“The entire earth,
there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I
don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you
who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided
to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So
you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win,
and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up
comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017
Well, there are a whole
bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be
those American voters who put back in office a President who complained
relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.
Now, as Isaac
Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic
notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement
for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest.
It’s not just
Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric
of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice
President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).
And all of that was
before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security
strategy.
By overwhelmingly
shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European
democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational
erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than
“a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution.
Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is
clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these
intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”
It might take a while,
but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming
Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully
good at making war in the first half of the 20th century. The United
States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine
to run amok.
Who is to say, in a
country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history
won’t repeat itself?
The image accompanying
this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939,
comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records
Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).
