By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, July 05, 2017
The accomplished and insightful British general Hasting
Ismay is remembered today largely because of his famous assessment of NATO,
offered when he was the alliance’s first secretary general. The purpose of the
new treaty organization founded in 1952, Ismay asserted, was “to keep the
Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Ismay formulated that aphorism at the height of a new
Cold War. The Soviet Red Army threatened to overrun Western Europe all the way
to the English Channel. And few knew who or what exactly could stop it.
A traditionally isolationist United States was still
debating its proper role after once again intervening on the winning side in a
distant catastrophic European war — only to see its most powerful ally of WWII,
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, become the victorious democracies’ most dangerous
post-war foe.
A divided Germany had become the new trip wire of the
free world against a continental and monolithic nuclear Soviet Union and its
bloc.
Nonetheless, note carefully what Ismay did not say.
He did not
refer to keeping the “Soviet Union” out of the Western alliance (which the
Soviets had once desired to join, a request that Ismay compared to inviting a
burglar onto the police force).
Ismay did not
cite the need to ensure that Nazi Germany never returned.
He did not
insist that the inclusion of Great Britain was essential to NATO’s tripartite
mission.
Why?
Ismay, a favorite of Churchill’s and a military adviser
to British governments, had a remarkable sense of history — namely that
constants such as historical memory, geography, and national character always
transcend the politics of the day.
Russians from the days of the czars have wanted to extend
their western influence into Europe. Russia was often a threat, given its large
population and territory and rich natural resources — and it was also more
autocratic and more volatile than many of its vulnerable European neighbors.
If alive today, Ismay might remind us that were there not
a Vladimir Putin posing a threat to NATO’s vulnerable Eastern European members,
he might have to be invented.
Ismay instinctively sensed that what made the Soviet
Union dangerous in the mid 1950s was not just Stalinism and the Communist
system per se, or even its possession of nuclear weapons, but rather the
resources of Russia and its historical tendency to embrace anti-democratic
absolutism, whether left or right.
With that same insight, Ismay understood that a Europe
caught between Germany and Russia would always need a powerful outside ally,
one with resources and manpower well beyond those of Great Britain. Further, he
accepted that Americans, protected by two oceans, 3,000 miles distant from
Europe, and nursed on warnings about pernicious entangling alliances from their
Founding Fathers, would always experience periods of nostalgia when it longed
to return to its republican America-first roots.
Again, if the movement that helped propel Donald Trump to
the White House had not existed, it would have to have been manufactured.
Today’s Americans are peeved about rich European members shorting NATO of their
mandatory contributions. They do not appreciate often dependent European
nations ankle-biting the U.S. as a supposedly illiberal imperial power, when
that power has long subsidized the defense needs of the shaky European Union
socialist experiment.
Ismay apparently sensed that an engaged America would
always be a hard sell, especially in the new nuclear age, given that, for less
cosmopolitan Americans far from the eastern seaboard, Europe seems a distant
perennial headache. For them, it might appear much easier to write off Europe
as hopelessly fractious and thus not deserving of yet another bailout requiring
American blood and treasure. If the U.S. came late into both World War I and
II, it was because of the same sort of weariness with European internecine
quarreling, albeit now in a milder form, that we currently see fracturing the
EU.
Lastly in his triad of advice, Ismay referred generically
to “Germany” — without specifying a contemporary friendly and allied West
Germany, juxtaposed to the Soviet-inspired, Communist, and hostile East
Germany. Again, the East–West German fault line existed in Ismay’s time; yet he
reduced all those unique differences of his age into a generic “Germany down.”
Ismay wrote an engaging wartime memoir from which we can
extract much of his thought and experience, so we need not put words into his
mouth. But nonetheless, insightful men of his generation did not necessarily
look at the rise of National Socialism as entirely a historical aberration, or,
in contrast, as a generic murderous ideology that just as easily might have
captured the hearts and minds of Frenchmen or British subjects. That historical
angst is why both Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev were apprehensive
about the idea of German unification in 1989.
Ismay apparently remembered the Franco-Prussian war of
1870–71, and the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. He concluded that
the common denominator was Germany’s strong desire to recover from its
historical hurt in predictable bouts of aggression and national chauvinism —
and backed by considerable skill and power.
