Uma guerra civil esquecida: a do Sudão - Ishaan Tharoor, Sammy Westfall (The Washington Post)

 

Today's WorldView

By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email Sudan marks grim anniversary of civil war in shadow of other conflicts Sudanese refugees gather as teams from Doctors Without Borders assist the war-wounded from West Darfur, Sudan, in Adre hospital, Chad, in June. (Mohammad Ghannam/MSF/Reuters) Exactly a year ago, Sudan’s ruinous collapse began. Tensions between two powerful rival factions that had already carved out fiefdoms in the country — the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — exploded into open war. Airstrikes hit civilian centers; militiamen and vigilantes set up checkpoints and looted neighborhoods. The capital, Khartoum, transformed into a sprawling battlefield. The conflict flared elsewhere in the African nation of close to 50 million people, including the already war-ravaged region of Darfur. For a time, Sudan’s civil war attracted some global attention. President Biden and his European counterparts whirred into action to evacuate their embassies and hundreds of foreign citizens and dual nationals based mostly in Sudan’s big cities. International journalists met convoys of refugees in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to hear their desperate, harrowing journeys to escape the country. The conflict marked a sad turn of events: A fledgling transition toward democracy in the years prior had won Sudan closer ties to a host of Western governments, and some relief from decades of U.S. sanctions. Even after Burhan and Dagalo, known universally by his sobriquet Hemedti, collaborated in interrupting that transition in 2021, ousting a civilian-led government, Sudan remained the subject of eager diplomacy. A U.S.-led initiative hoped to add Khartoum to the list of Arab capitals that could normalize relations with Israel. But the war seems to have doomed all that. The Sudanese state has essentially collapsed in many parts of the country. In some areas, hospitals and health services barely function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including in atrocities and massacres likely to be remembered as war crimes. Courageous civil rights groups are documenting myriad accounts of sexual violence and rape. Lackluster rounds of peace talks, convened in some instances by Arab governments that tacitly back one party or the other, have yielded failed cease-fires. And as destruction and death mounts, international awareness and interest in Sudan’s misery has waned. RSF soldiers on a motorbike drive by a destroyed tank belonging to the defeated Sudanese Armed Forces, on a main street in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Sudan, on February 20. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Twelve months on, the humanitarian situation in Sudan is astonishingly grim. The country is the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than a fifth of its population forced out of their homes by the civil war, as well as earlier rounds of conflict. Nearly a third of the population is acutely food insecure, according to U.N. data. Some 19 million children are out of school; an estimated 3 million Sudanese children are malnourished. Humanitarian officials have been warning of hunger — and its attendant miseries, such as cholera and other diseases — gripping the country. “This is a huge, looming problem, and they are very close to famine,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, told my colleagues at the beginning of the month. “Kids are dying of starvation within Darfur and other parts of the country.” International organizations complain that it’s logistically impossible to service much of the country. “Constraints to humanitarian access are severely impeding the delivery of life-saving assistance, and humanitarian funding needs have gone largely unmet,” noted a reportby the International Rescue Committee. By February, food prices in Sudan had spiked by more than 110 percent since the war began. In ramshackle refugee camps in neighboring Chad and South Sudan, aid groups say a dearth of funding may see food distribution cease imminently. The World Food Program says the “roots of the hunger problem are twofold: access and funding,” explained my colleagues Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and Katharine Houreld. “Within Sudan, WFP trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted and detained. Outside Sudan, makeshift camps are swollen with hungry and sick arrivals — but there’s no money to feed them.” On Monday, international governments, humanitarians and donors will convene in Paris for a conference aimed at raising funds for Sudan. They meet at a time when a paltry 5 percent of the humanitarian requests put out for Sudan by U.N. agencies have been met. There’s no question that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — exacerbated furthermore by the recent escalation between Israel and Iran — have put Sudan’s tragedy in the shade. “As communities barrel toward famine, as cholera and measles spread, as violence continues to claim countless lives, the world has largely remained silent,” said U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, last week. That must change now, she added. “The international community must give more. It must do more, and it has to care more.” “For one year, the people of Sudan have been neglected and ignored as they bore the brunt of violent clashes” between the warring parties, said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa, in a statement. “Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to end violations, protect civilians, provide sufficient humanitarian aid, or hold the perpetrators of war crimes to account.” Women prepare a meager meal on Feb. 18 in the yard of a former primary school, one of the numerous sites where thousands displaced by the war are seeking shelter in Sirba, a town north of El Geneina. (Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The Washington Post/for The Washington Post) Yet the warring parties are as likely to sharpen their hatchets as they are to bury them. The country is roughly split now between west and east, with the RSF ascendant in the former and Burhan and his allies better entrenched in the latter. In its Sudan briefing, the International Crisis Group, a think tank, urged countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates to use more of their leverage to bring the feuding factions to heel, open up access for humanitarian relief and place Sudan back on a path to stability. “The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region,” noted the Crisis Group. “Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.”

