In August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm told German troops waiting to be mobilised that they would be home ‘before the leaves fall’. He was not alone in this prediction. At the time it was widely believed that the coming war would be over by Christmas. In the early 1960s, the US did not foresee that a guerrilla war waged by Communist-nationalist forces in Vietnam would last for over 10 years. And when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he apparently expected his forces to capture the capital, Kyiv, and subdue the entire country within weeks, if not days. Why have so many conflicts in modern times defied initially confident expectations of a rapid, decisive victory? How far have the terms on which they were eventually concluded differed from belligerents’ original war aims? Have mounting costs in lives, money and materiel made it more - or less – easy to bring wars to an end? How to explain the willingness of populations to continue fighting, despite the sacrifices involved? Why has a negotiated peace often seemed so elusive? And is a war always ‘over’ when the fighting stops? We shall try to answer these difficult questions by studying a selection of case studies from 20th-21st centuries. Taking the First World War as a starting point, the course will move on to a comparison of the wars in Vietnam and Ukraine. Finally, we shall look at some examples of ‘frozen conflicts- in Korea, the Middle East and the Caucasus - and try to unpick the concepts of ‘victory’ and ‘lasting peace’.
This course is part of the Oxford University Summer School for Adults (OUSSA) programme.