In “The New German Question,” published in the May/June 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs, the historian Robert Kagan argued that German pacifism since 1945 is the result not of a permanent transformation in the country’s nature, but of the suppression of its immutable nationalist instincts by American power. By threatening to dissolve America’s traditional support for multilateral institutions, Kagan explained, Donald Trump was risking “the return of resentful nationalism and political instability” to Germany, and “the reemergence of the economic nationalism and bitter divisions of the past.”
Kagan’s suggestion that Trump was both a would-be Führer at home and enabling the rise of a new Führer in Europe created a stir at the American Embassy in Berlin—in part because he also accused the U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, whose office I worked in at the time, of “encouraging right-wing nationalism and the dissolution of pan-European institutions.” This was news to Grenell, who maintained a policy of nonengagement with the rising right-wing nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), even as officers in the embassy’s political section urged him to engage the pro-Putin, anti-NATO Left Party. But the point of Kagan’s article was not to paint a precise picture of what was happening in Germany; it was to use Germany as an object lesson in what you get when voters deviate too much from the traditional preferences of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. After his colleagues at the The Liberal Washington Post and the Brookings Institution had spent three years warning that Trump was summoning Nazis in America, Kagan was simply layering on the claim that Trump was also conjuring “literal Nazis” back from the dead.
Yet if Kagan’s ideological pre-commitments required him to insinuate that Trump was pushing Germany to rebuild the Wehrmacht and invade Poland, they also spoiled what would have been impeccable timing for a less preposterous warning about the direction Germany was actually headed—which was alarming enough.
On May 25, shortly after Kagan’s article came out, Felix Klein, then as now the government’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism,” responded to a steep rise in antisemitic crimes in the country by recommending that German Jews no longer wear kippahs in public. The next day, Germany held European Parliament elections in which Angela Merkel’s centrist ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats suffered major losses, while the far-right AfD came in fourth and won 11 seats.
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Author: Ruth King
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