The West’s World War II Moment
Defenders of the West have a tendency to gaze wistfully at the past, lamenting how far today’s leaders have fallen. Where America and its allies used to build things, create institutions, and win wars, now they seek only to hold ground, conserve what they have, and escape conflicts.
Such nostalgic longing isn’t hard to understand. Immediately after World War II, Europe was in ruins, its industries and infrastructure destroyed. Without American intervention, much more of Europe could well have fallen under Soviet control. But in the space of a few years, the United States financed Europe’s recovery, committed to its defense, and pushed the continent toward ever-closer union. It was an extraordinary age.
These enormous changes were not simply the result of the leaders of the time coming together. “Men make history, but they do not make it as they please,” wrote Karl Marx. They make it, instead, under the circumstances given to them. At the end of the war, circumstances changed, global power shifted, allowing leaders to do great things. Today, a similar change may be under way—though it’s hard to see anything great resulting from it.
After World War II, the principal security threat to democracy shifted, almost overnight, from Germany to the Soviet Union. And this changed everything. To deal with the new reality, the U.S. realized, Germany—or at least the bit of Germany under Allied control—would need to be rebuilt as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The prospect of German reindustrialization and rearmament, however, reignited age-old French fears. Traditionally, to address this problem, France would ally itself with Britain. But in 1950, France took a historic leap in the
