The Third War Over Ukraine.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob

The great British historian John Wheeler-Bennett called it the forgotten peace. He was referring to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, which was signed by the Central Powers and Soviet Russia on March 3, 1918. Lenin had instructed the Bolshevik Central Committee "you must sign this shameful peace in order to save the world revolution." In it, the Soviets handed over most of Ukraine and all three Baltic states to imperial Germany. The punitive treaty, Wheeler-Bennett wrote, "not only signified the apparently complete victory of German arms in the East, and the greatest diplomatic and military humiliation which Russia had ever sustained in a long history of defeat, but, with the exception of the Treaty of Versailles, it had consequences and repercussions more vitally important than any other peace settlement since the Congress of Vienna." Wheeler-Bennett was writing in 1938, a year before a new world war erupted, revolving once more around a Teutonic Drang nach Osten, or push to the East. Now, as Russia pursues the will-o'-the-wisp of its old imperial aspirations in Ukraine, the melancholy legacy of the Brest-Litovsk treaty is manifesting itself again. Central Europe, long seen as a geopolitical backwater, is at the center of world events for the third time in the modern era. With his war of aggression in Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin is ushering in nothing less than a new age of upheaval.

What to do? In May, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger created a furor in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos when he enunciated traditional realist precepts, declaring that a negotiated settlement was imperative lest the war spiral into a direct confrontation between Washington and Moscow. "Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo," he said. He added, "Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself." In both Berlin and Paris, where misgivings about the course of the war are percolating, Kissinger's words of caution fell upon receptive ears.

But his remarks prompted his critics, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to declare that he was counseling appeasement in the face of tyranny. Their argument is as simple as it is sweeping: this is no time to give up the fight. It is a...