A busca por um navio negreiro no Brasil em 1852 - Terrence McCoy, Sammy Westfall The Washington Post

 

Today's WorldView

By Terrence McCoy with Sammy Westfall  Email The underwater hunt for the lost ship of an American slave trafficker An aerial view of the mouth of the Bracuí River, near the island of Little Cunhanbebe, where the likely Carmargo shipwreck was found almost 200 years after it sank. It was one of the last ships to illegally transport enslaved Africans to the Americas. (Photographs by Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) ANGRA DOS REIS, Brazil — Gilson Rambelli motored out into the dark waters, thinking of the crime that had haunted him for years. The evidence of it was down there, in the bay’s depths. That was where the researcher believed he’d find the Camargo, the long-lost slave ship of Nathaniel Gordon, the only person ever executed in the United States for the crime of trafficking enslaved Africans. As dense clouds muffled the December morning sky, Rambelli and his research team approached a small island off the coastline of Rio de Janeiro state. There wasn’t much to distinguish it from the dozens of others dotting this vast bay. But it was here that the crew dropped anchor. “This is it,” Rambelli said. For decades, Rambelli and others have researched the shipwreck. According to contemporaneous accounts, Gordon sailed his American-made vessel into Brazilian waters in December 1852. As authorities closed in on him, Gordon sold his “cargo” — more than 500 enslaved Mozambicans — to the coffee plantations in the mountains beyond. Then he burned and sank his ship somewhere in the bay and escaped arrest dressed as a woman, scandalizing Brazil’s government and leading to its first crackdown on the country’s illegal slave trade. The remarkable story is part of a forgotten chapter in the history of America and slavery, when American ships and the American flag were used to illegally transport enslaved Africans to Brazil by the tens of thousands. In the first half of the 19th century, after much of the world had banned the transatlantic slave trade but before the end of slavery, a highly lucrative contraband trade continued to supply Brazil with enslaved Africans. Some of its most important players, according to historians and a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of records, were American merchants and sailors. They sold ships, captained slaving voyages and ultimately assumed such an active role in the illegal commerce that senior U.S. diplomats at the time suggested it couldn’t have happened without them. ADVERTISEMENT   “The African slave trade ‘thickens around us,’” wrote U.S. Brazil Minister Henry A. Wise in an 1845 letter to Secretary of State John C. Calhoun. “Without the aid of our citizens and our flag, it could not be carried on with success at all.” In all, between 1831 and 1850, American-made ships brought approximately 430,000 enslaved Africans to Brazil — nearly as many as were shipped to the United States during its entire history of slavery, Brazilian historian Leonardo Marques has found. During the latter half of that period, according to Marques’s review of British consular reports, more than one-third of all slaving vessels that made landfall in Rio de Janeiro did so under an American flag. Hunting in December for one of the most notorious of those vessels, Rambelli and colleague Luís Felipe Santos pulled on their wet suits. This expedition, scheduled to last four days, was their fourth attempt to find the Camargo in two years. All previous efforts to retrieve physical evidence of the ship had failed. Funding opportunities were drying up. If they didn’t find the Camargo soon, the team worried that the tale could again slip through the cracks of history — and deprive a nearby community of descendants of enslaved Africans of answers about its role in Brazil’s history. “When our elders told us stories of this ship, we thought it was just another tall tale,” said Marilda de Souza Francisco, a leader of the Santa Rita do Bracuí community in the city of Angra dos Reis. “Now we find out it could be true.” ADVERTISEMENT   The men fastened on their compressed air tanks. They pulled down their goggles. Jumping overboard, they vanished beneath the water. Santa Rita do Bracuí, a community founded by descendants of enslaved Africans, has passed down the story of the Camargo for generations. Here, community members Maria Madalena da Silva and Natalina Adriano da Silva sit in pews after Sunday Mass. