The End of History--Again

A member of my neighborhood foreign policy group has sent a query about NATO, Trump, Russia, Putin, etc... asking for comment. I append the questions raised at the end.

Hi D. et al,

    

Somewhere in the back of my brain is this recurring thought: "This is the true end of the twentieth century"; Meaning that we were mistaken in thinking that 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union was the end, and that back then we were sailing into the twenty-first century.

By the end of the 20th century, I mean the post-WWII world that came to grips with all the horror that began with:

1. the First World War, the reorganization of central and eastern Europe (i.e., the end of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires),

2. the economic dislocation of the twenties and thirties, and the economic reorganization of the fifties and sixties,

3. the rise and fall of Nazism, (Hitler, etc.),

4. and the reorganization of the West into a more global arrangement beginning with the Marshall Plan, the UN and all of its committees, NATO and other international military arrangements, and the beginnings of global economic institutions.

Not everyone, probably some of us, think all of this worked so well for the  developing world and for marginal First World countries. But in a shambling way it worked.

The reformation of Germany was an important, perhaps key, element in these developments, obviously in the French-German rapprochement and the emergence of the EU. Germany was destroyed along with its dream of military hegemony.  The unification of East and West Germany after 1990 was seen to be part of this new order.

******

What we are seeing today is a threat to all of that, or in some quarters the dimantling of central parts of the post-war agreements and understandings.  I have tried to pay attention to Angela Merkel's efforts because I think she is a firm believer not only in the EU but in the "reformed" (mostly demilitarized) Germany. She is to my mind the anit-Kaiser Wilhelm; she is not paranoid, not ambitious for new lands, and not a nationalist.  Germany is the centerpiece of the European land mass and critical to the future political and economic cohesion of "Europe." I think she is trying to maintain that role. She is under serious constraints from her own government.

******

Donald Trump is an ignorant and aggressive destabilizer. He knows little and seems to care little about all that was achieved after the slaughter and upheaval of the two world wars. Equally ignorant advisors surround him. The EU (Donald Tusk), Merkel, Macron, the Spanish, Portuguese, Ireland, the Low Countries, the Scandinavians are the back stop to everything Trump is doing in ignorance.  I will not fulminate about Britain and their Prime Minister.

*******

Russia is playing all of this to its own advantage. And Trump is playing kitten to an intelligent, knowledgeable, and cunning Putin. Whatever Putin or Russian intelligence has on Trump, I think it's money, but it could be sex tapes, as well. The money is probably illegal money in large amounts (Russian oligarchs sending their "profits" abroad), and Trump (and Kushner and Britain) are beholden to them. It was a deal with the devil and the devil (whether or not that is Putin) is collecting.

Glad you asked; sorry to go on at such length!  Peggy

********

The Original Question from "D":
I would like to know what you think about the upcoming NATO and Putin-Trump meetings in July. Brian Lehrer this morning hosted somebody billed as a national security and counterterrorism analyst—Malcom Nance. Nance described a 2-hour meeting that Trump had in Moscow in 2013 with Russia's top oligarchs, after which he formed his subsequent fawning attitudes toward Putin and his henchmen as figureheads for global right-wing Christian values—catnip to Trump and his supporters—and his steadfast refusal to condemn Russian meddling in ours and other countries' elections. https://www.wnyc.org/story/kremlin-messages-president

Nance predicts that at the NATO meeting Trump will continue to bray his pro-Putin, anti-NATO line. A line, by the way, that Katrina Vanden Heuvel's husband continues to support in the pages of The Nation, no less.

Do you find convincing the belief that Trump's unshakable obeisance to Putin is more likely to be attributable to this 2013 meeting than to his fear of revelations from the long-discredited Steele dossier?