Writing about Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Margaret MacMillan, an Oxford professor, compares it to the beginning of World War I: “In 1914 and 2022 alike, those who assumed war wasn’t possible were wrong.” (“How Wars Don’t End,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2023)

Russian leader Vladimir Putin, she points out, had made clear his belief that Ukraine was historically a part of Russia. He apparently assumed he could easily conquer it and incorporate it into Russia. Similarly, leaders of Europe in 1914 assumed “war was a reasonable option” and began taking sides when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist.

European leaders at the time assumed that any war would be short. Few envisioned the years long slog in muddy trenches and the slaughter of thousands of young men.

Europe, of course, had fought wars for centuries. Indeed, World War I was sometimes seen as merely another war to settle scores left by the German victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.

Wounded pride also played its part in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin was a Russian intelligence officer in East Germany and witnessed the Soviet Union’s loss there, as the Cold War receded and Germany reunited as a democracy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, in a sense, an as yet unfinished part of the Cold War.

When Ukraine’s war with Russia ends, as it eventually will, MacMillan suggests using the ending of World War II as a better example to follow than that of World War I. “In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Marshall Plan helped rebuild the countries of western Europe into flourishing economies and, equally important, stable democracies. . . . Even former enemies can be transformed into close partners.”

It seems the idea is not to defeat enemies but turn them into partners.