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) ‘Our flag is preferred over any other’ How U.S. nationals became “leaders in fomenting the illicit slave trade” and “permanently transformed Brazil for all time,” in the words of historian Gerald Horne, was largely a function of two historic developments. The first was a diplomatic dispute. In the early 1800s, Great Britain led an international campaign to end the transatlantic slave trade. It signed accords with several of the world’s naval powers, allowing British patrols to inspect suspected slaving vessels. But wary of British influence, the United States refused to sign on, effectively placing ships sailing under the American flag beyond the reach of the crown. The second was innovation in American ship engineering, with American shipyards pumping out vessels built for speed. The Baltimore Clipper, which could easily outrun British patrols, grew popular among merchants moving high-profit, low-volume goods. Few were as lucrative as enslaved Africans.  Seizing the opportunity, American merchants based in Rio de Janeiro sold U.S.-made vessels to slavers sailing for Africa. The proliferation of the American ship and flag — used by slavers of all nationalities — in the illicit commerce soon provoked alarm among diplomats. “Our flag is preferred over any other,” complained Gorham Parks, the U.S. consul in Rio de Janeiro, in an 1848 letter. Half of all enslaved Africans brought to Brazil, estimated U.S. diplomat David Tod in January 1850, “are introduced through the facilities directly and indirectly afforded by the American flag.” What ultimately ended the involvement of U.S. nationals in the trade was Brazil’s passage in 1850 of a new anti-trafficking law. An early test of Brazil’s commitment to enforcing it came in late 1852, when the Camargo neared the Rio de Janeiro coastline. With authorities in pursuit, Gordon dropped anchor at the mouth of the Bracuí River. His human cargo was brought ashore to the farm of Santa Rita do Bracuí. Then Gordon set fire to his ship and fled. “He escaped in woman’s clothes,” a U.S. diplomat at the time reported, “hastily put on in the cabin.” The Camargo sank to the depths of the bay, where researchers believed it had sat, undisturbed, ever since. Gilson Rambelli, right, and a colleague prepare to search the Brazilian waters for the Camargo. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) A hunt decades in the making The search for the Camargo began by happenstance. In the summer of 1994, historian Martha Abreu was scouring old newspaper clippings at Brazil’s national library, working on her dissertation, when she learned of an untold history that left her stunned. It was, in her understanding, Brazil’s first real attempt to crack down on the illegal slave trade. At the center of the tale were an American captain and his ship. After the Caramgo burned, Brazilian police launched an operation to rescue the Africans sold by Gordon and searched the region’s coffee plantations. The action was seen as a direct challenge to Brazil’s powerful slaveholding elite and helped establish a new precedent in a country that had allowed enslavers to do as they pleased. Police ultimately found 75 people whom Gordon had sold into slavery. Most of them were children. The youngest was 11.  The rest were lost. Abreu published a book chapter on the fallout and moved on to other projects. But she never stopped thinking about the Camargo or its captain. She later learned that Gordon continued his slaving exploits until he was convicted in federal court in New York of slave trading in 1861. The punishment was death. No one had ever suffered that consequence. But this time was different. “Any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I will never pardon,” Abraham Lincoln said, according to author Ron Soodalter, denying Gordon’s pleas for clemency. Nearly 150 years later, Abreu was researching how slavery was remembered along the Rio de Janeiro coastline when, at the mouth of the Bracuí, the story of the Camargo again found her. In the community of Santa Rita do Bracuí, founded by descendants of enslaved Africans on what had once been the farm of Santa Rita do Bracuí, she met a bald patriarch named Manoel Moraes, 85. He told her a story he first heard in his youth. He didn’t know the name of the boat that had gone down. But all the details aligned. Moraes was describing the