Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates eloquently summed up the state of the world generally and that of Western countries in particular after the Russian attack on Ukraine. “Our holiday from history is over.”
The holiday began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet camp in 1989-1990. Three years later, Francis Fukuyama’s famous book emerged, popularizing the phrase “the end of history,” which he believed to have resulted from liberal democracy’s conclusive global victory.
Since then, Europe has been taking it easy. The American writer Robert Kagan described the Europeans as living on Venus, as opposed to the Americans, who live on Mars. Of course, the latter’s stay was not happy, nor was it always fair, but the former’s stay, for the most part, was based on naivety bordering on idiocy.
Since 1999, the date of Vladimir Putin’s first public appearance, malice and hypocrisy came face to face with that naivety - spurred by a worship of unrestrained power, a nationalistic and vengeful bent, and a fixation on avenging the Soviet past.
Putin, between his scorched earth campaigns in Chechnya and then Aleppo, invaded Georgia and Ukraine, from which he separated Crimean Peninsula. He has interfered with several European (and American) elections in support of extremists on the right and the left. He has killed and arrested Russian dissidents and journalists, even assassinating and poisoning some of them with nerve gas in the heart of Western capitals. His oligarchs and thugs have managed to use European cities as getaways and tax havens for their dirty money. Moscow has used hacking, forgery and espionage on such a large scale that they became a pillar of its foreign policy.
More dangerous still is that Putin found supporters and imitators on both the right and left, some occupy high places in their countries. Donald Trump in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and Jean-Luc Melenchon in France were among them. All of them, from divergent political and ideological positions, sought to weaken EU-US ties.
The lure of money also played a role: “The Observer” writer Andrew Rawnsley reminded us of some of those who succumbed to it in his latest column: the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, was and still is a member of some Russian state-owned oil companies’ boards of directors, including Rosneft. Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, a Gaullist whose party was about to nominate him for the presidency in the previous race, also sits on the boards of state-owned petrochemical and oil companies. Former heads of state from Austria, Finland, and Italy had all occupied similar positions, only resigning after the latest invasion.
Putin’s appeal charmed near and far. Far away, Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for the 2012 US presidential elections, became the subject of ridicule when he spoke of Russia as a “threat” during his presidential debate with Barack Obama. Republican senior politician John McCain received his own share of ridicule after saying that when he looks into Putin’s eyes, he sees only a KGB officer. Close by, in Hungary, not far from the dragon’s mouth, Viktor Orban would frequently boast of his friendship with and express his admiration for Putin.
The laxity brought about by the victory in the Cold War, the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the impulse of business and profit were totally unrestrained under neo-liberalism, trying to compensate by fighting offshoots instead of the source, with terrorism being among the most important offshoots, backing down to regimes like the one in Iran, turning Syrians’ afflictions into a question of refuge and refugees, and being slow to find breakthroughs in just and unresolved problems, like the Palestinian problem... they are all gains that stacked together nicely for Putin.
Today, there are indications that things are changing throughout the Atlantic world: Europe is more solid and united, arming the Ukrainians and themselves. Even Germany, which has a complicated relationship with armament, has decided to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense after it announced that it would not operate the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
The US is also more solid and united, and the US - European relationship, which Putin and his admirers on the right and the left have been undermining, is as strong as it has ever been. Orban has come to see Russia as a “rogue state” and is demanding European unity. Even Erdogan’s Turkey pushed back, declaring that it would ban Moscow’s warships from crossing the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits to reach the Black Sea. Within the Republican Party in the US, voices have been raised in condemnation of Trump’s relationship with Putin bordering on accusations of treason.
As European countries outside NATO and the European Union say that they will become members, Russia, whose currency is collapsing, has been expelled from the world’s skies and its financial and banking system. It has been forbidden from access to the world’s ports, stadiums, and theaters - treated like it has the plague.
Indeed, when we begin recalling the names of former and current leaders like Trump, Orban, Erdogan, Corbyn, and Melenchon, and recall the difficulties some of them have been facing and how others changed, we have good reason to assume a decline in populism’s ability to create alliances and shield Putin.
And who knows, Europeans could end up renewing that fusion between the two traditions seen in Britain during the forties: Churchillism as uncompromising opposition to tyrannical regimes in Europe and the Laborite one which created the welfare state that complements their efforts to safeguard their country with their country’s efforts to safeguard them.
Europe is the beginning. What is happening there is not a substitute for other, more robust policies in defense of freedom and justice across the rest of the world. But a strong Europe is nonetheless a requisite for such a world, and its strength is a positive sign that this world may be coming and a safeguard for it. It is there that the return from the holiday begins.
