THE NEW YORK TIMES: Journalists writing on international affairs in the 1920s and 1930s referred to the era as “postwar.” They saw events through the prism of the Great War that had devastated Europe just a few years earlier. Historians writing today refer to these same years as the “interwar” period, for the simple reason that they analyze what happened during those years as part of the lead-up to the even more destructive World War II. If only those journalists writing in 1930s Europe had the clarity of hindsight.
We should all have that clarity today. Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine is one of those moments that impels us to reinterpret our own era: what we called the 30-year peace that followed the Cold War (tending to forget, consciously or unconsciously, the wars in the former Yugoslavia) has now ended. Future historians will look at these last decades, by and large, much like they look at the interwar period, as an opportunity squandered.
The sooner we all admit it, the better we can prepare for what comes next. Unfortunately, a kind of self-serving denialism pervades Western capitals and prevents us from seeing the obvious. Passionate pleas to defend post-Cold War European order have no meaning because this era is over.
In the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, Angela Merkel, then-chancellor of Germany, talked to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and reported to President Barack Obama that, in her view, Mr. Putin had lost touch with reality. He was, she said, living in “another world.” Today, we are all living in it. In this world, to quote Thucydides, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” » | Ivan Krastev * | Sunday, February 27, 2022
* Mr. Krastev is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on international politics.
