Are We In The Interwar Period? – OpEd
Since the first election of President Donald Trump in 2016, pundits have argued about the dawn of a new world order. Some increasingly speak about the end of the US-led unipolar world and the arrival of multipolarity.
In 2018, during his first term, Donald Trump emphasized that the U.S. should abandon its role as a global ‘policeman.’ In 2025, the newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, reconfirmed that the unipolar world was an anomaly of the end of the Cold War and “eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” This is a sharp departure from the core policy advanced by both Republican and Democrat administrations not only following the Cold War but also before—unipolarity, advanced as the goal of U.S. foreign policy during the country’s struggle with the Soviet Union.
Such a development—involving a return to a sort of isolationism—was predetermined by just a few factors. While the liberal world order, with free trade and the free flow of capital, had benefited the United States since the end of the Second World War, in the last twenty years, American economic supremacy has been challenged by other economic powers, such as China. Although not always with a level playing field, the free entry of goods from China and other countries to the U.S. market created an enormous trade deficit. Americans lost jobs, not only to cheap manufacturers in the third world, but also to automatization. As a result, the median income of average Americans stalled at mid-1990s levels, and ‘Joe the plumber’ felt angry with the American elite, bureaucracy, and overseas spending. Initially, they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, who failed to bring any tangible change, and eventually for Donald Trump in 2016.
Some experts see the Trump phenomenon as a reflection of U.S. nativism, which has developed over the course of American history. Others view Trump’s foreign policy as a neo-isolationist stance, completely out of step with American ideals promoted since the end of the Second World War. Both phenomena have historic roots that date to the pre-World War II period.
In Europe, the recent Munich Security Forum, with a shattering speech delivered by U.S. Vice-President JD Vance attacking European allies for failure in domestic policies, caused uproar and even accusations of treason from European policymakers. However, it was expected that Donald Trump would challenge European partners for lacking necessary financing and being overly dependent on the U.S. in terms of pan-European defense and security. JD Vance earlier criticized the European Union’s economic performance and overregulation, which have stifled competition and innovation. A more comprehensive view was expressed in former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s report on the future of European competitiveness, in which he warned about the technology gap.
Robert Kaplan compared the current trend with the “weak and wobbly republic that governed Germany before World War II.” Weimar Germany has been the subject of many research studies highlighting it as the precursor of Nazi Germany. The liberal atmosphere, coupled with hyperinflation and economic stagnation, made the German population prone to right-wing ideology. Besides the Weimar phenomenon in Germany, Austria, the birthplace of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, experienced the so-called ‘Red Vienna’ moment. Many social-oriented policies, which are still prevalent in European countries, have had a positive impact on the lives of average Europeans. Yet, leftist ideologies have also caused instability.
Historians still debate the causes of Nazism, and liberal scholars blame nationalists. However, they ignore many problems that still resonate today. Whatever pretexts the Nazis used to seize power, such as anti-Semitism, they came to power at the will of the people. Even though a minority—Hitler’s party received 43.9% of votes cast in 1933—this still represented a considerable share of the population. Communists supported by Soviet leader Josef Stalin were responsible for their own share of violence, which shook the foundation of the democratic republic. Recall that the civil war in Spain took place in the shadow of the threat of Stalinist sympathizers coming to power. And, at the height of the civil war, further violence broke out between Communist and Trotskyist forces in Spain. Hitler’s party’s success during the 1933 elections was partly because Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered communist parties to refrain from any alliance with social-democratic parties in Europe. The list of instances of Soviet influence and wrongdoing is extensive.
For many people in the 1930s, there were two alternatives—communism, associated with Stalin’s Soviets, and nationalism, overseen by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar. In the second half of the 1930s, the European populace could not see the horrors of the upcoming Second World War, but the economic situation did stabilize after the Great Depression of 1932–33 under strong leaders. Therefore, social-nationalism spread to other parts of the continent, especially to Eastern Europe.
