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| President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in ordering missile strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, follows a long line of wartime leaders who have sought to cow their adversaries by bombing enemy capitals. | 俄罗斯总统普京下令对基辅和其他乌克兰城市进行导弹袭击，此前许多战时领导人都曾试图通过轰炸敌方首都来吓唬对手。 |
| Ever since Nazi Germany’s bombardment of London in World War II, enabled by the first long-range missiles and warplanes, nearly every major war has featured similar attacks. | 自从纳粹德国在第二次世界大战中通过最早的远程导弹和战机轰炸伦敦以来，几乎每场重要战争都有类似袭击。 |
| The goal is almost always the same: to coerce the targeted country’s leaders into scaling back their war effort or suing for peace. | 其目标几乎都是一样的：迫使目标国领导人降低战争投入或求和。 |
| It typically aims to achieve this by forcing those leaders to ask whether the capital’s cultural landmarks and economic functioning are worth putting on the line — and also, especially, by terrorizing the country’s population into moderating their support for the war. | 通常这样做是要迫使这些领导人自问，首都的文化地标和经济功能是否值得冒风险——尤其还可以恐吓该国民众，让他们减少对战争的支持。 |
| But for as long as leaders have pursued this tactic, they have watched it repeatedly fail. | 但是，坚持这种策略的领导人总会看到它一再失败。 |
| More than that, such strikes tend to backfire, deepening the political and public resolve for war that they are meant to erode — even galvanizing the attacked country into stepping up its war aims. | 更重要的是，这样的打击往往适得其反，会令对方的政界和公众更坚决地战斗——这样的决心正是这些领导人本想削弱的——甚至还会刺激被攻击国家制定更高的战争目标。 |
| The victorious allies in World War II did emphasize a strategy of heavily bombing cities, which is part of why countries have come to repeat this so many times since. Cities including Dresden and Tokyo were devastated, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and forcing millions into homelessness. | “二战”中获胜的盟国确实强调对城市进行大规模轰炸的战略，这也是此后各国多次重复这一战略的部分原因。德累斯顿和东京等城市被摧毁，上万平民丧生，数百万人无家可归。 |
| Still, historians generally now argue that, even if that did play some role in exhausting those countries, it was largely because of damage to German and Japanese industrial output rather than the terror it caused. Axis countries were also aggressive in bombing enemy cities, casting further doubt on notions that the strategy could be a decisive factor on its own. | 然而，历史学家现在普遍认为，即使这确实在一定程度上给这些国家造成巨大消耗，但主要是因为它对德国和日本的工业产出受到了损害，而不是因为它造成了恐怖。轴心国也积极地轰炸敌方城市，这令人们进一步怀疑该战略本身是否可以成为决定性因素。 |
| And any World War II lessons may be of limited utility in understanding the wars that came after, as countries quickly learned from that conflict to move military production away from city centers. Tellingly, such bombing has seldom worked since. | 而且，“二战”中的教训对人们理解之后的战争未必有帮助，因为各国迅速从那场冲突中吸取教训，将军事生产从城市中心转移出去。很明显，这种轰炸从那以后就很少奏效。 |
| American war planners discovered this in the Korean War, when bombing Pyongyang only hardened the North’s commitment. A decade later, they tried it again in Vietnam. But an internal Pentagon report concluded that striking Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, had been “in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment.” | 美国的战争策划者在朝鲜战争中发现了这一点，轰炸平壤只会强化朝鲜的决心。十年后，他们在越南再次尝试。但五角大楼的一份内部报告得出的结论是，对北越首都河内的袭击“回过头来看，是一次严重误判”。 |
| Al Qaeda’s justification for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has shifted, but the group has said that one aim was to compel American withdrawal from the Middle East. But Americans, rather than rising up against their country’s overseas deployments as Al Qaeda leaders had hoped, rallied in support of invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. | 基地组织为2001年9月11日的恐怖袭击辩护的理由已经改变，但该组织表示，其目的之一是迫使美国从中东撤军。但美国人并没有像基地组织领导人所希望的那样，反对国家在海外的部署，而是团结起来支持入侵阿富汗和伊拉克。 |
| Though each conflict is different, this pattern is not a coincidence, but is explained by the politics as well as the psychology of warfare. And both appear to apply in Russia’s war in Ukraine. | 虽然每次冲突都是不同的，但这种模式并不是巧合，而是有政治和战争心理上的解释。二者似乎都适用于俄罗斯在乌克兰的战争。 |
