I forget who called World War I the original catastrophe from which all the other catastrophes of the 20th century (and beyond) derived.

I have come to feel over the past few years that the Russian/Japanese war of 1905 is the overlooked first domino of 20th-century wars – some of the what-were-they-thinking tactics of WWI came down to the Japanese infantry having taken an entrenched-with-machine-guns Russian position, like, one time, and the Western generals in the subsequent conflict kept pointing to this example saying “see, it *can* be done” (probably with a side-order of “if *they* could do it, white people have *got* to do it or look wimpy by comparison”).

Japan won in part because they’d modernized their navy with a loan from American businessman Jacob Schiff, which just convinced the Tsar of the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy – the kind of theory that would echo down the century. Being defeated by a smaller country probably shook up Russian society and contributed to the Revolution. Japan, meanwhile, got confident and began expanding its own empire.