Up to now, liberal historians have failed to properly assess the mistakes that extreme leftist ideologues brought to Europe in the 1930s. It is not an attempt to make them equally responsible for crimes committed by Nazis, nor can we draw strict parallels between events occurring in the second and third decades of the 21st century with those of the 1930s. Nevertheless, analyzing the factors that shaped the two different historical periods is useful.
The so-called Interwar period (1919–1939) was characterized by political and economic instability, culminating with the Great Depression (1932–1933). When leftist forces pushed their agenda further, which caused the civil war in Spain and erratic policies in Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe, which were followed by the rise of totalitarianism and trade protectionism. Adolf Hitler, as a matter of fact, ensured economic stability in Germany after 1933 at the cost of political liberties. People in other countries were attracted to the social-nationalist model proposed by Hitler and Mussolini.
All these changes were also accompanied by profound technological breakthroughs and cultural revolutions in arts, music, and literature. Not all people liked what they believed was the degeneration of culture—a sentiment that Hitler so successfully exploited, thereby fusing conservative and socialist ideas.
The 1930s saw land grabs by Germany, Japan, the USSR, and Italy. Even traditional empires like Britain and France were engaged in redrawing the boundaries of Middle Eastern territories taken from the Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations failed to prevent the multiple breaches of international law. How it ended, we all know.
Today, we have arrived at a point with some similar characteristics, but also differences, that are determining the geopolitical situation and our socio-economic lives. We no longer speak about ‘the end of history’—the liberal world order is under stress, and the unipolar moment is probably gone.
However, on the other side, the U.S. remains the largest military and economic power. President Donald Trump, having declared the withdrawal of military support to European partners, is fiercely opposing any challenges to the dominance of the U.S. dollar, and people in Russia and China still prefer to invest in liberal democracies—not only in fiscal terms, but also by sending their children for education and to spend time in these ‘rotten societies.’
Nevertheless, inside the Western liberal world, people are increasingly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. The hot topics of the liberal-versus-conservative debate hinge on several problems caused by opposed political forces. The massive deindustrialization of the developed countries was partly caused by neoconservative policies, namely globalization, which made multinational corporations outsource labor-intensive jobs. Liberal politicians favored overspending and public debt to promote democracy abroad and welfare at home. Migration was the result of a welcoming policy to meet the demand for cheap labor and to address demographic decline. However, the uncontrolled inflow of migrants and relaxed law-enforcement policies caused the culture war, with offshoots arising from concepts such as inclusiveness, political correctness, and woke culture—terms that initially signified the protection of racial minorities but expanded to encompass gender and sexually marginalized groups. The streets of Detroit, Brussels, and other Western cities came to resemble the dystopian landscapes of several Hollywood movies, including the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York.
The economic situation today shows the scars of not one crisis, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, but several. Let’s start with the financial crisis of 2008, then COVID-19, and the European energy crisis, with others looming on the horizon. The technological transformation pushed by AI and the digital revolution will inevitably make many jobs irrelevant. This transformation, while bringing many instruments for improving our lifestyle, could realize, I am afraid, some of the ominous futuristic predictions found in the works of the science fiction writers of the 20th century (Bradbury, Huxley) or historians like Yuval Harari.
The identity war, predicted by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s as a replacement for the class struggle, has made things more complicated. Worse, the clash of civilizations is not being fought out among states, regions, and continents alone—the culture wars are being waged within Europe and the U.S., with leftists having their own share of violence and intolerance towards dissenting opinions.
