The Munich moment

 After a year of wildly oscillating statements from President Trump regarding the Russia-Ukraine War, Trump, acting through his personal envoy Steve Witkoff, has definitely emerged as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.  It's time to review the historical parallel.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles took significant territory away from Germany and awarded it to Poland, while other treaties left the German-speaking regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a new vastly reduced Austria and in the new state of Czechoslovakia, which was dominated by the Czechs, its largest ethnic group.  In the wake of the treaty France attempted to play the role that the US played in Europe beginning in 1948--it signed alliances with Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to contain the new Germany within its new borders.  Great Britain held aloof from those alliances.  It took 14 years for a new German government, Hitler's, to embark upon the mission of undoing the Versailles treaty borders.  After five years of rearmament, Hitler managed to bring Austria into the Third Reich through political pressure.  He then demanded better treatment for the German minority in Czechoslovakia--a pretext to create a conflict with the Czech government that would allow him to attack and destroy that nation and bring both the German and Czech-inhabited parts of it into Germany.

France, sadly, knew that they could not fight on behalf of Czechoslovakia without Britain.  Neville Chamberlain had taken over as British Prime Minister in 1937.  He desperately wanted to avoid another European or world war, and by the end of that year he had made clear to Hitler that he would allow changes in frontiers to prevent one.  He sent a British cabinet member to mediate between the Czech government and its German minority, but Hitler had ordered the Sudeten German leader to keep raising his demands so that they could not be satisfied.  With  Europe on the brink of war in September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and agreed to the German annexation of the border territories inhabited by Germans.  Chamberlain then persuaded the French and the Czechs to agree to this as well.  Two more meetings at Bad Godesberg and then Munich--where Hitler met with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French Premier--led to that result.  The border territory also included the Czech fortifications and what was left of Czechoslovakia was defenseless. Six months later, Slovakia seceded and Hitler took over and annexed the rest of what is now Czechia.  That territory sat out the Second World War, and when the Allies won, a restored Czech government expelled its three million Germans into Germany.

The peaceful defeat of the USSR in 1991 corresponds to the defeat of Germany in 1918.  The USSR gave way to a much-reduced Russia, shorn of the Baltic States, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asian republics, and most of all, Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, but never managed to join NATO.  Russia, like Germany after 1919, suffered very severely economically from its defeat and the collapse of its regime, and it took just 8 years, not 14, for Vladimir Putin, a man dedicated to restoring Russia's former greatness, to take power.  Putin began, we have learned, by staging a fake terrorist attack that killed dozens of Russians as a pretext for resuming the war against Chechnya.  He managed to turn Belarus into a satellite and briefly bring a pro-Russian leader to power in Ukraine.  That government, however, fell, and in 2014 he simply annexed Crimea--an excellent parallel, it now occurs to me, to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria.  He also started a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 he invaded Ukraine without warning.  At that moment I suggested here that NATO should seriously consider getting into the war then and there.  I am not aware of a single other person to make that suggestion, but NATO, led by the United States, provided Ukraine with critical economic and military aid, and Finland and  Sweden joined NATO.  Ukraine quickly rolled back the initial Russian gains but could not mount a successful counterattack and now is very slowly giving ground in a war of attrition.  An invasion of Russian territory around Kursk--an excellent strategy--unfortunately had to be abandoned.

As peace has been discussed, the key issue has become clear: will Ukraine remain an independent nation?  Russia insists that it must not--and the deal that Witkoff has drafted gives into that demand.  The deal gives Russia all the territory that it has occupied, and more.  It would require Ukraine to change its constitution so as to renounce NATO membership and forbid NATO troops from entering Ukraine.  It will severely limit the size of the Ukrainian army.  Like the Munich agreement, it includes only the vaguest security guarantees for what will be left of Ukraine.  If Ukraine accepts it, it will take only a few years for Russia to destabilize its government and proclaim the need for Russian troops to restore order, as Hitler did in what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Donald Trump, playing the role of Chamberlain, has given Ukraine one week to accept the deal.  The rest of NATO finds itself in the role of France in 1938.  If it tells Ukraine to fight on, as the Baltic States and Poland, at the very least, certainly want to do, it will have to assume the responsibility of providing all necessary assistance, which will not be easy.  They will also have to assume the risk of war with Russia.  Whatever decision the British, French and Germans make, this is a turning point in modern European history.  There is no longer a United States government across the Atlantic willing to help with their defense.  

