Europe?!

  

The Russians called it the “Great War” and suffered 70% of the casualties in the European theater. It was a war that, like WWI, was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. World War II. It gave birth to the United Nations, but with a Security Council where specified powers from designated “permanent member states” – China (subsequently the Peoples’ Republic of China), Russia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States – where each has veto power over “substantive” resolutions. That has never worked very well. Now, less than ever.

But WII allowed the United States with heavy industry – with excess electric power by reason of FDR’s New Deal construction of massive hydroelectric projects – literally to supply the Allies with the hardware and software of war necessary to counter Nazi manufacturing excellence and Japanese industrial discipline. Take away our ability to manufacture at a level the world had never seen before, and the Allies would have been subjugated under vicious totalitarian boots.

With the war far from almost all of our shores, the United States did not suffer the massive death and destruction heaped upon the civilian lands of our Allies (pictured above). That is one of the most significant reasons why the United States rose to become the greatest superpower in the modern world, not having to pay for reconstructing our cities, towns and manufacturing centers. We were up and running with a GI Bill and a consumer economy for well over a decade and a half while Europe and Japan rebuilt.

Once again, contemporary Europe has erupted in the greatest war there since WWII, a military conflict between an aggressive and mendacious Russia and a noble but militarily weaker Ukraine combined with a rise in new autocracies making an awful mess even worse. And once again, the United States is far-removed from the military conflict, with debates mirroring the pro- and anti-Nazi factions before we entered WWII. As Europe discovered, and many in the United States seem to forget, appeasement and “and it’s your problem far away” do not work. In fact, this attitude simply incents the avaricious aggressors looking for “Lebensraum” (living space or territorial expansion) to attack even more. And get much stronger as we simply wait.

Today, there are leaders in Europe and the United States, proponents of a new rightwing populist repeat performance of pre-WWII complacency, who simply cannot fathom why we/they should support Ukraine, believing that living in the shadow of Russian nuclear capabilities should make sure that they do not provoke Mr. Putin. Even as instability is rising in Moscow, even assuming that there is the potential for a regime change against Putin, many believe that a substitute autocrat might even be worse.

One of the most interesting perspectives is that of French President Emmanuel Macron, whose rising unpopularity is giving way to a rising movement there in support of a pro-Russian populist faction. The May 2nd The Economist reported the results of a recent interview with Macron: “In 1940, after France had been defeated by the Nazi blitzkrieg, the historian Marc Bloch condemned his country’s inter-war elites for having failed to face up to the threat that lay ahead. Today Emmanuel Macron cites Bloch as a warning that Europe’s elites are gripped by the same fatal complacency.

“France’s president set out his apocalyptic vision in an interview with The Economist in the Elysée Palace. It came days after his delivery of a big speech about the future of Europe—an unruly, two-hour, Castro-scale marathon, ranging from nuclear annihilation to an alliance of European libraries. Mr Macron’s critics called it a mix of electioneering, the usual French self-interest and the intellectual vanity of a Jupiterian president thinking about his legacy…

“We wish they were right. In fact, Mr Macron’s message is as compelling as it is alarming. In our interview, he warned that Europe faces imminent danger, declaring that “things can fall apart very quickly”. He also spoke of the mountain of work ahead to make Europe safe. But he is bedevilled by unpopularity at home and poor relations with Germany. Like other gloomy visionaries, he faces the risk that his message is ignored.

“The driving force behind Mr Macron’s warning is the invasion of Ukraine. War has changed Russia. Flouting international law, issuing nuclear threats, investing heavily in arms and hybrid tactics, it has embraced “aggression in all known domains of conflict”. Now Russia knows no limits, he argues. Moldova, Lithuania, Poland, Romania or any neighbouring country could all be its targets. If it wins in Ukraine, European security will lie in ruins.

“Europe must wake up to this new danger. Mr Macron refuses to back down from his declaration in February that Europe should not rule out putting troops in Ukraine. This elicited horror and fury from some of his allies, but he insists their wariness will only encourage Russia to press on: “We have undoubtedly been too hesitant by defining the limits of our action to someone who no longer has any and who is the aggressor.”

“Mr Macron is adamant that, whoever is in the White House in 2025, Europe must shake off its decades-long military dependence on America and with it the head-in-the-sand reluctance to take hard power seriously. ‘My responsibility,’ he says, ‘is never to put [America] in a strategic dilemma that would mean choosing between Europeans and [its] own interests in the face of China.’ He calls for an ‘existential’ debate to take place within months. Bringing in non-EU countries like Britain and Norway, this would create a new framework for European defence that puts less of a burden on America. He is willing to discuss extending the protection afforded by France’s nuclear weapons, which would dramatically break from Gaullist orthodoxy and transform France’s relations with the rest of Europe.

“Mr Macron’s second theme is that an alarming industrial gap has opened up as Europe has fallen behind America and China. For Mr Macron, this is part of a broader dependence in energy and technology, especially in renewables and artificial intelligence. Europe must respond now, or it may never catch up. He says the Americans ‘have stopped trying to get the Chinese to conform to the rules of international trade’. Calling the Inflation Reduction Act ‘a conceptual revolution’, he accuses America of being like China by subsidising its critical industries. ‘You can’t carry on as if this isn’t happening,’ he says.

“Mr Macron’s solution is more radical than simply asking for Europe to match American and Chinese subsidies and protection. He also wants a profound change to the way Europe works. He would double research spending, deregulate industry, free up capital markets and sharpen Europeans’ appetite for risk. He is scathing about the dishing-out of subsidies and contracts so that each country gets back more or less what it puts in. Europe needs specialisation and scale, even if some countries lose out, he says.” Good luck with that, M. Macron.

Yet and unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in Macron’s message, accelerated by what many Europeans see as the increasing unreliability of the United States as a global stabilizer, a nation that is itself torn apart between liberal democracy (and that does not mean leftwing governance, just a form of self-rule) and fact-averse populism living in a world of mythology and conspiracy theories. Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg of devastation we face. Even the war in Gaza and the West Bank is tearing us further apart, as if that were possible. The United States faces destruction from not just powerful and unscrupulous foreign powers, but even worse, our self-destructive nihilism that is tearing us apart from within. We just may vote for our own unraveling.

I’m Peter Dekom, and rational minds are finding decreasing traction with a vast pool of populists who prefer manufactured news to truth, about as toxic to democracy as you can get.