World War III - It's On

About one hundred years ago, Germany’s leaders, then at war with Russia, decided to undermine the Russian government by infecting it with the political equivalent of a dread disease. To do this, they put Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on a train and sent him off to Petrograd. According to British historian Edward Crankshaw, the Germans saw Lenin as “one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection.” The German scheme worked. Within a year Lenin took over Russia and pulled out of the war against Germany.

And now Putin, it seems, has followed the German example by helping put Trump in control of the U.S. Will Putin’s plan work as well as the Germans’ scheme worked a century ago? And, by the way, given Putin’s hatred of the U.S., why are so many Republicans loyally supporting Donald Trump, a leader whom Putin, by his own words, wanted to see in the White House? Where does your ultimate loyalty lie, Republicans – with the U.S. or with the GOP? Or are you just throwing our well-being under the bus for the sake of your personal careers?

German meddling in Russia in 1917 and Russia meddling in the U.S. today are not perfect parallels. Lenin neutralized Russia and helped Germany in World War I through his political acumen, while Trump has strengthened Russia’s hand by virtue of his incompetence and his contempt for democracy.

Evidence for Trump’s anti-democratic sentiments is everywhere, but just as an example, let’s highlight one minor clue to this point. Last June when Putin had declared that Western liberal democracy was obsolete, Trump, in a news conference in Osaka, Japan, utterly failed to defend democracy. Instead he went off on a bizarre rant about the Democratic party in California.

Here’s an excerpt from Trump’s response when he was asked about Putin’s claim that “Western-style liberalism is obsolete.”

TRUMP: Well, I mean he may feel that way. He’s sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.

What an idiot.

But more to the point, what a pathetic excuse for a defender of American values. He apparently doesn’t know what Putin and other authoritarians mean when they use the phrase “western liberalism.”

Note to Trump: It means democracy and you are failing to defend it.

We can think of the democratic alliance as including North American, European, and Pacific rim democracies like Japan and Australia, as well as those nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia whose governments embody “Western-style liberalism.” Traditionally, the U.S. has played a central role in this liberal-democratic coalition, but today, with Trump in the White House, it cannot. And, consequently, the entire coalition is starting to come loose. God help us if it falls apart completely.

What we are about to face is a kind of World War III. This war will most likely not involve massive armies and navies maneuvering across oceans and continents. It will be focused on cyber warfare and a general struggle for influence through economic means and control of information. Trump, who is widely despised in the world at large, is not a positive force on the side of democracy in this struggle. Quite the opposite.

Democracy’s main adversary these days is not Putin, but rather Chinese President Xi Jinping. Like Putin, Xi Jinping hopes to see democracy decline. China’s rapid economic growth and increasingly aggressive international posture has made it the primary opposition to the worldwide spread of democracy. If the American-led coalition of democracies holds together, the anti-democratic push of Xi Jinping will fail. But if the coalition falls apart, as it has been starting to do under Trump, Chinese authoritarianism will most likely prevail.

The ideal scenario right now, as I see it, is for Trump to be replaced in January 2021 by a leader who believes in America’s traditional role as a leading defender of institutions like freedom of the press, independent judiciaries, and national leaders who are accountable to voters. With such an American leader, and, given enough time, Xi Jinping’s (and Putin’s) war against democracy will probably fail.

Since World War II, the world’s democracies have generally held the high ground, both morally and economically. I realize I have to disregard, for the sake of this brief argument, a host of bad actions by the western democracies. But I hope a brief mention of colonialism, Vietnam, and Iraq will suffice for the moment as acknowledgement of this bad behavior. But even given these sins, I believe the world will be much better served in the future if “Western-style liberalism” holds its own against the current authoritarian thrust.

A better world would be one in which China, Russia, and other governments join the established democracies on the high ground and we all find issues to argue about that do not include “whether or not individuals should be jailed or murdered for criticizing their leaders.” Such a world is not an impossibility, but it can only come into being when Donald Trump, with all his moral and intellectual failings, gets out of the way.