An odd mixture of people, it seems, will support the 28-point plan to end Ukrainian independence.  Here is historian Niall Ferguson, drawing the ire of former chess champion and activist Gary Kasparaov:

"The best is the enemy of the good. Contrary to recent press speculation, the draft 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine is in fact a reasonable basis for negotiations. Journalists can gripe about it as they griped about the 20-point Gaza plan. But wars are not ended by op-eds."

This is not too surprising.  Ferguson bizarrely established his reputation as an historian with his book The Pity of War, which argued that Britain in 1914 should have allowed Germany to win the First World War.  A lifelong resident of different parts of Oceana, he now seems willing to share the world with Eurasia and Eastasia and abandon the 1945 dream of a world of truly independent states.  That is also the policy of the current government of the United States, which has no respect for sovereignty within our own hemisphere.

Ukraine, unlike Czechoslovakia in 1938, has made it clear for four years that it has what it takes to defend its independence, and has fought heroically under very impressive leadership.  Russia also lacks a quick path to victory, as long as Ukraine gets enough assistance.  Sadly, the United States has abandoned the role that it played for a century.  This is a danger and an opportunity for the great nations of Europe.

Why Mamdani?

 I personally believe in highly taxed and regulated capitalism, not thorough-going socialism, and I regret that Zohran Mamdani has not abandoned all of the very woke positions he took a few years ago when they were so fashionable.  I would however have voted for him if I lived in New York City and I think his election is an important milestone in American life.  Far more than the career of Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, his victory in the nation's largest city reflects the political impact of the economic changes of the last few decades.  He may not have the best solutions to the problem in mind, but he is determined to face it head on.

Back on May 2, 2014, when I was nearly a year into retirement and No End Save Victory had just come out, I published the first of four blog posts here on Thomas Piketty's new book,  Capital in the 21st Century.  Reviewing what I wrote, I was struck by the breadth of his research, his knowledge of history, and his intellectual ambition, but most of all by the simple mathematical insight around which he had built the book.  Under capitalism, he showed, the natural tendency is for capital to grow more quickly than the economy as a whole.  I have never read Marx's original Capital but I have the impression that Marx had said the same thing, and he was right.  Piketty showed, too, that the United States and other western countries had overcome this tendency in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the consequences of the two world wars and the Depression, which had led among other things to almost confiscatory high marginal tax rates.  That era came to an end just as I was reaching adulthood, however, and the natural tendency of capitalism took over, making the rich richer while the lower half of the population stood still.  And that trend has had extraordinary economic and political consequences.

It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Mamdani won half the vote in the world's most capitalistic city.  Although the financial and real estate barons of New York are losing ground relative to the tech giants of the West Coast, they still dominate much of economy and our politics.  The crisis in higher education over the last two years has shown that they are the  ultimate authority over our universities as well, and they have enormous influence over some aspects of US foreign policy.  The economy those elites created helped give us Donald J. Trump.   Their wealth has pushed real estate prices in New York and other major metropolitan areas to undreamed of heights.  When I read Piketty, I had bought the property I live in in suburban Boston less than two years earlier, and Zillow tells me that it is now worth more than twice as much as it was then.  At that time the median US household income was $53,657.  Today it is $83,730, leaving my property considerably less affordable than it was then.  If one corrects the current median income figure for inflation, it becomes $61,206 in 2014 dollars--an increase of 1.27 percent per year.  During that period GDP growth has averaged 2.52 percent a year--almost exactly twice as much.  The rest of that GDP growth, presumably, has been turned into capital, which is held by relatively few people. Piketty was right.

Hysterical financial interests are now warning that the superrich will leave New York because of Mamdani's victory.  I am only speculating here, but I am not certain that would hurt the average New Yorker.  It could depress the housing market, but that is what New York needs to make it more affordable.  When the superrich ran General Electric and General Motors they created more ordinary jobs when they did better, but now it seems the superrich are at least as likely to reduce ordinary jobs as to create them--a trend that will become clearer as AI and robotics make new advances.  (See Bezos, Jeff.)  At least since Reagan we have been hearing from the leadership of both parties that economic growth benefits us all.  The lower half of the population knows better.  