Camargo. “I got goose bumps,” Abreu said. “I said, ‘It’s not possible.’” Then Moraes, now deceased, provided a bit of information even more tantalizing: He knew where the Camargo had sunk. “People often talked about that boat,” he said, “because it was a good spot to fish.” “It sank at the point of an island” named Cunhanbebe. For generations, the people of Santa Rita do Bracuí have told and retold the story of the Camargo. Their version, recounted in spartan homes set against a misted mountain, included details not found in any historical text. The sinking of the Camargo was more chaotic than recorded. Many of the captured Africans perished. The fate of those who survived was little better. “They were brought into the mountains beyond and put to work up there,” said Flavia da Silva Adriana, who’d heard the tale from her grandmother. “But first, they were brought here.” The land on which this village was built was then a crucial entry point in Brazil’s illegal slave trade. The Souza Breves family, among Brazil’s largest enslavers, had used its Santa Rita farm to receive and revive newly arrived enslaved Africans. Many came ashore so emaciated, Moraes once told researchers, that “they’d lost their value” and had needed a “fattening station” before being sold into labor. This story and others, told in informal settings, helped form a cultural framework through which the community came to understand its place in Brazil’s history. But many of the tales were impossible to prove. “They were myths,” said Emerson Luís Ramos. “We didn’t have any documents.” As a result, residents said, the community had always been easy to ignore. The people never secured official ownership of the land, and a federal highway cleaved it in two. Many have only known poverty and struggle. But then, several years ago, came a new story, this one told by visiting researchers: The Camargo was not a myth. And the evidence was there in the bay, waiting to be found — proof of the historic injustices suffered and witnessed by the people of Santa Rita do Bracuí. “If God wills it,” said Adriana, “we will find the ship.” Ruins of an old sugar mill known as Engenho Central do Bracuí, which was built in 1885 by enslaved people. Nowadays, members of the Santa Rita do Bracuí a community say they are unable to visit the site due to a high entrance fee. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post) Desperation, then sudden hope With time running out, the researchers remembered Abreu’s research and Moraes’s clue.  One local man, who had once told them he’d fished over the Camargo as a child, brought them to the spot he remembered, near Little Cunhanbebe. But again, nothing. As the prospect of failure hardened into reality, a fisherman approached their vessel. “I know what you’re looking for,” the man shouted. Then he continued on, without stopping to talk. The next morning, on the last day of the expedition, the researchers again saw the fisherman. This time, the man, Luiz Henrique de Freitas, did stop. He’d grown up on Big Cunhanbebe, where his family had lived for generations, and had fished the bay’s waters his entire life. He knew where the Camargo had sunk and, after hours of conversation, agreed to lead the researchers there. They motored to just 500 meters from where they’d looked the day before and dropped anchor. There, on their first dive, they came upon something, buried in the muck. It was a hard, wooden. They grabbed a few pieces of the debris. What they saw when they emerged elicited shrieks of euphoria. The wood was blackened and charred. The sunken ship they’d discovered had been burned. “We found it!” Rambelli yelled. In the weeks to come, the researchers would alert government authorities and designate the area as an official excavation site to ward off potential treasure hunters. They’d test the wood fragments, revealing traces of copper — the material that had encased the Camargo’s hull. And in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and GWU researchers, they would plan another expedition in May to further examine the remains, to study the hull and engineering and hopefully render a final conclusion on whether it’s the Camargo. The true scholarly work was only now just beginning. But for this moment, they sat on the boat, cherishing the discovery and what it meant. “This is an answer for the communities here, that the stories they’ve always told were true,” Felipe said. “They weren’t just stories.

