How history is repeating itself between America and Germany – Firstpost

History has a strange way of repeating itself. If one considers the period 1914-1945 as a modern version of the Thirty Years’ War, one sees it as a wrenching conflict that saw the death of nearly 110 million people (5 per cent of the world’s population) and a trail of unimaginable destruction and genocide. In this extended war, we had, on the one hand, the Anglosphere as a principal protagonist, and by this term we mean the UK, its dominions and colonies along with the US, which gradually grew in influence and power over the thirty years to effectively overtake Britain and occupy pole position. On the other side, we had the continental European landmass, represented by Germany, its vassals, and allies.

The Anglosphere is a collection of big and small islands separated from the European landmass by oceans, seas, and a 22-mile ditch. This geographical difference—islands versus landmass—between the warring parties is of profound significance and has influenced the very way in which these protagonists conducted their warfare, be it military or economic.

By 1945, the US put in place a new order that, both politically and economically, secured the interests of the Anglosphere. This was achieved with Bretton Woods, the IMF, the UN, and NATO (and its subsequent auxiliaries like SEATO and CENTO) and led to the rules-based order where the political boundaries of newly carved post-WWII nation-states were held to be inviolate for all time. The vanquished were smothered with the Marshall Plan, which gave them both money and security in a dispensation that was difficult for the destroyed European continent to refuse.

So, it is striking to see, nearly 80 years later, a repeat performance of the conflict in which America has flamboyantly discarded its own rules-based order, and we have written about how the coming of Donald Trump and the renewed American desire for territorial expansionism threaten the nation-state, the lowest common denominator of the post-WWII order. The key takeaway from our analysis was that the primary defender of this global rules-based order wanted to cannibalise it. But this was not to be all.

Little did we expect that there would be a recreation of the Anglosphere versus Eurosphere conflict of 1914-1945, albeit with some variations pertaining to the fact that large-scale battles on the ground on a worldwide level are now practically impossible. We now have hot wars in cold places, mostly of an economic nature. How amazing that Donald Trump seems to have made common cause with Vladimir Putin: old enemies have become new friends, while old allies have been discarded at the drop of a hat.

During the last four weeks since Trump took over as POTUS, deep fissures have erupted in the older Western alliance, resulting in a diplomatic cold war among two of its largest and most prominent constituents, the United States and Germany. The divergence has been so sudden and extreme that it would not be naive to suggest that the Western alliance seems to have split down the middle into two well-demarcated groups—the Anglo-Americans and the Europeans.

The primary cause for this perceived divorce is singular—Ukraine, the latest doormat of history. After US Vice President JD Vance’s open rebuke of “European democracy” and the overall approach of Europe to both internal and external threats, the knives were all but out. The cuts for Europe were deepened further when Trump and Putin agreed to negotiate for a settlement on Ukraine with zero involvement from either Europe or Ukraine.

The reasons for doing so are anybody’s guess, but we will dwell more on outcomes rather than causes. Europe feels slighted, its ego bruised by this casual dismissal from the president of a country that only three months ago was its strongest ally. How strange that the US and Russia are aligned in an economic equivalent of Yalta while they sideline and undercut Europe. Even stranger, the backdrop is Ukraine, in which territory lay the physical Yalta in 1945.

The European response to the American actions has been both impotent and bizarre. Europe must perforce chart its own course on a path it has long since forgotten after 1945. This is nowhere more evident than in Germany, the fabled engine of the continent, where structural economic issues over the past decade have resulted in the engine sputtering.

Recent comments by the Trump 2.0 administration have left it further choked. On being asked to comment about the recent German elections, Trump stated that he had more pressing issues to consider back home than worry about the German election results. Being confined to irrelevance is often a bigger punishment than rebuke. In response, the likely Chancellor of Germany vowed to “achieve independence from America”. However, this “independence” will come at a high price as it will involve Europe having to create a military and defence architecture separate from America. In the face of a slowing economy and an ageing demography, the independence would require ramping up military spending to almost 5 per cent of GDP, which is more than double the current expenditure. This seems to us to be difficult in the extreme.

All this masks the different approaches in play. At one level, America and Germany have very different visions for the world, for state capacity, for democracy, for global order, and for their role in all of it. At another level, American society is known for its aggression, flamboyance, and risk-taking attitude, whereas Germans are generally predictable, conservative, and dour—disruption versus incrementalism.

These fundamental differences were papered over by the prevailing rules-based order, but as this order recedes and finally vanishes, we might have a situation where the two largest countries in the broader West go back to re-establishing their rivalry from over a century ago based on their inherent and therefore unchanging character.

Yes, history indeed has a strange way of repeating itself because human nature does not change.

Gautam Desiraju is affiliated with IISc Bengaluru and UPES, Dehradun. Murali Bharadwaj is an independent consultant based in Mumbai. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.