And not only the lower half.  Harvard and MIT assistant professors can no longer afford single-family homes around here.  Two-career professionals see one salary eaten up entirely by childcare.  Etc.  Mamdani built his campaign around a simple message:  our economy is making life impossible for too many of us, and this can't go on.  That is the message that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to emphasize, and the problem they did nothing about.  Donald Trump, meanwhile, inhabits a fantasy world in which we have no inflation (it's 3 percent, not 0, at the moment), and job creation is at undreamed of levels (it is actually quite slow and getting slower.)  He will do nothing about the underlying problem.

For a long time now I have been pessimistic about the growth of the new aristocracy and its consequences.  The trends we have lived with for the last half century may well have gone too far to reverse now.  But I am glad that the electorate of our largest city resoundingly delivered the message that this must not go on.  I don't know what Mamdani will actually be able to do to try to reverse the trend, but I wish him well.

A Tale of Two Op-eds

 Hundreds of miles north of me, a controversy is raging over the U.S. Senate candidacy of Graham Platner, a 41-year old Millennial who is running for the Democratic nomination to oppose Senator Susan Collins next year.  Platner, an ex-Marine and an oyster farmer, had been effectively pitching an economic program focused on the working class when two disturbing stories broke.  First, more than ten years ago, on reddit, he had made a number of offensive comments, including homophobic ones and ones that questioned the extent of sexual assault in the military.  Secondly, it turns out that while in the Marine Corps he acquired a skull-and-crossbones tattoo similar to the Nazi Death's Head, which he has only just covered up.  Meanwhile, the  Democratic Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who will turn 78 at the end of this year, has also entered the race as the establishment Democratic candidate.  During the last week this situation triggered two very different op-eds by regular contributors to the New York Times that tell us a lot about splits inside the Democratic Party.

The first op-ed, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, aims more at senior Democrats who have stood up for Platner than at Platner himself.  The controversy over the posts and tattoos, she writes, should have ended up "as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history," except that "several prominent Democrats took time out of their remaining days on God's green earth to lecture Democratic voters on learning to forgive"--specifically Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  This, she says, is a problem, because "This country is being ruled by a powerful minority that espouses deplorable minority views that polling shows a majority of voters in this country disagree with.  This is a big problem.  It is also the same problem as a guy wearing a Nazi tattoo." She continues:

"I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns."

In other words, even to refer to a "working class" that is by definition interracial--instead of simply focusing on "marginalized groups"--marks one as a panderer to racism.  She continues: "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." The only way to prove that one is a real Democrat is to put "Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor" people first. And ramming that point home, she adds, " If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested."  

The second column, which appeared yesterday, was written by Michelle Goldberg. She makes clear that she was initially anticipating writing a column similar to MacMillan Cottam's, but after talking to some people in Maine, she decided she had to do some good old-fashioned reporting and travel up there to see Platner in action for herself. She interviewed him at length and researched his Reddit posts, some of which suggested that leftists arm themselves against Fascism and even identified with Antifa--not the kind of thing a real neo-Nazi would write.  And she attended one of his wildly popular campaign events, which are filled with voters who warm to his insistence that the Democratic Party had to return to the traditions that had given the nation Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Only such an approach would ever help the many ordinary Mainers who are losing out in our new economy.  He also urged the audience to begin talking to their neighbors, the only way that a real counter-movement to MAGA (which carried one of Maine's two Congressional districts and one electoral vote last year) could grow.  

MacMillan Cottam, it seems to me, focused so intently on using the power of "marginalized groups" to purge the Democratic Party of those with a different approach that she forgot a critical point: the main job of a candidate is to get elected.  By that I do not mean, as she suggested, that a Nazi-style tattoo would be more likely to attract than to repel white voters.  Goldberg found that very few of Platner's listeners seemed to be interested in the controversy at all.  I do mean that downplaying racial issues makes sense in a state that is 91 percent white, 5 percent biracial, 2 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic might make sense.  And last but not least, when Democrats face a choice between a 42-year old candidate and a near-79 year old one, the choice should be almost automatic.  That is why I will vote for Seth Moulton against Ed Markey (who is a year older even than Governor Mills) next year.  I no longer get any kick out of being represented by people my own age.  

The New York Times opinion page seems to be evolving.  MacMillan Cottum's piece would have appeared in 2020 or 2022, but I don't think that Goldberg's would have.  That's a step forward for the paper, and for the country.