The dominance of leftist ideas in the media caused the emergence of a new wave of white supremacists, conspiracists, and all kinds of nationalists. The narrative on the freedom of speech preached by both right- and left-wing forces was used to stifle opposing opinions rather than to create inclusive discussions. The links between Donald Trump and Russia were meticulously investigated by the liberal media, while the Hunter Biden–Ukraine deal was silenced by the same anti-corruption advocates. The extent of activities funded by the U.S. government through USAID and other instruments went beyond the humanitarian cause and became a tool for domestic rivalry. The lack of transparency of American and European liberal public institutions and international agencies caused legitimate accusations of corruption, overspending, and abuse for the sake of settling scores with conservative parties. In such a toxic political environment, traditional Christian and social democracies yielded the political scene to extremists from both sides. Several attempts on the life of Donald Trump by leftists echo the tactics of anarchists and communists in the 20th century. The Republican and Democratic parties have evolved over the years into two extreme camps—MAGA and Woke ideologies.
On the international scene, after the Cold War, neoconservatives advocated the primacy of the U.S. vision (or interests, for that matter) over international law, while liberals pushed the Western democracy model in all corners of the world, such as Afghanistan, without any realistic assessment of the geopolitical situation or the histories of the respective regions. The slightest doubt about such a policy would put opponents in the camp of reactionaries or advocates of totalitarian regimes. On many occasions, liberals and conservatives, for example, Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., would act in a similar manner, despite some ideological differences. Reshaping post-war borders in Europe, such as in the case of Kosovo, was a commonly championed cause. Later, the Kosovo case was used by Russia as justification for its invasion of Georgia and Ukraine.
Leftist forces in the West have also contributed to the rise of religious and nationalist extremists. The push for democratic elections in the Middle East brought the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and Hamas to power. But in Europe, election cancellation was justified due to legitimate concerns over election interference. In the Global South, Western powers preached for the support of international law in the case of Ukraine. In the meantime, the two-state solution for Palestine was rendered into empty diplomatic rhetoric. The PKK-linked Syrian rebels became a valuable Western asset despite the concerns of Turkey, a NATO member. The actions of Armenian irredentists occupying and destroying the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan were welcomed in many capitals as representing the cause of self-determination. The decisions of the International Criminal Court to prosecute some political leaders were cherry-picked in terms of support or neglect. The accusation of double standards became routine, and the order that was proposed to be ‘international’ and ‘’liberal’ lost both designations in the eyes of many.
The zenith of the crisis came with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The debate over the causes and resolution of the biggest geopolitical catastrophe since the Second World War resembles a conversation between two deaf people. On one side, liberals believe that the decision by the Russian leader Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine was determined by his desire to restore a Soviet-style empire, while others opine that the eastward expansion of NATO caused the move. However, a more in-depth analysis, considering, for example, Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech about the collapse of the USSR and NATO expansion, would speak in favor of both arguments. Thus, paradoxical as it might sound, the war was avoidable if realism had prevailed over idealism. Certainly, there were many signs that Russia was working towards the establishment of its dominance in the post-Soviet space, but whether the appropriate policy response to such a trend was to push Ukraine and Georgia into NATO is doubtful.
George W. Bush’s decision at the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008 to support the Ukrainian and Georgian NATO paths was supported by the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. When the Russian invasion became imminent, liberals in the U.S. and Europe were not only detached from reality but also reluctant to enforce their or Ukraine’s military capacity to challenge the Russian army. Nor did they exhibit any diplomatic skills towards negotiation. Hence, in the U.S. and Europe, a new force emerged that advocated for compromise with Russia. However, the proponents of a deal with Russia have also brought a false narrative aimed at justification of invasion and war crimes. Here, we should probably recall not only Munich in 1938, but also the Russo-Finish War of 1939–1940.
While the historic parallels are ultimately an intellectual exercise to help us to understand the dynamics of events, the goal should be to avoid a bigger catastrophe, which, I am afraid, is imminent for three reasons that were also present during the Interwar period, albeit with slightly different characteristics: polarization of the domestic political landscape in the West, coupled on one side with liberal intolerance and on the other with right radicalization; American isolationism; and global economic uncertainty.
When the League of Nations became defunct, war began in 1939. The chance that geopolitical actors will save the United Nations and reform the system is very slim today. There is only one factor that might prevent a new war, because it will probably make it the last one—nuclear weapons.
