“Madness, madness,” says Count Sergei Witte, elder statesman and advisor to Czar Nicholas II, when Nicholas follows his generals’ advice and orders the mobilization of millions of Russian soldiers in late July 1914, in the dramatic movie Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Witte in the movie is played brilliantly and accurately by Sir Laurence Olivier, who foretells the tragedies that will befall the Romanovs and Russia if the general mobilization leads to war. But the Czar ignores the elder statesman and joins Europe’s other “sleepwalkers” (Christopher Clark’s term) in the descent toward world war.  

In America, President Woodrow Wilson at first resisted calls (by former President Theodore Roosevelt and others) for the United States to become a belligerent in the Great War, but in 1917 he and Congress committed this country to the conflict, and in a relatively brief period of time we sustained roughly 320,000 casualties, including more than 100,000 dead. The outcome of the war settled nothing, which is why we were at it again twenty years later, and this time we suffered more than a million casualties, including more than 400,000 dead.  

The geopolitical outcome of the Second World War was to replace one murderous, expansionist totalitarian dictatorship (Nazi Germany) with another (the Soviet Union), and soon we were waging Cold War all over the world and fighting hot wars in places like Korea and Vietnam, with a combined American casualty total of nearly a half-million, including more than 90,000 dead.  

The common denominator in all of these wars is that great powers were involved to varying degrees, which explains the high casualty figures noted above. The deeper the United States becomes involved in the Ukraine war, the greater chance that we will sleepwalk our way into a wider, great power conflict.

The United States and its European allies are lifting restrictions on deep-strike weapons to threaten more of the Russian homeland. Influential lawmakers like Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley are calling for crippling economic sanctions against the Putin regime. Congressman Don Bacon (R-Neb) wants the U.S. to send more lethal weapons to Ukraine. “The U.S. & Allies must arm Ukraine to the teeth, sanction Russia to the max, & confiscate the $300B in overseas Russian assets,” Bacon wrote on X.  Eighty-one senators, according to the New York Post, “have pledged their support of a bill to impose sanctions against the Kremlin, as well as a 500% tariff on imported goods from countries that buy Russian oil, gas and other products.” Our European allies have expressed similar sentiments.  

Meanwhile, the American foreign-policy establishment and U.S. media spokespersons want President Trump to do more to support Ukraine. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands, for example, claims that aiding Ukraine has been a great investment for the U.S., and he has called the Ukraine conflict Trump’s war and called on the president to impose crippling sanctions on Russia. Washington Post columnist George Will argues that the costs will be great if the U.S. chooses to lose in Ukraine. President Obama’s ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wants Ukraine admitted to NATO. The list could go on and on of those who want to make Ukraine America’s war. 

President Trump recently criticized Putin for Russia’s escalation of military strikes in Ukraine. Trump may be applauded by the usual suspects for his tough talk, but he should resist the urge to escalate U.S. involvement in the war. Putin is a bad guy and a ruthless ruler, and the Ukrainian people are suffering due to Russia’s war of aggression, but those facts don’t make Ukraine a vital U.S. interest.  

The sleepwalkers of 1914 transformed conflict in the Balkans into a global catastrophe. Historian Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War persuasively argued that in hindsight Great Britain should never have become a belligerent in the Great War. Germany, he wrote, was not bidding for world power. At most, German war aims involved reducing Russia’s power in Eastern Europe and coming to the aid of her Austrian ally in the Balkans, and perhaps acquiring some French colonies—none of which was against British interests. Although Germany engaged in a naval arms race with Britain, it lost that race; British sea power was mostly unhindered during the Great War. And British belligerency because of her worldwide empire transformed a European war into a global war, affecting most of the world’s continents.   

What began as a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia ended in a global conflict that set the course for the bloodiest century in human history. Had Germany achieved its limited aims in the Great War, Hitler would never have come to power in the 1930s and Russia may have been spared the Bolshevik yoke. Just think: no Holocaust; no Holodomor (the Ukrainian famine); no World War II; no Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution; no Korean or Vietnam Wars. Those events all stemmed from the First World War. 

The war between Russia and Ukraine is still a regional war, but the involvement of Europe’s other powers and the United States threatens to transform it into a global war with nuclear-armed powers on both sides. Ukraine’s recent drone strike that reportedly destroyed more than 40 of Russia’s strategic bombers at four bases deep inside Russia risks becoming the trigger that ignites a wider war. It is doubtful that Russia will believe that Ukraine could have carried out this operation without U.S. and/or NATO involvement. Before President Trump escalates U.S. engagement he should think about what he would say to the families of U.S. servicemen who end up dying in the Third World War: “Your son (or daughter) died for Ukraine.” If that answer isn’t good enough—and it isn’t good enough—then he needs to awaken the sleepwalkers to avoid a great tragedy.  

In the movie Nicholas and Alexandra, Count Witte tells the Czar: “I’m old sir. I’ve seen so many wars. They all seemed so important at the time. Now I don’t even remember what they were called.” When it is announced that Germany declared war on Russia, Witte laments that “the victors will be as cursed as the defeated . . . Tradition, virtue, restraint—they all go. . . And the world will be full of fanatics and trivial fools.”