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knb comments on Calibrating your probability estimates of world events: Russia vs Ukraine, 6 months later. - Less Wrong Discussion
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All of these things also apply to the other examples I mentioned, and many other countries besides. People said the same things about Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad, etc. Putin is of course saying similar things about his Ukrainian enemies to what you are saying about him. (Admittedly, they make it easy for him.)
There is no shortage of historical examples of historical revanchism, yet the "Hitler in 1939" analogy utterly dominates. So why rely 100% on one analogy. Why insist on using the example that is the closest stand-in for "evil psychopath who cannot be reasoned with, but must be destroyed utterly?"
Probably because you're in the midst of a media driven two-minutes hate. History begins and ends with Hitler, 1939!
(Seriously, your standard for being Hitleresque is being racist, homophobic, and nationalistic? It might be a fun exercise for you to write down a list of 100 historical leaders, determine how many were/were not racist, homophobic, or nationalistic. This will give you your Hitler/non-Hitler ratio. Do you think the ratios of Hitlers : non-Hitlers is greater or less than 1?)
This situation is optimized for media, but exactly in the opposite way. The whole attack is divided into many incremental steps. Each small step is not enough to evoke a military response from the West. Then there is a pause, until media stop paying attention and find something else to care about. Then another small step.
(Remember the first step? Russian soldiers without uniforms in Ukraine territory, not yet openly fighting anyone, just carrying weapons and looking intimidating. So, what are you going to do about it? First, there is no war yet, and second, they even deny being Russian. Calm down, everyone, calm down, nothing to see here. -- A few steps later it's obvious there are Russian troops there, but we already kinda knew it for months, so why the sudden overreaction today? Calm down, everyone, calm down, nothing new is happening here.)
This is how you overcome the Schelling point -- by doing a calculated very small step, and then calling your opponent irrational if he wants to react.
This Yes, Prime Minster video is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE
Dividing something in many incremental steps that each are newsworthy generally means that the whole things gets more media attention than if you do everything at once.
Wikileaks for example didn't release all the cables at once but purposefully spread them out over a time to give them more media attention.
Not just being nationalistic, not just being expansionist, but actually taking territory.
I would guess that more than half of all rulers in history took others' territory, or tried to and failed. And being nationalistic goes without saying ever since the invention of nationalism.
The specific tactic of nibbling on your neighbors one bit at a time, varying your speed depending on international reactions, was used by Hitler but also by many others. Calling a common behavior Hitleresque isn't useful.
There are good reasons for comparing Germany in 1938 with Russia in 2014, but I don't think these are among them.
And more than half of all the rulers in history would find themselves really really out of place in the modern world if they tried to do the same things they did in their historical contexts, and we would rather not have to deal with them.
A rather low bar to get over, there.
I don't think Hitler was very unusual among rulers of, say, the post-Napoleonic epoch of 1814-1945. He was just first unusually successful (making many enemies) and then unusually thoroughly defeated and occupied (allowing those enemies to make his name particularly infamous).