The Ghost of Napoleon
in 2026

Reference is made to Fadiman’s 1942 Essay and the Echoes of Hubris, Resistance, and Historical Tides in Today’s Wars

Written by MARCEL CHIN-A-LIEN, Petroleum & Energy Advisor – March 2026

Global Petroleum & Energy Advisor · Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group (GLIAG).

A geopolitical reflection.

Great men do not write history; history writes them. The drama of nations unfolds across tides no single will can dam — and the chronicler who mistakes the captain for the sea has understood nothing.— after Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, and Clifton Fadiman, “The Ghost of Napoleon,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1942

I confess at the outset that these observations carry no more authority than the ruminations of a petroleum geologist who has spent nearly five decades reading stratigraphy, the layered record of things that happened long ago and yet somehow, stubbornly, keep happening again.

Subsurface geology teaches a peculiar humility: the rock does not lie, but it rarely speaks plainly, and the interpreter who mistakes a familiar pattern for an iron law is the one most likely to drill a dry hole.

I approach the geopolitics of 2026 in precisely that spirit, with fascination, genuine uncertainty, and the uneasy suspicion that the strata look unsettlingly familiar.

In the spring of 1942, as Wehrmacht columns ground toward the Volga and the word Stalingrad had not yet acquired its terrible finality, the American critic and anthologist Clifton Fadiman published a remarkable essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Ghost of Napoleon.”

Drawing on a fresh, wartime rereading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Fadiman traced what he called “sensationally repetitious” parallels between Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s eastern campaign of 1941–42.

The resemblances he catalogued were not superficial.

Both conquerors were undisputed military masters of a prostrate continent. Both had failed to humble England, had sealed pacts with Russia that curdled into enmity, and had faced appeasement abroad while manufacturing crusades at home, Napoleon against “barbarism,” Hitler against “Bolshevism.”

Both disguised naked rapacity as a civilising mission, and both marched eastward into a geography that swallowed armies the way a desert swallows water.

What gave Fadiman’s essay its enduring resonance was not the inventory of tactical echoes but the philosophical frame he borrowed from Tolstoy: the conviction that “great men” are less the authors of historical events than their most spectacular victims.

The tide moves; the leader, intoxicated by the illusion of agency, mistakes riding for steering. Hubris is not merely a moral failing, it is, Tolstoy insisted, a cognitive one.

The conqueror who believes himself indispensable to his victories is precisely the man most vulnerable to the moment when fortune withdraws.

Fadiman, writing with Hitler’s dream still very much alive, hedged his conclusions with admirable honesty. He noted that analogy is not prophecy.

But he permitted himself the observation that the “mighty Napoleonic parabola” might yet complete itself, that the ghost might, once more, be pointing east.

Eighty-four years later, in March 2026, two raging conflicts dominate the planet: Russia’s grinding war against Ukraine, now entering its fifth year, and a far more recent and volatile confrontation.

The coordinated US-Israeli air campaign against Iran, initiated on 28 February 2026 following decapitation strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior members of the security apparatus.

I find myself, quite against my professional instincts, returning to Fadiman.

The strata look familiar.

The ghost stirs again.

And yet, and this is the petroleum geologist’s habitual caveat, the rock is never quite what it was before.

· · ·

PART I

The Russian-Ukrainian Theater — Putin as the New Invader on the Steppes

The Ukrainian army did what Kutuzov’s army did: it retreated in good order, preserved itself, and let space and time become weapons of a higher order than any cannon.

Fadiman noted that both Napoleon and Hitler launched their eastern campaigns with the expectation of swift, decisive domination, the classic short-war illusion.

Both encountered instead what one might call the Russian paradox: the very vastness and apparent formlessness of the defence was the defence.

Armies retreated; territory was surrendered not in despair but as deliberate attrition, drawing the invader deeper into a logistical nightmare of his own making. By the time Napoleon entered a burning Moscow, he had already lost, though he did not know it.

Putin’s “special military operation,” launched on 24 February 2022 after years of accumulated grievances over NATO expansion, grievances that, whatever one’s sympathies, mirror in some respects the souring of earlier great-power pacts Fadiman described, reproduced this pattern with almost didactic fidelity.

Russian planners anticipated Kyiv’s fall within days.

Multi-axis advances stalled against stiffer-than-expected resistance, and Ukrainian forces, rather than collapsing, retreated in good order, preserving their army as a fighting force while inflicting attrition at every step.

It is exactly what Tolstoy described at Borodino, not a defeat, but a managed withdrawal that purchased time at acceptable cost.

By March 2026, Russia occupies roughly twenty percent of Ukraine, concentrated in the eastern and southern oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, and portions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Recent assessments suggest limited Russian gains, measured in tens of square miles per week, offset by Ukrainian counterattacks that in some sectors recover more ground than Russia seizes.

