We're About to Live in a Very Different World
The early 21st century will resemble the first half of the 20th century much more than the latter half.
Alright. So. Veterans Day. There’s a reason why we honor this occasion every year on November 11th and not just a “Last Monday of the May” sort of thing like we do with Memorial Day. The date itself is significant. It’s the day that the First World War ended in 1918 - the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
It’s important to remember why the Great War happened, and what happened next. After all, people in 1918 were calling it “The Great War” instead of “World War I” for a reason - it was so catastrophic that folks back then didn’t think people would be foolish enough to make a sequel less than a generation later.
Kind of sounds familiar, huh? After all the chaos of the first Trump term, how could the people vote for an even more chaotic return to all that with greater enthusiasm than they did when they first put him in office in 2016?
The comparison to the early 20th century goes much deeper, though.
Why did WWI happen? A myriad of tangled reasons, to be honest, but it was inevitably the end result that one way or another the great imperial powers of Europe were bound for a clash at some point - too many nationalistic egos had been built up for them to all share one tiny continent with each other without a fight breaking out that everyone felt obligated to jump into.
Ultimately, America had to step in to put an end to the conflict. And in a way, we won the battle but lost the war. Because we never really fixed the root cause of the problem - that the Europeans had a lot of resentments towards each other which WWI had just made even worse. President Wilson had the grand idea for a League of Nations - a forum for working out problems between nation states without resorting to violence - which would have encouraged cooperation between the countries involved to rebuild with more democratic societies after the war. But, the American citizenry decided that Europe’s problems were Europe’s problems, and so we didn’t join the League of Nations (which fell apart pretty quickly without American involvement) and looked on as countries like Italy and Germany turned to the fascists to solve those problems. It wasn’t great - that Hitler fellow seemed like a real piece of work - but that was Germany’s problem to deal with. The the Czech’s problem to deal with. Then Poland’s problem to deal with. Then the French’s problem to deal with. Then Britain’s problem to deal with. But of course, we had to look after our own - “America First” and all that as Charles Lindberg and the German American Bund liked to say while the Luftwaffe was bombing London.
So yeah. American withdrawing from the world doesn’t really seem to work out like we’d hope it would. Eventually everyone else’s problems become ours too. But, after two World Wars, we did learn that lesson, for a time at least. We stuck around after WWII to help countries rebuild and become prosperous. Germany became a healthy democracy deeply concerned with reckoning with its sins of the past. NATO was formed as an international alliance dedicated to serving as a collective bulwark against the new authoritarian threat of the Soviet Union, and after the fall of that evil empire, continued to serve as a check against the imperial interests of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And when those Eastern European countries broke free of their Soviet overlords, we spent the post-Cold War era gradually welcoming them into the fold of democratic societies and developing economies. It wasn’t perfect, sure. But Europe enjoyed several decades of unprecedented relative peace and prosperity that it never had in the previous two millennia of history. And America benefitted greatly from this too, even more than those European allies that we had spent time and effort shoring up through their times of trouble did.
Still, I guess all this normalcy gets a little boring after a while, doesn’t it? It can be easy to forget the safeguards actually serve a purpose when there nobody’s gotten hurt in a while - kind of like how all those fire safety regulations in building codes seem like a tedious expense and hassle until some jackass decides it would be fun to be an arsonist for a day. When you don’t have a major international conflict break out on the European continent in several generations, it can be easy to forget that sometimes egomaniacs hopped up on delusions of imperial grandeur just start invading sovereign nations because the existence of the Kievan-Rus kingdom in the 9th century serves as a mandate for the idea that Ukraine isn’t really a country and must be united under one banner with Russia in the 21st century and yeah… Sound kind of dumb doesn’t it?
Particularly when one of the biggest apologists for Putin and his specious excuses is an eccentric billionaire who can buy an entire media platform to promote his shitposts but can’t seem to afford a shirt that properly fits over his pasty nerd physique. But I guess America would prefer people like this to be in charge of our foreign policy and national security decisions.
One of the few things that Trump has been consistently obsessed with over the years is pulling America out of NATO. This will happen during Trump 2.0, unless there are some very dedicated people in his administration who manage to stop him from doing so. But Trump’s Cabinet this time around will not have a John Kelly, Jim Mattis or Mark Esper there to redirect his worse desires from shattering the Atlantic alliance, so I fear we are not likely to be saved from such consequences this time.
The end of NATO can take many forms, and it need not be that the alliance is ever formerly dissolved.
Trump could simply decide to pull American nuclear weapons out of missile-sharing agreements with allied countries, signaling to the rest of Europe that they can’t rely on American firepower as a deterrent against Russia, and forcing countries like Germany and Poland to takes steps to become nuclear-armed powers themselves.
Perhaps the worst case scenario would be that Putin decides to test the limits of “America First” isolationism by carving off a small piece of a NATO country. Russia has long had its eye on Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, a territory of Sweden, who just recently joined as a member state in the alliance. Seizing control of the island would not involve an invasion of the mainland, or be a particularly challenging military campaign, unlike the quagmire that Ukraine has turned into for the Russian army. But if the United States does not respond, then neither will any of the European countries be willing to risk direct conflict with Russia, and Article 5 of NATO will be a dead letter.
The end of NATO does not mean World War III. It does however, mean that Europe starts to look like something closer to the pre-World War I environment. A great many powers with the capacity for untold destruction (this time wrought by nuclear arms rather than imperial armies of millions), some in tension with each other and some in vaguely defined alliances with each other, where no one in the governments involved knows exactly what happens when a spark is lit, other than that something must happen. The world will once again experience the crisis of uncertainly awaiting a catalyst.
There is very little we as individual citizens can do about this at a high level, other than try to make the people in our lives understand the stakes. Trump will only avoid tearing up NATO if he thinks it will make him unpopular. It’s not enough for Democrats to call out the dangers. Some portion of that 51% of the country which voted for him also needs to come along with caring about it. The only thing we can do to save NATO is to create fierce public support for it with the same degree of intensity as Americans over 100 years ago used to rally against the League of Nations.