America Is About to Join the Axis of Evil
I certainly don’t need to tell any of you that we – and by “we” I mean the decent majority of Americans who subscribe to the best of American values – are living in terror right now. We are terrorized by the prospect that Trump will win the election, and that all the things in which we believe, all the things that have defined this nation’s greatness, not its blood and soil, as Trump and his supporters believe, or its machismo or its bigoted self-interest or its new blaze of white supremacy, but its decency and compassion will be obliterated. We live in terror that we are on the verge of fascism. We realize that something has happened to America over the last nine years since Trump arrived on the political scene, that its demons have been released, that it is no longer the country we had remembered as recently as a decade ago, much less in our youths. We realize, to put it bluntly, that a significant part of the country has gone bad: mean and hateful. To echo Barack Obama’s words in Pittsburgh: “When did that become okay? Why would we go along with that?”
But I don’t want to address the congeries of issues that Obama was addressing. Those have been cited repeatedly, including by me. We all know Trump is a monster. Nor do I want to address yet again the way in which the resentments of white male Americans have curdled into an animosity so feral that it resembles that of the Nazis. Instead, I want to want to focus here on a single one of Trump’s depravities, because it is so important that the fate of the world may very well rest upon it, because we seem to have forgotten it, and because in so many ways it crystallizes just how far we as a nation have fallen from grace.
That one issue is the survival of Ukraine.
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Two weeks ago, September 30 to be exact, marked the 86th anniversary of the notorious Munich Agreement, whose signatories were Britain, France, Italy, and, of course, Nazi Germany. Without getting too deep into the particulars here, the most important are that the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany, against the obvious wishes of the Czechs and Slovaks, after Hitler had issued an ultimatum that he would seize it militarily if the European powers didn’t agree. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hastily arranged a flight to Munich to meet with Hitler and try to avoid the military takeover of the Sudetenland, which he did. . .by handing the Sudetenland over to him. In a private meeting with Hitler, the two agreed on the “desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”
Hitler couldn’t have been more cordial. He had gotten exactly what he wanted. Chamberlain returned to England amid cheering throngs, and promised “All this will be over in three months.” (Sound familiar?) It wasn’t, as history later showed, though at Nuremburg, Marshal Keitel admitted Germany hadn’t the armaments in 1938 to attack Czechoslovakia if the European powers had stood by the country. Basically, Hitler had called their bluff, but they were too blind to know, too weak to stand up for democracy. As Britain and France saw it, war was allegedly averted, and all was good.
But history subsequently proved it wasn’t good. The Munich Agreement didn’t satisfy Hitler; it emboldened him. Munich lit the fuse for Germany’s invasion of Poland a year later and for World War II. Why this matters is that historically Munich would become synonymous with appeasement – with the cowardice of the European powers to confront Hitler and stop him when they still had the chance. It would take the war to do that. And why this matters is that Munich would become another “never again” moment – another of those teaching moments, in this case the lesson that when a dictator threatens, you don’t surrender. You deny. That lesson has governed American behavior ever since.
The anniversary passed this year, as far as I can tell, without any comment or observation, which wouldn’t be surprising were it not for Donald Trump, and for the fact that he has made Munich more relevant than it has been at any time since it was signed, even though I seriously doubt he knows what the Munich Agreement is. At his debate with Kamala Harris and at his rallies before and since, Trump has made it clear that he never learned that lesson. Today, we have another murderous dictator with designs on his neighbors, Vladimir Putin, another threatened state, the Ukraine, and another set of nations faced with the prospect of either stopping the dictator or appeasing him. Ukraine has fought valiantly, more than valiantly, to preserve its independence and democracy, and the nations of Europe and, this time, the United States, have forged an alliance to stop the dictator, lest Munich be repeated, and Putin’s insatiable appetite gobble the rest of Europe.