The operational tempo is gruelling, attritional, and deeply costly for both sides, but the character of the war has undergone a transformation that Fadiman could not have anticipated: the industrialisation of the drone.

Ukraine now produces millions of drones annually, deploying them with a tactical ingenuity that has fundamentally altered the calculus of armoured manoeuvre.

Western systems, French SAMP/T NG anti-ballistic batteries among them, constrain Russian offensive options from the air.

Supply strains, the slow bite of sanctions, and the systematic destruction of Russian logistics and energy infrastructure evoke, in their cumulative effect, both Napoleon’s catastrophic supply collapse and the Allied strategic bombing that bled Hitler’s war economy white.

The form is new; the dynamic is ancient.

HISTORICAL PARALLEL

Fadiman’s “unsportsmanlike” asymmetry, the partisan who refuses the set-piece battle the conqueror has prepared, recurs in every theatre.

In Ukraine it manifests as the drone swarm rather than the Cossack raid; in Iran, as the proxy network rather than the guerrilla band. The technology changes; the logic of asymmetric denial does not.

But of all the Fadimanian constants at work in Ukraine, none is more striking than what he called the defender’s “messianic” attachment to homeland. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former comedian whose wartime steadfastness has surprised the world, rallies a people who understand, with the bone-deep clarity of those who have lived through occupation, that they are defending not merely territory but identity, language, and the right to choose their own future.

Tolstoy’s Russians believed, in their apocalyptic moments, that they were saving Europe.

Ukrainians hold a version of that conviction, and it has proved, thus far, to be an inexhaustible military resource.

Public polling within Russia, meanwhile, shows support for peace negotiations approaching sixty-seven percent, the same erosion of will that hollowed out French morale after the Moscow campaign.

And then there is Putin himself.

Fadiman, channelling Tolstoy’s psychological portraits, drew a vivid picture of the conqueror’s pathology: the isolation that accumulates inevitably around absolute power, the echo chamber of subordinates competing to confirm rather than correct, the outbursts of “frenzied irritability” when reality intrudes on the strategic fantasy.

He quoted Rebecca West’s observation that the tyrant’s fatal flaw is a “sense of process”, a demand for outcomes without the discipline of engaging with the actual grain of the world.

Putin’s self-portrait as the rightful heir of Peter the Great, enlarging Russia’s borders by historic destiny, is a nearly perfect specimen of this syndrome.

Like Napoleon interrupting his envoys with impatience, or Hitler purging the generals who brought him unwelcome maps, Putin has rejected any compromise that does not incorporate maximalist territorial and political demands.

The ego-trap, in Fadiman’s phrase, is fully sprung.

· · ·

PART II

The US-Israeli-Iranian Theater — A High-Technology Crusade and the Resistance of Terrain

The second war offers fainter but no less provocative echoes, and perhaps more dangerous ones, given its nuclear shadows and its direct implication of the global energy supply that happens to be my own professional domain.

The airstrikes of 28 February 2026, a coordinated US-Israeli campaign that decapitated the Islamic Republic’s senior leadership including Supreme Leader Khamenei, represent the culmination of a decades-long strategic doctrine.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Iran policy, now executed with the explicit backing of a Trump administration pursuing “peace through strength,” sought to permanently neutralise what it characterised as an existential nuclear and proxy threat.

The initial strikes were tactically precise: air defences, missile production facilities, oil infrastructure, and the command layer of the Revolutionary Guard.

In their early success, they echo the Napoleonic and Hitlerian opening gambits Fadiman described, brilliant, overwhelming, and self-validating.

No military campaign against a resolute people has ever ended with the first strike.

The opening move illuminates the conqueror’s capabilities.

The defender’s response reveals his soul.

Iran’s response has been the mirror image of Ukrainian resistance, different in form, consistent in logic.

Missile salvoes against Israel and Gulf states, the activation of the Hezbollah and Houthi proxy networks, and aggressive manoeuvres threatening the Strait of Hormuz have spiked global oil prices and rattled energy markets from Rotterdam to Singapore.

I note, with professional interest and personal unease, that the Hormuz chokepoint, through which roughly a fifth of global seaborne oil passes, has become the geopolitical equivalent of the Russian rear in 1812: a vulnerability that the defender knows how to exploit and the aggressor cannot easily close.

The new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, elected in extraordinary session on 8 March 2026 following his father’s death, has vowed comprehensive retaliation.

Whatever one thinks of the Islamic Republic’s governance, the language of resistance, Iran as the defender of faith and sovereignty against “arrogant” external powers, carries a mobilising power among significant portions of the Iranian population and the broader Muslim world that purely military analysis consistently underestimates.

