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Chapter 123: The Rhineland and the Crimea: Testing the West's Resolve

March 7, 1936. Hauptmann Klaus von Stauff, a young Wehrmacht officer, sits atop a boxy Sd.Kfz. 221 armored car, the engine rattling his bones. The air over the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne is cold and damp, thick with the smell of coal smoke and the Rhine. He feels a knot of ice in his stomach that has nothing to do with the weather. His column, part of a pathetically small force of just a few battalions armed mostly with machine guns, is trundling into the demilitarized Rhineland. The act is a direct, flagrant violation of the two sacred texts of the European order: the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. It is Adolf Hitler's first, colossal gamble on the international stage, a poker bluff played not with a strong hand, but with sheer, breathtaking audacity. Klaus's secret orders, whispered to him by his commanding general, are as clear as they are terrifying: "At the first sign of French military mobilization, at the first shot fired by a French soldier, you are to offer only token resistance and retreat immediately to your starting positions."

For hours, Klaus's world is a state of unbearable, stretched-thin tension. His head is on a swivel, his eyes scanning the western horizon, his ears straining for the sound he dreads and fully expects to hear: the deep, guttural thud of French artillery or the angry drone of French fighter aircraft. The French army, just miles away, is the most powerful in the world, a massive force that could, he knows, obliterate his small expeditionary force in a matter of hours. He pictures the headlines in Berlin, the humiliation, the end of the Führer's grand experiment. But the sound never comes. The day passes in an eerie, unnatural, and deeply perplexing silence. The only response from Paris and London is a flurry of frantic diplomatic cables and sternly worded letters of condemnation, a blizzard of useless paper. By evening, as his men set up camp on the west bank of the Rhine, welcomed by cheering German crowds, Klaus feels a sense of profound, disbelieving shock, which is quickly replaced by an immense, invigorating, and world-altering relief. The West, for all its pronouncements, for all its mighty armies and vaunted treaties, is a paper tiger. It will not fight. It does not have the will.

February 27, 2014. Major Dmitri Volkov, a Spetsnaz officer from the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade, his face hidden behind a green balaclava, kicks open the ornate wooden door to the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol. He and his men, the soon-to-be-famous "little green men," wear perfectly clean, new uniforms stripped of all insignia. They are ghosts, a deniable instrument of state power, a lie made flesh. Their mission, to seize the levers of government on the sovereign territory of Ukraine, is a massive gamble, a blatant violation of every international treaty Russia has signed since the end of the Cold War. As his men swiftly and bloodlessly secure the building, neutralizing the few confused guards, Dmitri sets up a temporary command post in the speaker's chamber and waits. He, too, has secret orders. This is a probe, a test. If the Ukrainian army, garrisoned across the peninsula, responds in force, and more importantly, if the United States and the Western powers signal a truly decisive response—a run on Russian banks, the movement of the US Navy in the Black Sea—the operation is to be recalibrated, potentially even aborted. The risk of a real, hot war is, at this stage, deemed too high by the men in the Kremlin.

For hours, he monitors the frantic, panicked signals intelligence intercepts, waiting for the West to act, waiting for the crippling sanctions that would freeze his country's foreign reserves, waiting for the Ukrainian army to be given its orders to fight. But the response that comes is laughably, pathetically weak. A handful of toothless sanctions on a few mid-level officials and oligarchs. An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that ends, predictably, with a Russian veto. Statements of "grave concern" and "deep disappointment." The West condemns, and complains, and wrings its hands, and does nothing of consequence. Within days, the entire Crimean peninsula, with its great strategic prize, the naval base at Sevastopol, is under total Russian control with barely a shot fired. As Dmitri stands a week later on a cliff overlooking that very base, watching his country's flag being raised, the lesson he absorbs is identical to the one learned in the Rhineland almost eighty years before. It is a lesson that will embolden his President and shape the next eight years of history: The West is hollow. It will not fight to defend the rules it claims to cherish. Aggression, if executed with speed and daring, works. The door to a wider war has just been kicked wide open.

The Discourse 123: The Price of Inaction

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the first major territorial gambles undertaken by Hitler and Putin and the catastrophic failure of the Western response in both cases. It argues that the failure to impose severe, immediate, and devastating consequences for these initial, blatant acts of aggression served as the most important permissive signal for the larger wars that followed. It was the moment that deterrence failed, not through a lack of capability, but through a fatal lack of political will.

Breaking the Foundational Treaties was the central act of defiance in both scenarios, a deliberate test of the entire international order. Hitler’s 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland was a direct and intentional violation of the two sacred texts of the European order of the time: the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I, and the Locarno Treaties, a set of agreements Germany had entered into voluntarily in 1925 to guarantee its western borders. For Putin, the 2014 annexation of Crimea was an even more profound act of treaty-breaking, an assault on the entire post-Cold War settlement. It was a violation of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Accords (which guaranteed the inviolability of Europe's borders), and, most damningly, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In this specific and legally binding document, Russia had personally pledged to "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" in exchange for Ukraine surrendering the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, which it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Russia was not just breaking a general rule of international law; it was violating a specific, written security guarantee it had given to the very country it was now dismembering. Both the Rhineland and Crimea were not just about seizing a piece of territory; they were deliberate, symbolic assaults on the entire legal and normative framework of international order, designed explicitly to test the resolve of its self-appointed guardians.

The Failure of Deterrence was the catastrophic, and mirror-imaged, response in both cases. In both 1936 and 2014, the Western powers possessed overwhelming conventional military superiority and crippling economic power. A decisive response was not a matter of capability, but purely of political will. The failure to act stemmed from the same flawed and fearful logic: a desperate desire to "avoid a wider conflict," a naive hope that the aggressor would be satisfied with his initial gains ("he's just marching into his own back garden," a British lord infamously said of the Rhineland), and a deep-seated reluctance to risk economic or military confrontation over a piece of land that seemed, to many in Paris and Washington, far away and disconnected from their own national interests.

The Anglo-French response to the Rhineland was a mix of toothless diplomatic protests to the League of Nations and private admissions that Hitler, however illegally, was correcting a "grievance." The US-European response to Crimea was a set of targeted, cosmetic sanctions that deliberately and explicitly spared the core of the Russian economy—its massive oil and gas exports to Europe—for fear of damaging their own economies. These feeble, performative responses were not interpreted by the aggressors as magnanimity or a wise and prudent de-escalation. They were interpreted, correctly, as profound, decadent weakness. This failure of deterrence taught both Hitler and Putin the same vital, world-altering lesson: that the risks of brazen aggression were far lower, and the resolve of the democratic world was far weaker, than they had ever calculated. It was the essential green light, the critical psychological permission slip for the far larger and more devastating invasions that were, in both cases, to come.

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