In Ismay’s time, such aggression was different from
lesser Fascist movements in Italy and Spain, largely because of the central
geographic position of a unified young German nation-state, its sizable
population, its national wealth, and what we reluctantly in today’s politically
correct landscape might call “German character.” That stereotype originates
from the time of Caesar and Tacitus: the ability of the German people to create
economic, military, and cultural influence well beyond what one might expect
from the actual size of even an impressive German population or geography. And
such dynamism is often expressed by eyeing neighbors’ spiritual or concrete territory.
Once again, if there were not Angela Merkel’s
increasingly defiant Germany, it too would have to be created. Some in the
United States were troubled that Angela Merkel, from a beer hall in Munich no
less, recently lashed out at the United States and promised that Germany might
just have to navigate between the U.S. and Russia — quite a thought from a
Germany once saved largely by the United States from its own carnivorousness
and later likely Communist servitude.
Of course, what is disconcerting today about Germany is
not the rise of totalitarian or nationalist movements, at least not as we
usually use those terms. Indeed, in most respects, post-war Germany has been a
model democracy. But there is a common denominator in Germany’s most recent
controversies, with disturbing historical roots that might further amplify the
logic of Ismay’s prescient “Germany down.” Germany might be pursuing a
Eurocentric agenda, it might proudly declare itself an open-borders host for millions
of impoverished immigrants, it might be at the vanguard of green energy, but it
is doing all that in ways of Lord Ismay’s Germany of old.
The central bank of Germany de facto controls European
finances. It uses the euro as a weaker currency than would otherwise be true of
the Deutsche Mark to conduct a mercantile export economy, providing credit to
weaker European economies to buy Germans goods that they otherwise could ill
afford. The impoverished southern Mediterranean economies are essentially in
hock now to Germany, and Germany apparently can neither be paid back its
original loans nor write off the debts. In other words, German won all the
chips of the European Union poker game and it no longer need play with its
broke rivals.
No one quite knows the strange driving force behind
Angela Merkel’s demand that the European Union open its borders to millions of
mostly young men from the war-torn Middle East and the chaotic lands of North
Africa. Cynics might suggest that a shrinking Germany wants young, cheap manual
laborers. Post-war guilt may play a role as Germany’s cure for its past becomes
nearly as obsessive as the behavior that led to the disease in the first place.
German postmodern multiculturalism encourages a naïve
acceptance of millions of unassimilated Middle Eastern Muslims, and it demands
the same from neighbors without Germany’s resources. A largely atheistic or
agnostic Germany also has few religious worries about Islamic immigrants, given
that secular affluence and leisure long ago proved far more deleterious to
German Christianity than did radical Islam.
Germany saw Brexit as an intolerable affront to its own
leadership. Apparently the British voter saw the increasingly non-democratic
trajectory of the European Union as a future challenge to its own independence.
If southern Europeans are becoming serfs to Germany, and Eastern Europeans its
clients, and Western Europeans anxious subordinates, then the British across
the channel thought they had to get out while the getting was good.
Recent Pew international polls reveal that Germany of all
the countries of the European Union is by far the most anti-American, with
scarcely 52 percent expressing a positive appraisal of the United States — well
before Donald Trump ran for office. Media polls show that the German press ran
the most negative appraisals of Trump of all global news (98 percent of all
coverage was critical). A fair summary of current German views of the United
States would be not much different from the stereotypes of the 1930s:
undisciplined, prone to wild swings in policy, a bastardized and commercialized
culture of poorly informed and highly indebted consumers.
Ismay’s generation welcomed the re-creation of Germany as
a positive democratic force both in the soon-to-be-created European Common
Market and the nascent NATO alliance. But it did not discard Ismay’s idea of
“Germany down.” Instead, there was a wink-and-nod acceptance that a divided
Germany was a safe Germany. NATO and the common Soviet threat would encourage
ties of solidarity. And just in case they did not, weaker and smaller
traditional rivals, France and Great Britain, would possess nuclear weapons —
and stronger and far larger Germany would not.
What would Ismay say of his current tripartite formula?
He would warn about what happens when NATO withers on the
vine: Russian is a bit in, America is somewhat out, and Germany more up than
down — as Ismay feared when he helped offer the remedy of NATO at its creation.
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