Warmonger? Mass murderer? Evil incarnate? Yes, Hitler was all of these things, but, as Niall Ferguson says, he was also an inept colonialist, and his Reich one of the last, worst incarnations of the resource-extraction colonial power. Ferguson’s short review focuses mostly on Nazi Germany’s treatment of Ukraine, a place where ethnic Germans and various other minority groups who had suffered under the Russians were inclined to view the Nazis as liberators.

That sentiment didn’t last long:

What went wrong? The answer can be given in four words: arrogance, callousness, brutality and ineptitude. All empires are prone to these vices, of course. But the Nazi empire took them to such an extreme that any possibility of sustainable rule was destroyed. Later empires worried about winning hearts and minds. The Nazi empire was both heartless and mindless. The “arrogant and overbearing Reich Germans”, strutting around in their fancy uniforms, alienated even the ethnic Germans they claimed to have freed from foreign oppression. Moreover, they took positive pride in starving the newly subject peoples. “I will pump every last thing out of this country,” declared Reichskommissar Erich Koch, when put in charge of the Ukraine. “I did not come here to spread bliss …”

Props to Reichskommissar Koch for understatement of the century.

There were some dissenting voices in the Reich government. One official in the Ost Ministerium (nicknamed Cha-ost Ministerium, or Ministry for Chaos) called Germany’s record in the east

a masterpiece of wrong treatment … to have, within a year, chased into the woods and swamps, as partisans, a people which was absolutely pro-German and had jubilantly greeted us as their liberator.

But could they have been more successful if they had been less brutal and incompetent? Probably not, Ferguson says. By then it had been proven that even relatively (much much) better governed empires, such as Britain’s, were a constant nuisance to their thoroughly industrialized mother states.

The Economist notes:

According to a Russian newspaper report, Mr Putin lost his temper with Mr Bush at a meeting on the final day of the Bucharest summit, telling him: “Do you understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.” Claiming that most of Ukraine’s territory was “given away” by Russia, Mr Putin supposedly also said that if the country joined NATO it would “cease to exist”.

So many of my “Russia hand” friends tell me that Russia’s leadership is made up of mafioso goons who nevertheless clearly understand the profit motive above all else. “These people can be bargained with.” Undoubtedly this is true in many cases, but I think most people underestimate nationalistic pride and raw power hunger when they talk about Russia. Russia is far more likely to behave like a 19th century Great Power bully than as a responsible stakeholder in some 21st century post-national global order.

This is not to say that Putin’s point is completely unfounded on its merits—the West treating Ukraine like some inviolable, monolithic entity is a recipe for disaster. But it should be a heads-up to all Western strategists that Russia will not be likely to compromise in any constructive way when it comes to talking about Ukraine’s future.