All wars are like car accidents, and all car accidents have causes.  The trouble arises when conflicting testimonies produce different explanations of the cause. We see this in the Russo-Ukraine War.

The conventional view of how the war started and who is responsible is the one put forward by the U.S. and its NATO allies at the war’s outset. It is still dominant today, but it is being challenged by alternative views, one of them coming from the American president.  The Battle of the Narratives has been joined.

The conventional narrative holds that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes a grave act of injustice, amounting to a clear case of “unprovoked” aggression. War guilt rests solely on the shoulders of one person: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin’s past words and deeds show that he had long planned for war and sees himself as a modern-day Peter the Great, reclaiming territories he views as historically Russian.

Russia, goes this version, has unlawfully denied Ukraine its U.N. Charter rights to live in peace. Its behavior is an affront to the norms of world order, and justice requires armed opposition to thwart its designs.

In critical theory, there is something called a “dominant discourse,” which is a way of speaking about a topic that reflects the outlook of those who have the most power. The conventional view of the Ukraine war is like that. It gives people a way of thinking and feeling about the war and Russia. It justifies military assistance to Ukraine, it keeps NATO together, and it allows like-minded opinion writers to signal their solidarity with each other.

Although it is not a closed system, it filters new ideas, allowing some to pass while blocking others. An unvetted idea could send the discourse in a different direction.

Donald Trump is offering those unvetted ideas. With his election, the titular leader of the Western alliance has become a critic of the alliance he leads.

Trump is challenging the dominant narrative. His deputies no longer speak of Russia in the condemnatory talking points of the Biden administration, nor do they refer to Ukraine as a besieged ally.

A few months ago, this would have been considered heresy. Today, it is American policy, but it is a peculiar policy in the sense that the most powerful player on the field also professes a minority view. Trump’s idea of seeking rapprochement with Russia is unpopular among foreign policy experts on both sides of the Atlantic. It is outside the dominant discourse.

The conventional narrative is basically a blame-based analysis. It is like a prosecutor’s brief, a charge sheet drawn up against only one party, the accused, while the actions of the other parties are squeezed out of the picture. It is a forensic approach, akin to going through a basket of apples looking for the bad ones. The narrative builders look for evidence in the actions and statements of Russian leaders and plot these on a line leading irresistibly to the conclusion that Russia has harbored aggressive intent all along.

But our search for an explanation cannot be merely a one-state inquest. It must consider all actions from all the players. Of course, Putin ordered his commanders to attack, but he did not do so in a fit of isolated resentment, but rather from a highly dynamic context in which Russia was both proactive and reactive to the challenges posed to it by its enemies. And our search should not only look at the situation at the time of Russia’s invasion. It must also account for factors that are more remote in time that shaped the decisions.

Will future historians write their accounts of the Ukraine war from within the tenets of the orthodoxy? Some will do that, but the question is, will those accounts stand the test of time? To get an answer, let us look for a clue in the different ways we have come to understand the origins of the two world wars of the twentieth century. That story goes like this:

In 1919, the victorious powers gathered in Paris to dictate the terms of the peace. The Versailles Treaty contained an article that fixed war guilt on one party only—Germany and its allies. That article would later become the woe of Europe.

No sooner was the ink dry than a reappraisal of the Great War’s origin took place. Historians began to sift and re-sift the data, trying to come up with a satisfactory explanation. They questioned the verdict of war guilt. Today, library shelves are filled with such volumes. Some of them look at the various crises that buffeted Europe in the decade before 1914. Others looked for more remote causes going back into the nineteenth century.

The debate has gone on for a century, and it appears that historians are still not done with it. Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers (2012) is perhaps the latest contribution to that conversation. Today, it would be rare to find the expert who would place war guilt solely on the shoulders of one party.

Nothing like this happened after the Second World War.

The consensus view in 1945 of the war’s origin is basically the same view today: the war was the emanation of the mind of an evil man taking advantage of Germany’s post-WWI economic disarray and societal breakdown, and he died in a double suicide in Berlin in April 1945. Germany was the aggressor. Unlike the aftermath of the First World War, there has been no serious reappraisal of that finding, no serious decades-long debate.

Today’s narrative builders want us to understand the origin of the Ukraine war like we understand that of the Second World War: Both conflicts have a simple and final explanation. The narrative tells us that if one is looking for the causes of war in Ukraine, one need not look much beyond the Kremlin walls. The demonization of Vladimir Putin is an important part of this. The narrative builders make Putin into a Hitlerian figure who must not be appeased. They urge us to apply the hard lessons of the 1930s to Ukraine in real time.

By contrast, the Ukraine war critics are in the tradition of the First World War re-appraisers. They cull through the war’s long run-up, going back into the twentieth century, looking for where mistakes were made and why. They question whether Russia’s attack was really “unprovoked” and whether the right party is being charged with aggression. While the conventional narrative fixes its analytical gaze on Russia, the critics turn it inward. They raise questions about what our side did and how it fits into the picture.

With the passage of time, more re-evaluations of the Ukraine war will be brought out. It’s probable that, as with the histories of the First World War, eventually a more nuanced view of the war’s origin and where responsibility lies will displace the dominant discourse.

"Putin the Great" image by AI.

JAMES SORIANO is a retired Foreign Service Officer. He has previously written about the Ukraine war on The American Thinker.

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