| Capital strikes intended to push a government toward conciliation or retreat instead do much to close off those options. | 对首都进行打击的本意是推动政府走向和解或撤退，却在很大程度上断绝了这些出路。 |
| In practice, such attacks tell targeted leaders that they, and perhaps the very existence of their government, will not be secure until they eliminate the threat through outright victory. They will tend to escalate in response, rather than back down as their attackers hope. | 在实践中，这类打击告诉目标领导人，除非他们通过彻底的胜利消除威胁，否则他们（或许还有他们政府的存在本身）不会有安全。作为回应，他们倾向于升级应对方式，而不是像攻击者所希望的那样退缩。 |
| And a negotiated peace, like the one Mr. Putin has urged, becomes harder for those leaders to enter because it means accepting that the threat to the capital will remain. | 而像普京所敦促的那种通过谈判达成的和平，对这些领导人来说将变得更加难以实现，因为这意味着接受对首都的威胁还将继续存在这一现实。 |
| The public will often reach the same calculus, coming to see their attacker as an implacable threat that can only be neutralized through defeat. | 公众往往会得出同样的结论，将攻击他们的人视为不可调和的威胁，只有打败对方才能消除。 |
| The stiffening resolve inspired by such strikes can be equal parts strategic and emotional. | 这种打击所激发的坚定决心可能是战略上的，也可能是情感上的。 |
| German rocket and air attacks on British cities during World War II, known as the Blitz, aimed to degrade British production as well as public support for the war, so that Britain would agree to withdraw from the conflict. | “二战”期间，德国对英国城市的火箭和空袭被称为“伦敦大轰炸”，目的是削弱英国的生产和公众对战争的支持，从而使英国同意退出冲突。 |
| Instead, the attacks led to a drastic reduction in British support for peace talks with Germany, polls at the time found, raising pressure on British leaders to uphold the fight. | 然而当时的民意调查显示，这些袭击导致英国人对英德和谈的支持率大幅下降，加大了英国领导人坚持战斗的压力。 |
| And German leaders had hoped that turning whole blocks of London into rubble would inspire Britons to turn against the leaders who insisted on staying in the war. But British approval of their government rose to near 90 percent. | 德国领导人曾希望把整个伦敦街区变成废墟，可以刺激英国人反对那些坚持战斗的领导人。但英国人对政府的支持率上升到近90%。 |
| In Vietnam, American forces began bombing northern cities in 1966 with the explicit goals of “deterioration of popular morale” and to “put pressure on the Hanoi leadership to terminate the war,” according to a 1972 Congressional review of Pentagon documents. | 1972年国会对五角大楼文件的一份审查报告显示，在越南，美军从1966年开始轰炸其北部城市，其明确目标是“削弱民众士气”，并“向河内领导层施加压力，要求结束战争”。 |
| Instead, the strikes helped lock Northern Vietnamese leaders into a strategy of expelling the Americans who were dropping bombs on their cities, Pentagon officials concluded privately. | 相反，五角大楼官员私下里得出的结论是，空袭迫使北越领导人采取了一种战略——驱逐向他们的城市投掷炸弹的美国人。 |
| The attacks also so angered North Vietnam’s allies in Moscow and Beijing that those countries increased their military aid beyond what the bombers had destroyed, Pentagon analysts said. | 五角大楼的分析人士说，这些袭击还激怒了北越在莫斯科和北京的盟友，以至于这些国家增加的军事援助超过了轰炸机所摧毁的东西。 |
| And the more damage that the strikes caused, whether economic or human in toll, the deeper became the Northern Vietnamese public’s commitment — to both the war and the Communist government. | 空袭造成的损失越多，无论是经济损失还是人员损失，越北民众对战争和共产党政府就越忠诚。 |
| A C.I.A. report three years into the bombing campaign found “substantial evidence” that the Northern Vietnamese public “found the hardships of the war more tolerable when it faced daily dangers from the bombing than when this threat was removed.” | 在轰炸行动进行了三年之后，中央情报局的一份报告发现，“大量证据”表明北越民众“在每天面临轰炸带来的危险时，比在没有这种威胁的时候，更能忍受战争的艰辛”。 |
| This may seem counterintuitive. But seeing a foreign enemy crater one’s hometown or neighborhood with airborne explosives can produce a rally-around-the-flag effect so profound as to offset even the exhaustion of living in daily peril. | 这似乎违反直觉。但是，看到外敌投下炸弹，炸毁自己的家乡或邻里，就会产生一种团结在旗帜周围的强烈效果，甚至可以抵消日常生活所带来的疲惫。 |
| Such attacks might even be said to radicalize the very populations they are meant to terrorize. | 甚至可以说，正是此类袭击使他们要恐吓的人群变得更进取。 |