De volta aos anos 1930? Pelo menos nos EUA - Robert Kagan (Foreign Policy, The Washington Post)

Foreign Policy, March 29. 2024 

Back to the 1930s

Here’s an idea to chew on: “We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another.”

It comes from Robert Kagan’s big essay comparing the anti-Ukraine views of many Republicans today to the original “America First” philosophy of the 1930s. The accomplishment in question is the United States’ entry into World War II, which, Robert writes, “was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.”

That same fight is being fought today — well, the philosophical one, not the world war … yet. Interventionism’s win then established an ethos of American captaincy that lasted until now; a victory this fall by Donald Trump could undo it all if he goes on, as promised, to cut off U.S. commitments to European security, ostensibly because European countries aren’t meeting NATO’s defense spending targets.

Meanwhile, David Ignatius interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where defense is the only thing on anybody’s mind. Zelensky said Ukraine might have to establish deterrence by more aggressively attacking airfields, energy facilities and other strategic targets across the Russian border. That is, unless the United States provides Ukraine with more weapons first — a prospect still possible under President Biden but unlikely under Trump.

==============

Opinion

Trump’s anti-Ukraine view dates to the 1930s. America rejected it then. Will we now?

By Robert Kagan

Editor at large

The Washington Post, March 28, 2024 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/28/robert-kagan-trump-ukraine-america-first-isolationism/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_popns&utm_campaign=wp_opinions_pm

Robert Kagan, a Post Opinions contributing editor, is the author of “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941” as well as “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again,” which will be published by Knopf in April.

Many Americans seem shocked that Republicans would oppose helping Ukraine at this critical juncture in history. Don’t Republican members of Congress see the consequences of a Russian victory, for America’s European allies, for its Asian allies and ultimately for the United States itself? What happened to the party of Ronald Reagan? Clearly, people have not been taking Donald Trump’s resurrection of America First seriously. It’s time they did.

The original America First Committee was founded in September 1940. Consider the global circumstances at the time. Two years earlier, Hitler had annexed Austria and invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. One year earlier, he had invaded and conquered Poland. In the first months of 1940, he invaded and occupied Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. In early June 1940, British troops evacuated from Dunkirk, and France was overrun by the Nazi blitzkrieg. In September, the very month of the committee’s formation, German troops were in Paris and Edward R. Murrow was reporting from London under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. That was the moment the America First movement launched itself into the battle to block aid to Britain.

Cutting off Ukraine seems like small beer by comparison, but behind it lies the same “America First” thinking. For Donald Trump and his followers, pulling the plug on Ukraine is part of a larger aim to end America’s broader commitment to European peace and security. America’s commitment to NATO, Trump believes, should be conditional, at best: Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to allies who do not pay their fair share and meet certain defense-spending objectives.

Other Republicans don’t even mention conditions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has called for the immediate reduction of U.S. force levels in Europe and the abrogation of America’s common-defense Article 5 commitments. He wants the United States to declare publicly that in the event of a “direct conflict” between Russia and a NATO ally, America will “withhold forces.” The Europeans need to know they can no longer “count on us like they used to.” Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official praised by Hawley, has written widely (and wrongly) that United States cannot defend both East Asia and Europe and that Europeans must fend for themselves because, as he put it in a recent social media post, “Asia is more important than Europe.” He said, “If we have to leave Europe more exposed, so be it.” 

Can Republicans really be returning to a 1930s worldview in our 21st-century world? The answer is yes. Trump’s Republican Party wants to take the United States back to the triad of interwar conservatism: high tariffs, anti-immigrant xenophobia, isolationism. According to Russ Vought, who is often touted as Trump’s likely chief of staff in a second term, it is precisely this “older definition of conservatism,” the conservatism of the interwar years, that they hope to impose on the nation when Trump regains power.

So it’s time to take a closer look at the 1930s conservative mentality and the America First movement it spawned.

Republican anti-interventionism of those interwar years — “isolationism” as critics called it — was less a carefully considered strategic doctrine than an extension of their battles against domestic opponents. Yes, there were self-proclaimed “realists” in the late 1930s assuring everyone that the United States was invulnerable and that events in Asia, where Japan was also on the rampage, and Europe need not endanger American security. Those “realists” chided their fellow Americans for a “giddy” moralism and emotionalism in response to Nazi and Japanese aggression that prevented them from dealing “with the world as it is,” as historian Charles Beard put it. George F. Kennan, an anti-liberal conservative who served in the American Embassy in Prague, at the time applauded the Munich settlement and praised the Czechs for eschewing the “romantic” course of resistance in favor of the “humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”

This “realism” meshed well with anti-interventionism. Americans had to respect “the right of an able and virile nation [i.e. Nazi Germany] to expand,” aviator Charles Lindbergh argued. The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”

It was not fascism that conservative Republicans worried about. It was communism. For them, the foreign policy battle in the interwar years was but a subset of their larger war against Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, which Republicans insisted disguised an attempt to bring communism to the United States. Conservatives in both the United States and Great Britain had long seen Hitler and Mussolini as bulwarks against the spread of communism in Germany and elsewhere.