Fadiman’s “messianic spirit” is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon; it is a universal consequence of occupation and humiliation. Internal regime strains, clerics questioning Mojtaba’s health and legitimacy, whispers of a Leadership Council arrangement, suggest the same tests of political coherence that Napoleon’s conquest imposed on every polity it touched.

President Trump’s public posture throughout, alternating declarations that the “war will be over soon” with escalatory threats, demanding “unconditional surrender” while simultaneously pursuing back-channel communications with Moscow that may link the two theatres, is a vivid instance of what Fadiman called the tyrant’s irritability.

Everything, in such a disposition, depends on the leader’s will; coalition-building becomes a secondary performance.

Allies are alienated by unpredictability precisely when they are most needed.

The ego-trap, once more, is fully sprung, though its occupant, it must be said, has thus far proved a more confounding strategic actor than most analysts predicted.

The geography here differs from the Russian steppe in ways that matter.

Iran is not a vast plain but a mountainous, fractured terrain of high plateaus, deep valleys, and dispersed population centres.

There are no comparable conditions for the classic Napoleonic catastrophe of overextension across featureless space. But the underlying dynamic of attritional resistance, of a people who have absorbed external aggression for centuries and emerged with their collective identity intact, is not geography-dependent.

Spain in 1808 had no steppes, and yet it bled France for six years.

· · ·

PART III

Personalities and the Illusion of Agency — The Tyrant’s Isolation and the Defender’s Soul

Tolstoy’s most subversive argument in War and Peace, the argument that Fadiman considered his true philosophical legacy, was the denial of the “great man” theory of history.

Napoleon did not cause the French campaigns; the French campaigns, in a deep sense, produced Napoleon.

The forces of national ambition, technological change, economic dislocation, and demographic pressure shaped events, and the individual leader was at most their most visible and dramatic instrument.

This is a view that sits uncomfortably with our political cultures, which remain structured around the personification of power, but it is a view that 2026 seems determined to vindicate.

Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump each exhibit, in their distinct registers, what Fadiman diagnosed as the conqueror’s psychological signature: the “frenzied irritability” of men who believe themselves to be the authors of events and grow dangerous when events resist authorship.

Putin’s echo chamber and uncompromising grip have been documented by every serious analyst of the Kremlin.

Netanyahu’s fusion of the personal and the existential, his legal vulnerabilities at home driving, or at minimum intertwining with, his strategic decisions abroad, produces a pattern Fadiman would recognise: the protector-authoritarian who cannot distinguish the nation’s survival from his own.

Trump’s “hot charismatic” personalisation of foreign policy, his intuitive contempt for institutional constraint, and his simultaneous demands for foreign deference and domestic applause create the conditions for exactly the kind of misreading that precedes catastrophic strategic error.

Against these figures stand the defenders.

Zelenskyy, for all his imperfections, has demonstrated the authentic version of what Fadiman called the “soul of a people”, the capacity to absorb punishment, maintain institutional coherence, and articulate a vision of what is being defended beyond the merely tactical.

His reported sharing of Ukrainian drone expertise with Israeli forces is a detail of almost allegorical neatness: the defender-in-chief of one theatre transferring knowledge to the defender-in-chief of another.

Tolstoy, I think, would have appreciated the irony.

THE GEOLOGIST’S REFLECTION

In subsurface work, we are trained to distinguish between signal and noise, between the structural pattern that reflects genuine geological history and the artefact that reflects the limitations of our instruments.

Fadiman’s parallels may be signal; they may be, in part, the artefact of a pattern-hungry mind.

I confess I cannot fully separate the two.

I suspect no one can.

That uncertainty is itself, perhaps, the most honest conclusion available.

· · ·

PART IV

Differences, Constants, and the Limits of Analogy — Where the Rhyme Breaks Down

I would be less than honest if I did not dwell on the ways in which 2026 diverges from the patterns Fadiman traced.

Historical analogy, like seismic analogy in petroleum exploration, is a tool of tremendous power and commensurate danger. It clarifies; it also distorts.

The most obvious difference is scale and technology.

Napoleon marched a Grande Armée across one relatively narrow front at the pace of human feet and horse hooves.

Putin conducts a continental war along a thousand-kilometre line in which drone swarms, satellite intelligence, precision munitions, and real-time communications have compressed the decision cycle to hours.

The US-Israeli campaign against Iran represents a form of three-dimensional precision warfare, layered across kinetic, cyber, electromagnetic, and proxy dimensions simultaneously, that has no precedent in any earlier conflict.

Fadiman’s “Russian winter” was a climatic fact that took months to kill; a cyberattack on critical infrastructure takes seconds.

Nuclear deterrence imposes a constraint on escalation that has no equivalent in the Napoleonic or Hitlerian world.

