The deformed child: The decision by the White House to withdraw fifteen percent of American forces from Germany over the next year is pushing NATO ever closer to irrelevance, much the same way the United Nations has already been sent packing. Boiled down, the president seeks to punish (and blackmail) the whole of Europe for its failure to assist in his undeclared and unprovoked war on Iran, a conflict that has produced global economic instability and has yet to achieve its desired results. His distaste for Europe only deepened when his friend, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was voted out of office in a landslide. At this point, it is fair to say that the postwar relationship on which NATO was founded is all but dead — no other word applies. It is now as if World War II never existed and the Marshall plan a “bad deal” that this American leader would never have signed off on.
In the mid-1990s, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama equated the end of communism with the end of history since liberal democracy had finally vanquished all ideological rivals. Now it would be up to the world to formulate a unified vision based around the United States as the world’s economic, political, and cultural superpower. What he could not have foreseen was the rise to the presidency of a lawless businessman who spits in the face of one-time friends, his capitalism bearing a deformed child and permitting postcommunist history to suddenly acquire an entirely different, and bitter, flavor.