End of the Interbellum
Preparing mentally for a new war in Europe
In 1964, a bewildered 4-year old boy, dressed in a suit, walked with his mom into the bright, sunlit airport reception area. Bleary-eyed with jet lag, he was joyfully greeted by strangers who spoke an incomprehensible language. That little boy was me after landing at Stuttgart-Echterdingen for my first visit to West Germany and meeting my German relatives. It was a dizzying experience, but one that opened my mind and my eyes to a world beyond the United States. World War II had ended 19 years earlier, and though West Germany was riding the wave of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that drove the transformation of West Germany into an industrial power, there were still visible scars of war from Allied bombing that I can remember in my sepia-colored memory. I can distinctly remember the few remnants of bombed-out buildings in my grandparents’ home of Freiburg im Breisgau. Stuttgart had notable Trümmerberge, literally manmade mountains of rubble, like the Monte Scherbelino.
I would visit West Germany and my relatives over the course of my life, eventually spending one year studying at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg, my mother’s Alma Mater, and a total of eight more years in the now unified Bundesrepublik Deutschland, serving as a physician in the United States Army. For me, Germany had always represented post-war Europe. The growth of the European Union and a single currency, the Euro, cemented the idea that Europe was in a new and different place. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 signified the end of the post-World War II era as well as the end of the Cold War. The Cold War world had teetered on the brink of nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again in 1983 during a lesser-known series of near-fatal miscalculations around the NATO exercise Autumn Forge. The end of the Cold War was celebrated as a Western victory, complete with a Cold War Recognition Certificate that service members and Veterans were eligible to receive.
Just as the seeds of grievance that led to World War II were sown by the terms of Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, the resentment of the fall of the Soviet Union bred the grievances of modern Russia under a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. Putin has repeatedly called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He resents the West for its role in the USSR’s fall, especially the United States.
Putin is as rich as he is ruthless. He is reportedly the richest man in the world, although his exact financial worth is not know. He accumulated that wealth like a mafia don, extorting the wealthy oligarchs who serve his interests. Part of Putin’s ire with the United States, beyond the USA’s role in ushering the end of the Soviet Union is the passing of the Magnitsky Act, which blocked Russian government officials and businessmen from entering the United States, froze their assets here, and stopped their future use of U.S. banking systems. The law was expanded in 2016, and now apply to 44 suspected human rights abusers worldwide. The Magnitsky Act cut off the flow of funds to Putin’s friends, and therefore into Putin’s pockets. Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the act is named, was a Russian attorney and auditor who exposed tax fraud worth $230 million linked to individuals close to the government. beaten to death in pretrial confinement. As the Washington Post reported, in 2017, “Independent investigators found “inhuman detention conditions, the isolation from his family, the lack of regular access to his lawyers and the intentional refusal to provide adequate medical assistance resulted in the deliberate infliction of severe pain and suffering, and ultimately his death.” Many of Putin’s critics, challengers, and people who have otherwise crossed him have found similar fates. Putin’s chief nemesis, Alexei Navalny, jailed after being nearly assassinated with the nerve agent Novichok, is now labeled a terrorist and faces yet another trial to keep him in jail even longer. Putin’s agents traveled to the United Kingdom in 2018 to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal with Novichok, brazenly bringing this deadly nerve agent to foreign soil to attempt to kill a man who had passed Russian secrets to Britain’s intelligence unit, MI6. That attack also killed a British woman who had nothing to do with the Skripals. Other critics end up dead after defenestrations, including physicians. One of the best measures of foreign aggression is the suppression of dissent at home and the pattern fits in Putin’s Russia. Putin operated with impunity in the war against Georgia in 2008 with the occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia’s occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in Ukraine in 2014 went unpunished. As of the writing of this piece, Russian forces are poised to finish the job of dismantling the democratic government in the Ukraine. The human toll in deaths and suffering will be incalculable.
Putin has repeatedly called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.
We’ve seen this film before and know where appeasement of despots leads. What does Putin stand to gain by invading Ukraine? Perhaps he intends to fragment NATO, divide Europe politically, and humiliate the United States while he and his western allies continue to spread misinformation and divisive rhetoric over social media and other media. Only he knows for certain and where or even if Russian forces invade Ukraine, but the signs all point that it will happen and soon.
I don’t want to believe it, but my perception of a post-war Europe is over. The interbellum period is nearly at an end. I have experienced firsthand the horrors of war in Europe with the implosion of Yugoslavia, when I deployed to the Balkans with the United Nations Protection Forces (UNPROFOR) in 1992. That limited scale conflict could not compare with the force on force bloodletting that may well soon be unleashed on Ukraine by superior Russian forces. The specter of an all out war in Europe is almost unthinkable with the advanced weaponry available to Russia including its massive nuclear arsenal. No sane person wants war with Russia. As President Kennedy once said about the 1962 naval quarantine of Cuba, “This nation is opposed to war. ... We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth-but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.” We need that same determination now to stand up to a man with boundless cruelty and vindictiveness.
What I hope above all else in this dark moment is that no future child will ever have to return to Europe with his or her parents to see a nation rebuilding from the rubble of an all out conflict.