Nor were they especially troubled by the dramatic rise of official antisemitism in Germany. In the 1920s and ’30s, influential Republicans and conservatives put Jews at the center of various conspiracies against America. Some conservatives referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal” (there were Jews among FDR’s “brain trust”), and they opposed intervening in a war in which Jews were among the prominent victims. Lindbergh, among the most admired men in the United States, claimed Jews were pushing the United States into war “for reasons which are not American.”

Conservative Republicans also warned against the creation of an American “liberal empire” no less oppressive than the one Hitler was trying to create. The result, Taft claimed, would be the “establishment of a dictatorship in this country.” In May 1940, as the British army faced annihilation at Dunkirk, Taft insisted it was “no time for the people to be wholly absorbed in foreign battles.” It was “the New Deal which may leave us weak and unprepared for attack.”

America’s entry into World War II was, among other things, the triumph of a contrary view of the world. Even before Pearl Harbor, a majority of Americans, prodded by Roosevelt, came to view the advancing power of European fascism and Japanese authoritarian militarism as a threat not just to U.S. security but also to liberal democracy in general. While Roosevelt did warn (implausibly) of the Luftwaffe bombing the United States from bases in Latin America, his broader argument was less about immediate physical security than about the kind of world Americans wanted to live in.

Even if the United States faced no immediate threat of military attack, Roosevelt insisted, in his January 1940 State of the Union address, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in — yes, even for Americans to live in” if it were ruled “by force in the hands of a few.” To live as a lone island in such a world would be a nightmare. There were times Americans needed to defend not just their homeland, he told Congress in 1939, “but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. ... To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”

The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, formed in May 1940 by progressive Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White and including such prominent Democrats as Dean Acheson, declared the war in Europe was a “life and death struggle for every principle we cherish in America” and urged the United States to “throw its economic and moral weight on the side of the nations of Western Europe, great and small, that are struggling in battle for a civilized way of life.”

This was exactly what the men who formed the America First Committee opposed — and not because they spoke for some mass groundswell of working-class Americans. The poor and working class in these years were with FDR. The America First Committee was founded by a group of Yale students. (Kingman Brewster Jr., a future president of Yale, was a member, as was Potter Stewart, a future Supreme Court justice.) But it soon boasted an impressive list of wealthy and influential supporters that included textile magnate Henry Regnery; chairman of the board of Sears, retired Gen. Robert E. Wood; president of Vick Chemical Co., H. Smith Richardson; and diplomat and future governor of Connecticut Chester B. Bowles. Although they railed at “elites” and claimed to speak for real Americans, they were chiefly business executives who represented the nation’s commercial and industrial elites.

Unfortunately for the original America Firsters, most Americans rejected their arguments and embraced FDR’s liberal worldview. Especially after the fall of France, polling showed a majority of Americans wanted to send aid to Britain even at the risk of the United States being dragged into war. The America First Committee, despite its well-funded nationwide lobbying effort — it boasted 800,000 members in 400 chapters across the nation — lost the battle against Lend-Lease and all subsequent attempts to prevent the United States from becoming the world’s “arsenal of democracy.”

When the United States was finally drawn into the war, partly because of Pearl Harbor but also because of FDR’s increasingly belligerent approach to what he called the “bandit nations,” anti-interventionist Republican critics called it “the New Dealers’ War.” We like to think that great accomplishments in American history are the result of broad national consensus. More often they are the triumph of one worldview over another. American entry into World War II was the victory of a liberal worldview over an anti-interventionism rooted in a conservative anti-liberalism.

That victory remained largely intact throughout the Cold War and after. Although many conservatives eventually hopped on the internationalist bandwagon for the sake of fighting communism (and many on the left dissented from the liberal consensus), it was FDR’s worldview that guided Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard M. Nixon to Reagan to the two Bushes. It was the belief that the United States had both an interest and an obligation to support a liberal democratic, capitalist order and to do so by committing to alliances and deploying hundreds of thousands of GIs thousands of miles from American shores. Reagan’s foreign policy was in many ways simply a resumption of the muscular internationalism of FDR, his onetime hero, and the liberal anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and Acheson.

