Dangerously Close To Political
But, we'll try to keep it a history lesson.
If you were one of the few people I recruited from the beginning of this Substack, you may remember my queasiness with discussing political topics here. I don’t plan to start now, but it’s not going to be easy.
When talking about the situation between Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and Europe, emotions are high, for very understandable reasons.1 Apropos of such high-strung geopolitical scenarios, the historical analogy that is impossible to avoid is, of course, Hitler and Nazi Germany.
The Germany of that era, like present-day Russia, was an expansionist state. As for the United States, the question of interventionism vs. non-interventionism2 was indeed front-and-center during the 1930s and is so in the 2020s. Of course, the analogy breaks down in other key areas as well—especially of note, there were no nuclear weapons in the 1930s.
All this is background to finally get to my point: If indeed the situations are analogous3, then Putin is Hitler, Zelenskyy is any number of heads of state that Hitler targeted, and Trump… is FDR. FDR continues to be widely praised for his handling of World War II, and it had occurred to me a little while ago that if this analogy holds, it’s a bit ironic.
Yet—and not to pick on this xweet (sic), although it is the one that triggered this post—it turns out that Trump’s critics can be rather fond of FDR.
Independent of what you make of the tweet as a whole, there is a fairly glaring logical flaw with it. Why is it that “we can be happy that Roosevelt and not Trump was American President in 1941”?
Specifically, why 1941? That is not at all where we are at this point in the analogy! Putin’s Russia has taken aggressive actions against Georgia and Ukraine in 2008, 2014, and 2022, but has not, of course, attacked the United States. In 1938/39, Hitler’s Germany pulled off the Anschluss with Austria, “peace for our time” with Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland, but it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that got the United States into the war.4 So, in the analogy, we are not in 1941, we’re in roughly 1939.5
If the theory is that Putin has similar ambitions—which I don’t deny—and that therefore the United States should take certain policy actions—on which I have no comment, as regardless of Putin’s ambitions, his ability to achieve them remains highly in doubt6 —then the historical implication would be that United States foreign policy in the 1930s was an abject failure.
That should, in turn, lead to a reassessment of FDR’s role in the start of World War II.7 However, the example of fast-forwarding history in order to launder his reputation indicates it might not be coming anytime soon.
As with most things, my position is between the two extremes of American political discourse, but with a lean in one direction—or rather, away from the other. However, on this exact issue as it has played out, the directions are flipped. Interpret all that as fencing-sitting, centrism, or what you will. But what my exact position is, is not relevant to this post, and so you won’t get it here.
Not the most helpful binary, actually. If you were inclined to aid one side or the other in a conflict, but also draw a line at sending armed forces into the conflict, are you an interventionist or not?
Emphasis on “if”. They’re not as much as they are, which we’ll get to in a later footnote, but for the purposes of this paragraph at least, we’ll assume that they are.
Lend-Lease, you might point out, but that began well after the war had already started, of course.
And call me crazy, but I think even Trump would respond to a direct attack on the United States. Heck, Ron Paul voted for the invasion of Afghanistan (but talk about analogies that don’t quite hold).
Note, if you haven’t already, just how extended the timelines are—quite likely in part due to the aforementioned nukes. Germany took all of 12 months to pivot from Austria to Czechoslovakia and another 6 months thereafter to move on Poland. Russia waited 8 years each between Georgia, Ukraine, and Ukraine again. Imagine then how far we are from North Korea’s nuclear attack on the United States, which would be the Pearl Harbor in the analogy—which, even within this footnote, fails on additional levels as well.
Wanting to make one policy decision, but feeling held to another by the political climate at home, as some might argue was the case with FDR, is not usually an excuse I’m sympathetic to.