Among historians and political scientists, an unwritten conventional practice prescribes that in referencing a bilateral war, the loser’s name comes first. As a result, the name tells the student of history from the start which side won. A few examples follow.
In 1866 the Kingdom of Prussia went to war with the Austrian Empire to increase its territorial base. The war was short-lived, and Prussia won, thus entitling the war the Austro-Prussian War. In the aftermath of the war, the Hungarians pressured the Empire for equality with the Austrians, resulting in the establishment of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.
Encouraged by their success against Austria, four years later, Prussia, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, went to war with the Second Empire of France, then ruled by the Emperor Napoleon III, whose government collapsed in seven weeks, and the Emperor and Empress fled to England. That conflict we call the Franco-Prussian War.
Realizing the internal weakness of the Russian Empire, in 1903, Japan declared war on Russia. The war was a disaster for Russia. Tsar Nicholas II sent the Russian Baltic Navy to the Far East to engage the Japanese naval forces. The Russian fleet was defeated and captured by the Japanese in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima. The war concluded with the Peace of Portsmouth (New Hampshire), arranged by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was not present for the deliberations. The war is known as the Russo-Japanese War.
In the peace treaty, Russia lost the southern half of Sakhalin Island in the Pacific to Japan and was left with no sizable navy leading up to the First World War. Japan continued to use some of the captured Russian ships well into the 1930s. In Russia, the 1905 Revolution ensued, which transformed the absolute rule of the Tsar into a limited monarchy governed with a constitution, thus when V. I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917, they were overturning a constitutional government with an elected parliament, the Duma, the autocracy having ceased to exist in 1905.
In the New World, from 1846 to 1848, President James Knox Polk took the United States to war with Mexico. The war went badly for Mexico, which had to agree to America’s terms in the Peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which expanded America’s territories in the Southwest. That war provided the young Robert E. Lee with frontline military experience in the conduct of warfare. The conflict remains known as the Mexican-American War.
Also here, on our side of The Pond, 50 years after the war with Mexico, in 1898 the United States went to war with Spain, giving the future president, Theodore Roosevelt, the opportunity to ride horseback up San Juan Hill in Cuba, thereby propelling him into greater limelight in the political arena. The war provided America with an international stage, as it was also fought in the Far East, leading to America taking over the Philippines.
The War had a significant Northern Neck connection in that Congressman William Atkinson Jones, whose home still stands on Route 360 in Warsaw, began his crusade for the independence of the Philippines. The grateful Filipinos responded after his death in 1918 by erecting the impressive monument over his grave in Saint John’s Churchyard in Warsaw.
The War with Spain has come down through history known as the Spanish-American War, once again with the loser’s name coming first. These examples illustrate the practice of placing the defeated power’s name first in denominating a bilateral war. With the passage of time across the battlefield and in the cities, many names are being used to define the struggle for control of Ukraine. I leave it to historians of the future to set in place a name for the current Russo-Ukrainian War.
