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In today’s edition:
Republicans want to abandon Zelensky and take us back to the 1930sGoing back to the beginning in GenesisTwo GOP Senate candidates show the party’s squalorBack 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.
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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.
The former president and his acolytes aren’t only reheating isolationism, either. They’re whipping up all the 1930s conservative fixins, too, including high tariffs and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
Robert explains how the severing of U.S. commitments would take us back to not only a 1930s worldview but a 1930s world, too — one “of many heavily armed powers engaged in a multipolar arms race, ever poised for conflict … only this time with nuclear weapons.”
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He wryly notes one way Trump would surely get his wish in this chaotic world: Yes, these powers “will be spending more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense.”
Chaser: Fareed Zakaria cautions that liberals must not use illiberal means to defeat Trumpism. He sees a warning in NBC’s hiring and........