When she was German Chancellor, back in Trump's first term, Angela Merkel discerned how "there would be no co-operative work for an interconnected world with Trump," who, she writes in her recently published memoir, still saw things as a real-estate developer. "For him, all countries were in competition, and the success of one meant the failure of another."
It was three years ago today that Russian dictator Putin invaded Ukraine. Whatever is now being claimed, it is Putin who is the dictator, and it was Putin who started the war. The short-term result was an encouraging strengthening of the western alliance, as the U.S. and most of Europe made common cause with Ukraine, identifying that country's struggle for survival with the international order which the U.S. and Europe had forged in the aftermath of the Second World War. The long-term result of Putin's aggression remains to be seen, however, as the U.S. seems now to be switching sides, as it were, reimagining the war's origin story even as the Trump Administration is reimagining America's role in the world.
Historically, the post-war international order has been seen as an alternative to American isolationism. Maybe nobody ever actually imagined that an American retreat from "co-operative work for an interconnected world" would be not isolationism as once understood but an approach to international relations that more than anything else resembles a kind of shameful bullying gangsterism.
Such is the world's sad prospect as the third anniversary of war dawns over Europe.
Once again, shall we evoke Sir Edward Grey's famously ominous words from 1914?
"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."
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