This is all in accord with the terrible lessons of 1938. But there is a difference this time: Donald Trump has all but said that he will cede Ukraine to Russia should Trump win in November. He has said that if the NATO allies don’t pony up more money – they are already paying their fair share of NATO and more – he will cast Ukraine to its Russian fate and not give a damn. One of his surrogates, Robert Kennedy, Jr., said at a Trump rally that NATO provoked Russia’s invasion – do you need any more proof that Kennedy is certifiably insane? – and said we should abandon the country. And at his debate, Trump stubbornly refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to win, which is like Franklin Roosevelt refusing to say that he wanted Britain to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. But, then, Trump is already certifiably insane, even if he is within a whisker of the presidency.
In effect, Trump is promising to reenact Munich. He is promising to be his generation’s Neville Chamberlain, who pronounced that he had assured “peace for our time” and was later permanently disgraced. In fact, Trump may be even worse than Chamberlain. However one interprets Chamberlain’s intentions, Trump’s intentions are more ignoble. Chamberlain doubtlessly feared Hitler. Trump seems to love Putin – seems to see him as the model of leadership and that to which Trump himself aspires. As Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson privately noted after the Trump-Putin lovefest in Hamburg in 2017, where Putin told Trump that Ukraine was corrupt and unsalvageable, “We’ve got work to do to change the president’s mind on Ukraine.” Tillerson couldn’t change it. Instead, Trump dug in, trying to bribe Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into blackening President Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for American military aid. When Zelensky refused, Trump turned on Ukraine, subsequently and frequently saying that Ukraine should have negotiated a deal with Russia, obviously on Putin’s terms. As I said, Trump has become our Neville Chamberlain.
*
What makes this so remarkable is that it is actually out of character for the Republican Party, which typically - always - chooses the wrong policy. However cold-hearted the Republican Party is, however averse it is to the very idea of doing good in this world and preventing harm, it had learned the lessons of Munich that you confront dictators; you don’t appease them. There was, to be sure, a large isolationist wing in the party, a wing that included many Republican progressives back in the 1920s and 1930s when Hitler rose to power; it is a major historical revision and white-wash to think that Americans were eager to aid their European allies as Hitler’s menace became unmistakable. Trump didn’t coin “America First.” It was the name of a movement to rouse American sentiment against entering World War II: aviator Charles Lindbergh’s movement. Not incidentally, it was a movement with a pro-Nazi bent, which is to say that the so-called and much-venerated Greatest Generation had a whole lot of Nazi sympathizers in it before they became Nazi fighters. Pre-Trumpians, you might call them.
But Pearl Harbor changed that. America’s entrance into the European theater changed that. The post-war rise of the Soviet Union changed that, and the communist takeover of China changed that. And, in a manner of speaking, Munich changed that after the fact. There were no two entirely different foreign policies in the post-war period separating Republicans and Democrats. It was one of the very few areas on which the parties largely agreed. There was an overriding consensus that set America against the rise of dictators generally and the expansion of communism specifically. (Of course, America over the years was more lenient toward right-wing dictatorships, but that is another story.) It was, in fact, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a former isolationist, who delivered what became known as the “speech heard ‘round the world” on January 10, 1945, announcing that he was abandoning his former isolationism for internationalism. (Never mind it took a war to do it.) As the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the post-war period, Vandenberg was a motive force behind a “bipartisan” foreign policy that included America’s entrance into the United Nations and NATO, the promulgation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, and the Truman Doctrine to contain communist adventurism. Again, Democrats and Republicans.
Munich loomed over all of this. America would no longer abdicate its responsibilities to the world. For over seventy years now, it has been our obligation to halt dictatorship. And the memory of Munich has kept the world from erupting into another global war.
*
That has all changed now. Donald Trump has changed it. But he didn’t change it because geopolitics changed. He didn’t change it because it was suddenly in America’s interest to abandon democracies and embrace dictatorships. He changed it in large part because he admired dictators, because he was always boasting about how great they are, how they are able to control their people, how much disregard and contempt they display for the features of democracy, and, needless to say, how much they express that they like Donald Trump, though Trump doesn’t seem to recognize that they pretend to like him so much precisely because he is overthrowing American democracy – the very bulwark of the world. Most Americans don’t perceive how monumental a change from protection of democracy to the promotion of authoritarianism really is, both for the world and for us. Should Trump be elected, America will be a member of the new axis of evil along with Russia, China, North Korea, and Hungary. America will no longer be the bulwark standing against them. As my grandchildren might put it, America will be one of the “bad guys,” standing with the Hitlers of our time. When did that become okay?
