Writing for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas publication, historian Victor Davis Hanson looks at today’s Germany and sees uncomfortable parallels with 1870, 1914, and 1939. I’ll grant that the parallels he identifies are real.
What makes the parallels less meaningful is the total unpreparedness of the German military this time around. In those other eras, German arms responded by gobbling up surrounding countries.
Perhaps today’s notoriously underfunded, undermanned and unserious Bundeswehr could defeat tiny Luxembourg. No larger neighbor need feel especially threatened.
Which is not to say Germany can’t make mischief in central Europe. Dropping the U.S. and choosing Russia as its territorial guarantor would certainly upend NATO and the EU.
As VDH notes, when Germans “feel aggrieved,” many ugly and unfortunate things become possible, (e.g., the Holocaust). One troubling thing they’ve done this time around is mass Islamic immigration, which in Germany and France begins to resemble a twenty-first century Holocaust outsourced to Islam.