Not all Republicans have forgotten this legacy. Today, when people like Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, insist that what happens to Ukraine has “a direct and vital bearing on America’s national security and vital interests,” they are articulating this liberal worldview, the assumption that the United States has an interest in the peace and security of a predominantly liberal democratic Europe. If Americans care about what happens in Europe, then they must care about what happens in Ukraine. For should Ukraine fall to Russian control, it would move the line of confrontation between Russia and NATO hundreds of miles westward and allow Vladimir Putin to pursue his unconcealed ambition to restore Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe. Should Ukraine fall, the cost and risk of stopping Russia later will be much higher, including the risk of the United States having to confront Russia as it did during the Cold War. My Post colleague Marc Thiessen has thus advised Republicans to give Ukraine the weapons it needs now, lest they come to “own Ukraine’s military collapse” and leave a reelected Trump “with a weak hand.” Yet that sensible advice also rests on the assumption that at some point the United States may have to come to Europe’s defense against an aggressive Putin.

But what of those Republicans who don’t share that basic assumption? When Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) tells Stephen K. Bannon that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” that statement rests on a different assumption, namely, that a liberal democratic Europe is of no value to the United States and that Americans should not be willing to fight for Germany and France any more than they should fight for Ukraine. It is the original America First position.

Like those of their 1930s forbears, today’s Republicans’ views of foreign policy are heavily shaped by what they consider the more important domestic battle against liberalism. Foreign policy issues are primarily weapons to be wielded against domestic enemies. Today’s Republicans depict their domestic opponents as, among other things, “communists” who are taking their orders from communist China. Republicans insist that Biden is a communist, that his election was a “communist takeover,” that his administration is a “communist regime.” It follows, then, that Biden must have a “pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agenda,” as the powerful Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers , has put it. “Communist China has their President ... China Joe,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Biden’s Inauguration Day in 2021. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) has called the President “Beijing Biden.”

And just as World War II was the “New Dealers’ War,” so Ukraine is the war of “globalists.” Hawley, killing many birds with one stone, warns, like his America First forebears, that a cabal of “liberal globalists on the left” and “neoconservatives on the right”is trying to impose a “liberal empire” on the world to make “the world over in the image of New York and Silicon Valley.” What makes these “liberal globalists” and “neoconservatives” dangerous, Hawley insists, is that they are not pursuing a “truly nationalist foreign policy” because they themselves are not true Americans.

The GOP devotion to America First is merely the flip side of Trump’s “poison the blood” campaign. It is about the ascendancy of White Christian America and the various un-American ethnic and racial groups allegedly conspiring against it.

This has long been evident in Republican veneration of anti-liberal dictators such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Conservatives applauded when Putin warned in 2013 that the “Euro-Atlantic countries” were “rejecting” the “Christian values” that were the “basis of Western civilization,” “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.” Patrick J. Buchanan put it best when he called Putin “one of us,” the voice of “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries,” and praised him for standing up against “the cultural and ideological imperialism of ... a decadent west.” The New York Times’ Christopher Caldwell has calledPutin a “hero to populist conservatives around the world” because he refuses to submit to the U.S.-dominated liberal world order: “Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist.” He is “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

And what about Trump himself? Does Trump have such a fully formed ideological and strategic agenda? The answer may well be no. As his own former attorney general pointed out, Trump “is a consummate narcissist … who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” But Trump’s narcissism meshes well with the aims of those yearning to extricate the United States from its commitments in Europe. In his personal life, as people who know him tend to agree, Trump has no allies. As one Republican told the Wall Street Journal, “All relationships with Trump are one-way transactional and the day he decides that it’s no longer beneficial to him, folks are out the door.” It is hardly surprising that he takes the same approach in foreign policy. Trump does not value America’s allies any more than he values any other relationship, including his relationships with Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. Trump does not see the world as divided between America’s friends and enemies but only between those who can help him, or hurt him, and those who can’t.

Trump has none of the reverence for America’s commitments overseas that Republican political leaders have shared since the 1940s, when even Michigan Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a true isolationist before Pearl Harbor, threw his support behind NATO. Ronald Reagan was famous for his close relationships with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone and even France’s François Mitterrand, a socialist.

