When Vittorio Hösle predicted in 2015 that Ukraine was at risk of a full-scale invasion by Russia, few people believed him. Now, he is warning that further escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war could cause the collapse of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“Time is running out,” Hösle said. “I am convinced that Russia will go to the next step. They’ve tried to test out the waters with Trump.”
Hösle, the founding director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, came to Boston College for the first time on Thursday evening to discuss the imminent threat he believes Vladimir Putin poses and the United States’ lack of a clear stance on the conflict.
“We now have a president of the United States whose inconsistency with regard to principles is not the highest,” Hösle said. “Now, no one knows what he will do in the future. If America were to leave NATO, then NATO would collapse.”
Hösle believes the question of whether Russia will pursue further aggression will soon be answered. For Russia, the Russo-Ukrainian war is a conflict rooted in humiliation and a desire for revenge after a moral defeat in the Cold War, according to Hösle. He drew parallels between Russia’s post–Cold War political state and Germany’s situation after World War I.
“There is a detailed parallelism between what happened in Russia in the 1990s and in Germany in the 1920s,” Hösle said.
According to Hösle, for both Putin and Adolf Hitler, the combination of looming military defeat, refusal to relinquish national power, mass mobilizations to address national debt, and the consolidation of power in a single authority ultimately led to conflict.
“Putin, like Hitler, was very successful in this aspect,” Hösle said. “[They] pay back by attacking the rest of the world.”
The Russia invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022 marked the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. The invasion followed years of escalating tensions that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Now, three years since the invasion, Hösle pointed to the political underpinnings of the war. He describes it as a fight for recognition by Putin and Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign affairs minister.
“There will be huge revenge,” Hösle said. “Putin and Lavrov explicitly said this war is because [they] have been humiliated.”
The war is still ongoing, despite Russia’s initial belief that a swift victory was inevitable. Hösle said Russia faced strong Ukrainian resistance, inadequate preparation, aid from the United States and the United Nations, and China’s reluctance to openly supply it with military equipment.
Hösle warned that it took Germany two wars to finally accept defeat and cautioned that the Russia-Ukraine war is still in the early stages of what could become a major international conflict.
“It’s naive to say that NATO will solve this problem.” Hösle said. “They won’t. They can’t.”