| This played out during the Second Intifada, a conflict between the Israeli military and Palestinian groups in the 2000s. Terrorist bombings in Israeli cities were intended to pressure Israelis to ease or end their country’s occupation of Palestinian territories. | 2000年代的“第二次大起义”，也就是以色列军队和巴勒斯坦组织之间的冲突，也产生了类似效果。对以色列城市的恐怖爆炸旨在向以色列人施压，以减少或结束该国对巴勒斯坦领土的占领。 |
| But research conducted during the conflict found that each bombing instead increased votes for right-wing parties, which ran on militarily escalating the conflict, by 1.35 percentage points. | 但在冲突期间进行的研究发现，每次爆炸反而使依靠军事升级冲突的右翼政党的选票增加了1.35个百分点。 |
| Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli cities — perhaps a closer parallel to Mr. Putin’s strikes on Ukraine — were, in subsequent years, found to boost hard-line political candidates by as much as six percentage points. | 随后几年，巴勒斯坦人对以色列城市进行火箭弹袭击，可能和普京对乌克兰的袭击更为相似。人们发现这使强硬派政治候选人的支持率提高了6个百分点。 |
| The effect likely runs deeper than policy preferences. Psychological studies found that rocket and bomb attacks on Israeli cities made Jewish Israelis feel a greater sense of solidarity with one another — rallying not just around their flag, but their identity. | 这种效应可能比政策倾向的影响更深。心理学研究发现，对以色列城市的火箭和炸弹袭击让以色列犹太人感受到了一种更强的团结感——不仅团结在他们的旗帜周围，而且团结在身份认同中。 |
| The strikes also made Jewish Israelis in those areas more willing to support harsher policies toward the Palestinians, preferring outright victory to accommodation or compromise. | 这些袭击还使这些地区的以色列犹太人更愿意支持对巴勒斯坦人采取更严厉的政策，更倾向于完全胜利，而非和解或妥协。 |
| There is another way that strikes like Mr. Putin’s this week can heighten a country’s military commitment and lessen its willingness to compromise. | 像普京本周的这种袭击还可以从另一方面增强一个国家的军事承诺并降低其妥协的意愿。 |
| When fighting is restricted to the front lines, a war might be experienced very differently by the general population than by soldiers and leaders. | 当战斗仅限于前线时，普通民众对战争的体验可能与士兵和领导人截然不同。 |
| This may be the case in Russia itself. Even as backlash to the war and fear of conscription visibly rise there, for much of the country it is an abstraction experienced through sunny and selective state media reports. It might make a war easier to bear, but also to consider an unwelcome burden, particularly as economic tolls and other costs rise. | 俄罗斯本身可能就是这种情况。尽管那里的人对战争的强烈反对和对征兵的恐惧明显上升，但对于该国大部分地区来说，在报喜不报忧的官方媒体报道下，这种体会很抽象。这可能会让人们更容易承受战争，但也会认为这是个不利的负担，尤其是在经济损失和其他成本上升的情况下。 |
| But attacks on residential districts erase distinctions between soldiers and civilians. Londoners in the Blitz described feeling deep solidarity with British soldiers overseas, leading many to organize in the war’s support rather than asking their leaders to back down. | 但对住宅区的袭击抹去了士兵和平民之间的区别。伦敦大轰炸中的伦敦人说，他们深深感到与海外的英国士兵团结在一起，导致许多人组织起来支援战争，而不是要求他们的领导人退缩。 |
| This sense of society-wide solidarity can also deepen peoples’ willingness to bear a long and costly struggle for victory, along with their belief that there may be no surer path to safety. | 这种全社会的团结意识也可以加深人们为胜利而进行长期且代价高昂的斗争的意愿，以及他们相信没有比这更可靠的安全之路。 |
| Ukrainian families afflicted by Russian bombs, which have brought the front lines to their very homes, have described feeling much the same. | 遭受俄罗斯炸弹袭击的乌克兰家庭描述的感觉大致相同，袭击将前线带到了他们的家中。 |
| Strikes like Mr. Putin’s have backfired so consistently in modern warfare that some analysts have wondered whether his aims might be focused, at least in part, more at home: appeasing frustrated Russian hard-liners. But, if history is any guide, those critics’ may find that their dissatisfaction with the war’s progress is only deepened by Monday’s attacks. | 在现代战争中，像普京这样的袭击屡屡适得其反，以至于一些分析人士怀疑他的目标是否会更多集中在——至少部分集中在——国内：安抚沮丧的俄罗斯强硬派。但是，如果以历史为鉴，那些批评人士可能会发现，他们对战争进展的不满只会因周一的袭击而加深。俄罗斯总统普京下令对基辅和其他乌克兰城市进行导弹袭击，此前许多战时领导人都曾试图通过轰炸敌方首都来吓唬对手。 |
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