On how to win a war and what not to mention – Omer Bartov in TLS:

‘There is a fair amount of talk these days about the crumbling of the international order put into place in the wake of the Second World War. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the outcome of which is yet to be determined, is one obvious indication. Vladimir Putin seems set on crowning his tenure as the Russian Federation’s long-term strongman by expanding his realm back to the very same territories that Imperial Russia and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union took over with fire and sword. If defeat in the First World War, revolution and civil war stripped the newly emergent Soviet Russia of its western lands, Stalin won them back, and then some, in the Great Patriotic War, until Mikhail Gorbachev’s dismantling of the Soviet state brought the EU and Nato to Russia’s door, precisely what Stalin was determined to prevent and what Putin is committed to reversing. Another site of disintegration of the international order is the Middle East, especially Israel/Palestine. Territorially, the region is the outcome of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, while the establishment of an international legal regime, also threatened by the actions of both sides in the conflict, was established in response to the crimes of the Nazis.
The authors of the two exceedingly well-written and wide-ranging books reviewed here do not discuss these current crises, but both prompt the question, how did we get from there to here? Some of the answers may be inferred from their exploration of the manner in which the bloodiest war in human history was won by the democracies in alliance with the Soviet Union. Phillips Payson O’Brien’s The Strategists makes two fundamental claims. First, he argues that the strategic vision of the principal leaders of the Second World War – Winston Churchill, Stalin, Franklin Delano Roose¬velt, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler – was forged by their experiences as young participants in colonial wars, revolution and the First World War. Those who drew the right conclusions from those earlier military confrontations, he suggests, reaped their benefits in the mighty struggle over which they presided as the leaders of millions of combatants. This brings O’Brien to his second argument, which he first presented in his study How the War Was Won: Air-sea power and Allied victory in World War II (2015), contending that it was thanks to Britain and the US’s superiority in the air and on the sea, in what he terms the “air-sea super battlefield”, rather than the strength of their land armies of infantry, artillery and armour, that the Allies won the war against Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.’

(…)

‘As Tim Bouverie reminds us in Allies at War, no less than 75 per cent of the Wehrmacht’s losses were incurred on the Eastern Front, fighting a vast land war against the Red Army. As Bouverie also notes – a point O’Brien makes as well – the western Allies, and especially Churchill (who had opposed the slaughter of British troops in futile offensives in 1916 and 1917), delayed opening a second front in France until late in the war, despite promises made to Stalin about a landing as early as 1942. As Churchill saw it, the Wehrmacht had to take a brutal beating from the Red Army before such a landing could be accomplished without the kind of bloodshed seen on the Somme. This meant that by the time the Allies began fighting in France, Stalin was already well on his way to swallowing most of eastern Europe, which he had no intention of releasing from his grasp.’

(…)
‘That was the root of the Cold War, which lasted for more than four decades. The collapse of Communism undid these proxy states and removed eastern Europe from Russia’s grasp. It would appear that Putin is picking up where Stalin left off, eager to re-establish the same chain, whose origins date back to imperial times. As we observe the great unravelling of the international order, which was meant to prevent powerful states from taking over their neighbours in the name of their own national security, and was grounded in conventions and treaties geared to protect individuals and groups from war crimes, extermination and genocide, we can only hope for a new generation of leaders who will pull us back from the abyss.’

Read the article here.

How to win a war is one thing, but what are the moral grounds for winning? The cynical point of view: win first, morality will come afterwards.
Perhaps.

Bartov hopes for learders who will pull us back from the abyss.
What abyss? The total war between Iran and Israel.
World War III? Oligarchy forever in the US?

And where are the leaders? Perhaps I’m just impatient.