If anything, it has been Democratic presidents who have raised the most concern about American commitments. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter openly toyed with pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, and, more recently, Barack Obama’s feelings for the European allies were noticeably cooler than his predecessors’ — and he was very clear in his view that Ukraine was not a “vital” interest of the United States. But none has gone as far as Trump, Vance, Hawley and Colby in insisting that America should no longer be bound by its European alliance.

It doesn’t really matter what Trump believes, therefore. More important is what he doesn’t believe. Nor does he need to withdraw formally from NATO to introduce massive instability. It will be enough that he and his advisers cast significant doubt on the reliability of America’s Article 5 obligations. There is no such thing as a conditional guarantee. Once other nations realize that America’s commitment to defend treaty allies can no longer be relied upon, the whole configuration of power in the international system will change. All powers, whether friendly or hostile to the United States, will adjust accordingly.

In this respect, those Trump Republicans who wish to sever American commitments to allies are not only bringing back a 1930s worldview. If they take power, they will bring us back to a 1930s world.

Imagine that Kyiv falls a year or two into a second Trump presidency and that instead of responding by rushing to bolster the alliance’s defenses with a more substantial American commitment, Trump expresses relative indifference. How will the nations of Europe respond? Russian troops will be hundreds of miles closer to NATO countries and will share a nearly 700-mile border with Poland, but if Republicans have their way, the United States will do nothing. It will be a historic geopolitical revolution.

Under those circumstances, Europeans will have to make a choice. They must either adjust to the expanding hegemony of a militarized Russia led by a proven aggressor — accepting the world “as it is” in prescribed “realist” fashion. Or they must prepare themselves to stand up to it — without the United States.

The stakes will be highest and most immediate for the Baltic nations, which in the eyes of traditional Russian nationalists such as Putin are mere appendages of Russia, with significant Russian-speaking populations that may at any time demand “protection” from Moscow, as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia demanded protection from Berlin in the 1930s. The Baltic states have never enjoyed sovereign independence in periods of Russian hegemony and owe their independence today entirely to American and NATO guarantees.

Then there is Poland, which during the Cold War and repeatedly in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was either subjugated or partitioned by Moscow. Will the Poles again go quietly into that good Russian night once they have been left deliberately “exposed,” as Colby put it, to the full weight of Russian power without the United States or NATO to back them up?

The most important nation in this transformed Europe will be Germany. Germans will quickly find themselves faced with a terrible choice. Either they try to remain in a fundamentally pacifist mode, as they have been since 1945, or they once again become a great military power. To defend themselves in the absence of an American guarantee, Germans will face a staggering uphill climb to match Russia’s conventional-weapons capabilities. But they will also have to address Russia’s overwhelming nuclear superiority, which Putin has not been shy about threatening to use even against the nuclear-armed United States. Will the Germans rely on British and French nuclear capacities to deter Russia, since they can no longer count on the American nuclear umbrella? Or will they choose to become a nuclear power themselves?

Indeed, should the United States make clear that it is no longer bound by its security guarantees, the likelihood is that other industrialized nations will quickly turn to nuclear weapons to try to make up for the sudden gap in their defenses. Japan could build hundreds of nuclear weapons in a very short time if it chose — or do the new America Firsters believe that the Japanese will find reassuring America’s abandonment of the similar treaty commitments in Europe? We will be living in a world of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict — in short, the world that existed in the 1930s, only this time with nuclear weapons. But yes, they will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.

Who can say when all this will come a cropper for the United States? Putin’s first act of aggression was in Georgia in 2008; his second was in 2014, when he invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine; his third was in 2022 when, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, he invaded all of Ukraine. But his cautious probing, if you can call it that, was in the context of a continuing American commitment to European security.

And how long before China, watching America abandon its allies in Europe, asks whether Americans still plan to live up to any of their commitments anywhere? Even if one believes that “Asia is more important than Europe,” does it strengthen the Asian allies to abandon the European allies? Hitler also hoped the United States would focus exclusively on Asia and leave Europe to him. It is no surprise that among those most frightened by Trump’s talk of abandoning NATO is Taiwan.

An older generation of Americans, many of whom may vote for Trump this year, may not live to see the consequences — those crises will fall on their children and grandchildren. But they can be sure of this: If they vote for a return to the 1930s, posterity is not going to mistake them for America’s “greatest generation.”

 

(Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post)