Having been led in its first two decades by firmly anti-Soviet chancellors, West German foreign policy took a left turn in 1969, after Willy Brandt took its helm.
The previous ruling party, the Christian Democrats, refused to recognize communist East Germany and would also not recognize Poland’s sovereignty over formerly German lands. One of those leaders, Ludwig Erhard, even toyed with the idea of buying East Germany for $25 billion, as noted here once in a different context (“Where to strive with Iran,” December 10, 2021. The payment would have been made to the USSR).
Brandt and the Social Democrats changed all that as they launched the policy of Ostpolitik, which sought reconciliation with the Eastern Bloc, and thus recognized East Germany, accepted Poland’s sovereignty over historically German lands, and intensified trade with the USSR.
Following all this, American leaders in Washington were alarmed.
“The Soviets,” warned national security advisor Henry Kissinger in a secret memo to president Richard Nixon, might “confront the Federal Republic of Germany with the proposition that a real and lasting improvement in [its] relations with the German Democratic Republic and other Eastern countries can only be achieved if Bonn loosens its Western ties.” (See wilsoncenter.com, February 16, 1970.)
The new German policy would be part of a broader, pan-European attitude that tried to counterbalance America’s hostility toward all things communist, despotic, and Russian, a suspicion that underpinned American diplomacy for 80 postwar years.
Now, the roles have been reversed
THE NEW American attitude is, in effect, “Russia good, Europe bad.” It’s a historic U-turn, and its announcement was shouted in three rapid installments within 48 hours.
The first installment came last Wednesday, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a phone conversation – the first between an American president and his Russian counterpart since Russia’s grand invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
The second came Thursday, when Trump said he and Putin were planning to visit each other, “he’ll come here and I’ll go there,” as he put it to reporters in the Oval Office. And on Friday, Vice President JD Vance lectured to European diplomats who gathered in – how symbolic – Munich:
“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia… [it’s] the threat from within… shutting people out of the political process protects nothing… I believe that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinion and the conscience that guide your very own people.” America was thus telling Germany to embrace its far-Right.
Yesteryears’ concerns – military aggression in general, and Russia’s in particular – are passé, it now turned out. Ukraine’s lot is unfortunate, but America is no longer concerned about its invaders’ scorn for justice and sovereignty, not to mention freedom. The roles are so reversed that Europe is the one scolding Russia while America prods Europe to turn a blind eye to Russian evils, and while it also ignores what Europeans diagnose as German fascism’s germs.
Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan are turning in their graves.
Yes, America’s policy toward Russia evolved over the generations. Truman and his successors focused on blocking Moscow’s imperialist drive, Nixon shifted to detente but made sure to outflank Russia from its Chinese east, and Reagan made the moral demand – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – that Trump is now abandoning, and in fact inverting.
America’s current leader is ready to waltz with the man who attacked an innocent neighbor. In all likelihood, this is the beginning of unabashed appeasement.
Trump’s negotiation with Putin has already begun, in a meeting between their foreign secretaries this week in Riyadh. That the Ukrainians and Europeans were not invited to the table says everything about Trump’s attitude and the talks’ predictable outcome.
Europe to him is not a democratic bastion that shares America’s ideals. That’s what it was to all previous American leaders, the ones who did not mock the American Constitution and assault the judiciary and the media. This leader is different. To him, Europe’s enemy is a soulmate, and Europe itself is neutral territory, at best.
This would have been bad enough had Trump been the leader of any other country. But Trump is the leader of the American people, the Western alliance, and the free world. All their enemies are watching and listening, and what they hear is music to their ears.
THE FIRST ones to take stock are the Chinese.
Beijing is waiting patiently to see what kind of deal Trump cooks for Ukraine. In the absence of any moral demand, or even just its pretense, chances are high that when the dust settles Russia will have retained, with America’s nod, Crimea and other swathes of Ukraine that Russia snatched in a war of aggression. The Chinese will then say: if Russia can have Crimea, why can’t we have Taiwan?
Watching Taiwan come under waves of Chinese marines, Turkey will then say: if China can have Taiwan, why can’t we have Cyprus?
And back in the Kremlin, after watching what Putin will judge as Western civilization’s moral defeat and strategic striptease, Moscow will proceed to the rest of the business of restoring the Soviet imperium. First, after accepting the deal that will trim, deplete, and humiliate Ukraine, Russia will find a pretext to attack that shrunken land, and then it will proceed to what once were Moscow’s Baltic realms.
Back in the West, meanwhile, pundits will debate the analogy to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, soon after Western leaders forfeited that helpless democracy’s western hip. “Mr. President,” reporters will ask Trump, “Are you a new version of Neville Chamberlain?” and the leader of the free world will reply: “Who’s that?”
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.