the work of defeating the Axis.

Someone said the truth must be somewhere in the interior of the triangle formed from those 3 points of view. Putin, of course, wants the West to know and believe the USSR version.

Churchill always said history would treat him kindly because he would write it, and he did, and became the main English language source for WWII. But there are problems. Churchill demonised Chamberlain for appeasement. Only it wasn't appeasement. In Chamberlain's defence, I have to call a hostile witness who wrote, 'Shall We All Commit Suicide?' in 1924, saying that, if there were ever a war after the War to End All Wars, both sides would have MAD, and would use it. Only they didn't. But Chamberlain didn't know that. Churchill wrote that all nations would use the new aeroplanes like crop-dusters to spray new poison gasses covering all the population centres, gasses far, far more deadly than the ones used in WWI, and against which gas masks were useless, and this would completely depopulate all of Europe. So Chamberlain was pretending to appease Hitler just to buy time to put in the radar shield that ended up helping win the Battle of Britain (that might have been lost had Chamberlain gone to war in '38, along with the entire BEF that would have been lost if they'd been defeated in Czechoslovakia instead of at Dunkirk). But Putin accepts Churchill's demonisation of appeasement, then says the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was just the USSR trying to buy time after the UK and France appeased Hitler by refusing to fight the Axis in Czechoslovakia and made it clear they were terrified and would never challenge Hitler, who was planning World Conquest.

But Putin is worried about WWIII, as well he should be, and is trying to convince the US not to go there.

In '45, the US used its entire nuclear arsenal against Japan, which was already defeated, so there was no military reason to use that arsenal. But the USSR saw that a nuclear weapon was possible, knew about the unclassified Chicago Pile of '42, and made their own. (The US executed two people for giving the USSR the secret, but they probably didn't, and the USSR was an ally, not an enemy, at the time, so it wasn't technically treason; after the USSR broke up, some desperate, unemployed Russians said they had been spies who had gotten the secret from the two who were executed, for which they were very well paid, so that's not the proof many Americans think it is.) The USSR detonated their first nuke in '49. In '51, the US was at war in Korea, and was unable to defeat the People's Liberation Army. General MacArthur said the only way to win was to nuke China, and President Truman said, 'The USSR has MAD. You're fired!' With that in mind, WWIII has been avoided for 75 years. Only now, the top US military experts are convinced the US anti-missile defences mean that the Russians and PRC and DPRK no longer have MAD and so ...

Anyway, the US is cancelling all the Nuclear Bomb treaties and generally acting very pugnacious, so Putin wrote a 20 page paper called "The Real Lessons of World War 2" trying to convince the US to back off.

It basically says the USSR did 75% of the work of defeating the Axis, and Russia is not to be trifled with.

I doubt it will work. Biden has never seen a war he didn't like, and it looks like he's likely to win the election. And it's not clear what Trump will try since he's desperate to get re-elected.

So it looks like we're inexorably heading toward a Thucydides trap.