Tale spodnja zgodovinska paralela med lahkotnostjo nemškega napada na Francijo avgusta 1914 in Trumpovim “vikend napadom” nas Iran je fenomenalna. V to kategorijo spada tudi Napoleonov napad na Rusiho sto let pred tem ali britanski poskus zavzetja polotoka Gallipoli ob turški ožini Daedanele. Gre za napad iz objestnosti, kjer napadalec nima plana B, ker je bil tako zaverovan v svojo zmago. Nakar je šlo vse narobe in vodilo v zgodovinsko katastrofo.

There are many historical parallels to be drawn with Epic Fury. The most telling, to me, is with the beginning of the First World War. Both conflicts began with what looked like a brilliant plan. The US and Israel aimed to decapitate the Iranian regime on day one of the war. Germany’s strategy was to secure a rapid victory in France. It was devised by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen eight years previously, and rather than attacking France directly from the Franco-German border, where it had strong fortifications, the Germans would go through Belgium and Luxembourg and encircle Paris in a spiral-like movement. Speed was of the essence back then, just as it is today.

It is hard to imagine today the degree of optimism everybody had about the war when Helmuth von Moltke, the German military commander, executed a version of the Schlieffen plan. Kaiser Wilhelm II told his soldiers: “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.” Young men left their jobs to go to the front. Older men, like the German sociologist Max Weber, lamented their inability to fight. In Britain, too, the general expectation was that the war would be “over by Christmas”. Trump predicted that the Iran war would last four to five weeks. We are now in week five.

Initially, in 1914, Germany’s war went according to plan. The Germans pushed through Belgium, encountering British forces near Mons, and then moved quickly over the border into France, pushing the French and British armies some 250km to the south. The Germans came within 40km of Paris. But the seeds of failure were already sown. They advanced, but they failed to surround the city. The quick encirclement — Schlieffen’s grand plan — did not happen.

As the Canadian historian Holger Herwig writes in The Marne 1914 about the Schlieffen plan: “It was a single roll of the dice. There was no fallback, no Plan B. Speed was critical; delay was death. Every available soldier, active or reserve, was deployed from the first day of mobilisation. The sounds and sights of two million men trudging across Belgium and northeastern France with their kit, guns, and horses in sweltering 30-degree heat, stifling humidity and suffocating dust was stunning, and frightening.”

And herein lies the problem with grand strategy: it unravels on contact with the unexpected. Reality has a nasty habit of sabotaging even the most carefully laid plans. As Herwig tells it, the German troops were simply not prepared for the summer heat.

The Franco-British counter-offensive started on September 6 with the Battle of the Marne, the single most consequential battle of the First World War. Essentially, the Allied Forces managed to split the two German armies, the one that came from the north towards Paris, and the other further east. On 9 September, the Germans began a general retreat, and by 12 September they had fallen back to the Aisne in the north. This was the beginning of the trench warfare that would dominate the Western Front for another four years. It ended with Germany’s total exhaustion, militarily and financially.

Historians have examined in great detail why Germany, the military and economic superpower of its time, lost the war. But the most important reason was apparent in those first six weeks: there was no plan B. The Schlieffen plan did not account for the weather. Nor did it consider what might happen if the war dragged on: acute supply difficulties.

Donald Trump, too, has no plan B. In fact, it’s hard to decipher if he ever had a plan A…

Vir: Wolfgang Münchau, UnHerd