It is the great invisible actor in both current theatres, present in every calculation, acknowledged in no public statement. Its existence does not eliminate the logic of Fadiman’s parallels, but it does mean that the parabola, if it completes itself, will do so under a ceiling that did not exist in 1812 or 1942.

Global economic interdependence adds another dimension entirely foreign to Tolstoy’s world.

The sanction regimes against Russia, the oil price shock attendant on Hormuz threats, the cascade effects through supply chains, financial markets, and energy systems, these are the “pressure on the rear” that Fadiman identified as Spain’s function against Napoleon or the RAF’s function against Hitler, but they operate with a simultaneity and a feedback intensity that is qualitatively different.

When Iranian proxies threaten Gulf shipping, the price of Brent crude moves within minutes in Amsterdam and Chicago. The rear, in 2026, is everywhere at once.

There is also an epistemological caution I feel obliged to register. Fadiman’s characterisation of “Russian character”, the messianic, self-sacrificial attachment to the Motherland, was a partially essentialist argument that risks romanticism and overlooks the extent to which national resistance is constructed, contingent, and capable of collapse under the right conditions.

Ukraine’s remarkable cohesion is real, but it is not inevitable; it is the product of specific political choices, specific leadership, and specific historical memory.

Iran’s resistance is real, but the Iranian people are also exhausted, economically damaged, and deeply ambivalent about a regime that has spent their prosperity on foreign adventures.

To invoke “the soul of a people” as an inexorable constant is to risk the same error Tolstoy committed in his most deterministic passages: replacing one simplification (the great man) with another (the invincible nation).

And yet, and this is where I find myself, despite all professional caution, unable to fully escape Fadiman’s frame, certain constants endure.

Vast space, whether geographical or political, still favours the resolute defender over the impatient attacker.

The tyrant’s hubris still produces the isolation that degrades strategic judgment at precisely the moment it is most needed.

National spirit, however constructed, however contingent, does appear to outlast the initial calculation of matériel advantages.

Tolstoy called this “thick continuity,” the persistence of certain human dynamics across radically different technological and political contexts. I am not certain he was wrong.

· · ·

CONCLUSION

The Unwritten Parabola — Awaiting Its Chronicler

Fadiman concluded his 1942 essay by expressing the hope that a new Tolstoy, a writer of sufficient philosophical depth and humane breadth, would one day chronicle Hitler’s fall as Tolstoy had chronicled Napoleon’s.

He was writing in a moment of genuine uncertainty, when Hitler’s dream was still very much alive and the parabola had not yet completed its arc.

He was honest about the limits of his own prediction, and it is that honesty, more than his parallels, that I most admire.

In March 2026, the parabola remains very much unfinished.

Russia gains territory at terrible cost while Ukrainian resilience shows no sign of fundamental collapse.

Iran’s regime survives the initial airstrikes but bleeds economically, politically, and in international standing.

Back-channel communications between Washington and Moscow, what the press has taken to calling the “Trump-Putin calls”, hint at the possibility of negotiations that might link the two theatres in a single grand bargain.

Whether this represents the beginning of a resolution or the consolidation of a new disorder is not yet legible.

A Socratic reader of Fadiman, and I count myself, tentatively, among them, might ask the most uncomfortable question of all: do we reach for historical patterns because those patterns are genuinely operative, or because the human mind, confronted with chaos, desperately requires the comfort of narrative?

Are we reading the strata accurately, or are we seeing what we were trained to expect?

I do not know.

I suspect the honest answer is both simultaneously, that human invariants of pride, attachment, and the illusion of control do genuinely govern the broad arc of events, and that the specific texture of each moment resists the pattern with an obstinacy that the analogist always underestimates.

What I am certain of, thinking back to the quiet seismicity of Fadiman’s prose in the spring of 1942, is this: the humane, philosophic view that Tolstoy embodied, the view that insists on the complexity of causes, the fallibility of leaders, and the ultimate resilience of ordinary human life against the ambitions of great men, is not merely an aesthetic preference.

It is the most practically useful frame we have.

It is, if you will permit a geologist one final metaphor, the best model we possess for the basin we are trying to understand: imperfect, perpetually in need of revision, but far more reliable than the comforting simplicities that leaders on all sides prefer.

The ghost of Napoleon salutes eastward, and southward, once more.

Whether it heralds rout, quagmire, or some outcome we have not yet imagined, the drama of 2026 awaits its chronicler.

I am unfortunately only a petroleum geologist.

But I have read the rock, and the rock, as always, is trying to tell us something.

⁂

Marcel Chin-A-Lien, CPG #5201 · CEG #92
Global Petroleum & Energy Advisor
Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group (GLIAG)
March 2026