On unification – Thomas Meaney in NYT:

‘Amid the point-blank horror of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the expanding war zone in Europe seems to have become a comfort zone for much of America’s political establishment. In his State of the Union address, President Biden declared that in the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, “we see a more unified Europe, a more unified West.” He is correct. Polish nationalists and European Union bureaucrats are sudden brothers in arms. Back at home, Republicans and Democrats have put aside differences on climate change and voting rights for an enemy who appears to have emerged from Cold War central casting: An evil empire is again on the march in Europe.’

(…)

‘The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox, European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives. The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. Although the fact sometimes fails to register in Washington, Europeans live in Europe and assess their threats differently from their American security providers, who are 5,000 miles from Moscow. The more Europe and America conflate their security interests, the less Europe can develop its own place in the world and play the mediator between the United States and rival powers.’

(…)

‘The end of the Cold War was supposed to dissolve the East-West division. No one assumed this more than Mr. Putin himself, who was once keen to join the club of the West. When he first came to power at the turn of the century, he played with the idea of Russia joining NATO, which itself was miraculously not rendered obsolete by the disappearance of its raison d’être, the Soviet Union. “When are you going to invite us to join NATO?” Mr. Putin reportedly asked the alliance’s secretary general, George Robertson, in 2000. When Mr. Robertson explained that the club had an application process, Mr. Putin rebuffed him: “Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.” It was still imaginable in that period that the European Union, too, could one day include Russia. At the end of the Cold War, President François Mitterand of France even floated the idea of a new organization — a European Confederation — that would pointedly include Soviet Russia, but not the United States. During his first years in power, Mr. Putin was viewed positively by Western politicians and journalists. Thomas L. Friedman of The Times advised his readers to “keep rootin’ for Putin” in 2001, while Madeleine Albright called him a “can-do person,” and Bill Clinton deemed him someone “the United States can do business with.”’

(…)

‘Mr. Putin himself acted like a savvy applicant to the West in many respects. He gamely signed on to the “global war on terror,” later allowing the United States to use his bases for the war in Afghanistan, and extinguished a “terrorist” insurgency at home. Since coming to power, Mr. Putin has also made Moscow into a paragon of fiscal rectitude, and, according to the former aide, he explored the idea of installing an American-style two-party system in Russia.
But as the economy Mr. Putin presided over threatened to crash in a state-stripping bonanza, he tried to shore up the state sector and turned to increasingly authoritarian measures at home. As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.’

(…)

‘Although they have been remarkably effective at starving Iraqi, Iranian and now Afghan children while satisfying the American appetite for moral aggrandizement, modern economic sanctions have rarely curbed any regime’s behavior. The lack of enthusiasm around the world for the West training its economic weapons on Russia indicates that the rest of the world is concerned not only about wider economic immiseration but also about the global escalation of a conflict between two “civilizations” that share the preponderance of the world’s nuclear weapons between them.
Mr. Putin himself came to power atop the rubble of Russia’s 1990s economic chaos. It would be rash to think that out of the new economic chaos inflicted, a phoenix to the liking of the West will rise.’

Read the article here.

Since 1945 Europe is militarily dependent on the US, the US was fighting wars for Europe, Europe was paying (a bit).
Nobody should have thought that this was going to end now, despite Scholz declaring that he was giving the Bundeswehr a booster shot.

Enemies unite. Yes, NATO now is less obsolete than it was five years ago.

Putin was okay with the war on terror, Chechnya started with Yeltsin and what Russia (Putin) was doing there was as cruel and gruesome as what it did in Syria, but the Chechens are unlike the Ukrainians Muslim, so who cares?

The west was as united after 9/11 as it is now, and the war on terror was also mainly a pursuit of the West, basically a hobby of Bush and Cheney.

And yes, Putin was a friend before he became an enemy. Saddam was also an ally, before he became the incarnation of Hitler.

There was a time, not too long ago, that more or less serious politicians in Germany asked themselves the questions whether the American century finally had ended, whether Germany i.e. Europe had to look for new protectors and friends (China? Russia?). This question now has become absurd.

So, the American century and Germany’s ‘Westbindung’ has been extended.

A friend asked me: what do you think of all this?

We have been living with American’s century for decades, a few decades more is perfectly fine with me. Especially when I think of the alternatives.