But there is another reason why Trump will attach America to the dictators it has always fought, and why he will appease them. It isn’t just because it is convenient for Trump to do so or agreeable for him to do so. It is worse, much worse. It is because he shares their values. Trump hates American freedom as much as Putin and Xi and Orbán. He hates the equality and liberty afforded to Blacks and Hispanics and immigrants and gays and trans people and Muslims and liberals – above all, liberals, whom he has recently taken to calling “enemies,” and whom he has recently sworn to attack with the National Guard and even the military. He hates democracy itself because democracy hates him. In a truly democratic nation, Trump could never be elected.
For Putin, America represents the collapse of Western Civilization. When his efforts at modernizing the Russian economy began to fail, he turned on the West. As one account has put it, “Putin sounded like a preacher: he harshly criticized the `Euroatlantic’ countries for their decadence and immorality. He said they had abandoned their roots and their Christian values and equated `belief in God with belief in Satan.’ He condemned European multiculturalism and dismissed the policy of tolerance as `neutered and barren.’” Viktor Orbán, Trump’s good friend and Mussolini to Putin’s Hitler, is even more averse to Western values, if that is possible. “It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal,” he said in a recent speech, “are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world.” And he said that the West’s embrace of LBGTQ+ rights has been the biggest force for overturning liberal Western values. (Putin and Orbán are extremely homophobic, and Trump has recently made transphobia one of the struts of his campaign.)
All of this should sound terribly familiar because, in effect, Putin became a right-wing Christian Nationalist extremist – a liberal hater, and a hater, naturally, of liberal democracy. Now Putin and Trump had a real community of interest – more than transactional. And so did Trump’s supporters, most of whom would have been perfectly comfortable declaring Putin’s criticisms of the decadent West as their own. America, or at least a very sizable portion of it, had done a 180°. It really had abandoned the kinds of freedoms that make America the land of the free and the home of the brave. It really had joined the enemy.
And one should note this. While the fight for Ukraine is a fight against not only dictatorship but also against the destruction of Western values, Americans, like Trump, increasingly are willing to sacrifice Ukraine. By one poll, less than half now support American aid there, including only 37% of Republicans.
*
The point isn’t just that one presidential candidate has forgotten – never heard of? – Munich, and will almost surely turn over the Ukraine to Russia as soon as he enters office. (I assume this is what he means when he says he will settle the Ukraine war with a phone call.) The point isn’t even that this man, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, is so captivated by Putin that he gave him covid testing machines that were sorely needed by this country, or that he has spoken privately with Putin seven times since leaving office in clear violation of the Logan Act – this despite the fact that Putin is a vicious murderer as well as a dictator. The point isn’t even that Trump, as Neville Chamberlain did for Britain, will forsake America’s mission in the world as a beacon of democracy and as a protector of democracy, that he will disregard the sacrifices hundreds of thousands of American soldiers – those “suckers” and “losers” – made to stop dictators, including the one that Chamberlain appeased, or that the Republican Party itself has forsaken its longtime commitment to stop the spread of dictatorship, or even that a growing number of Americans, close to a majority now, would be more than willing to jettison support of Ukraine because, apparently, saving the world from Putin is too onerous a burden for them when they are yelling about paying a nickel more for a dozen eggs.
No. The point is that America has joined a war against its own values – a war to destroy its own values. To quote Obama: “When did that become okay? Why would we go along with that?”
But we will destroy those values, unless Kamala Harris is elected. We will. And the world will pay a very steep price as it did so many years ago.
Notes
https://barackobama.medium.com/fired-up-and-ready-to-go-6e65adf0fe54
David Faber. Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Winston Churchill. The Gathering Storm. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/05/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/27/trump-zelenskyy-meeting-new-york-russia-war-00181429
Charles Kupchan. Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World. NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020.
Lawrence Haas. Harry and Arthur: The Partnership That Created the Free World. Potomac Books, 2016.
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_how_russia_has_come_to_loathe_the_west311346/
https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-33rd-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/08/bob-woodward-new-book-war-trump-putin-biden/
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