OPINION:

The world is at the precipice of World War III and American leadership is missing. The unjustified and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, along with the increased campaign of aggression and intimidation toward Taiwan and Australia at the direction of President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have brought increased tension and uncertainty to the European Union and the Asia-Pacific regions respectively.

In fact, the world has not seen such destabilizing actions since pre-WWII brought on by the actions of Germany, Italy and Japan. Some view these moves as a prelude to WWIII.

Since the end of WWII, the world has not had a major war between strong militarized nations. Much of this is due to the formation of NATO and the security alliances created between member nations. The United States has played a pivotal role in maintaining world peace through leadership and forging strong security alliances with countries inside and outside of the NATO umbrella. 

Countries that the U.S. has strong cooperation and inter-operative security relationships with outside of the NATO umbrella are Japan, South Korea, India and Australia, which by working together helps maintain world stability. The United States leadership along with our allies have established and have worked to maintain a rule based world order that honors international laws, treaties and national sovereignty.

Mr. Putin’s maniacal attack on Ukraine is strictly a move to recreate what he views as the lost motherland due to the financial breakup of Russia. Thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been murdered to date by Mr. Putin’s actions. His motive is solely to appease his narcissistic ambitions to recreate “Mother Russia.” 

Ukraine became a sovereign and independent nation after the breakup of the failed Soviet Union. The Soviet Union failed because it forced its citizens to serve the socialist authoritarian government instead of a government protecting the rights of the people, and went broke in the process. History has moved on. Mr. Putin too, should move on to make the remaining parts of Russia a productive member of responsible nations in the world and stop being the pariah of the northern Euro-Asia region. His actions will go down in history and face the same fate paralleling other irrational and egomaniac authoritarians such as Hitler and Mussolini.

The rapid response of disdain, condemnation and sanctions evoked by the many nations of the world, including all the EU, U.S., U.K., Canada, Latin America and many Asian nations, should be proof enough for Mr. Putin to reverse course and withdraw from Ukraine. The message is clear, nation invasion and destabilizing actions in the 21st century are not acceptable. China’s Mr. Xi should take note.

At the southern end of the region, China’s provocation and rhetoric toward the nation of Taiwan have increased tensions in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s intentional and belligerent actions that violates Taiwan’s sovereign airspace and economic exclusive zones are attempts to intimidate the Taiwanese government and are nothing more than a bullying attempt to force unification with mainland China. Beijing’s actions are also increasing tensions in the region as China taunts other sovereign nations such as Australia, Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines in the same fashion. This again is a narcissistic desire for Mr. Xi and the CCP to reestablish China as the world hegemon.

The recent CCP sponsored social media sites — which praise the assassination of the respected former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe, while also encouraging stabbing to death Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to aid the unification of Taiwan and China — only increase the tension in the region and further isolates China.

The actions of both Russia and China are creating a destabilizing tectonic shift in the world order not seen since WWII. At the conclusion of WWII and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, America became the sole superpower in the world. The strong leadership of the United States along with its allies is what many say kept the world peace dividend in place since then. Unfortunately, America’s leadership on the world stage has weakened and lost its focus, thus creating a vacuum which nature abhors. That vacuum is in danger of being filled by two of the world’s strong authoritarian leaders.

It’s time for America to regain its focus and work at shoring up that peace dividend by reestablishing strong partnerships with like-minded countries along with clear, concise foreign policies that do not change with each new administration. 

If Congress puts forth a long-reaching foreign policy that promotes peace to guide each subsequent administration it will reassure our allies and adversaries alike of America’s stance on future foreign policy issues. We need to have a united front and let Mr. Putin’s Russia and Mr. Xi’s China understand that disrupting the world order will have severe consequences for them both. All nations should be allowed to exist in the 21st century, and the threat of an invading force desiring to conquer foreign lands should be relegated too and remain in the history books of past centuries.

• Ted S. Yoho, D.V.M., was a member of Congress for Florida’s 3rd Congressional District from 2013 to 2021 and was chair Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific in the 115th Congress.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world seemed more peaceful and American power more solidly entrenched than ever before. Twenty-two years into the new century, Americans face the most threatening international environment since the darkest days of the Cold War. The war in Ukraine threatens the post-Cold War order in Europe. Iran is well on its way to a nuclear bomb, and China’s shadow looms larger than ever over Taiwan.

The record of American statecraft since 2000 has been, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved immense human and economic costs even as Iranian power surged across the Middle East. America’s failure to enforce trade rules against China facilitated the rise of a hostile communist rival while undermining political support for free trade in both political parties. What posterity will likely regard as the Chamberlainesque responses of American presidents in both parties to Russia’s growing assertiveness allowed Vladimir Putin to rebuild the Kremlin’s power.

Today, China, Russia and Iran are deepening their mutual ties and doubling down on their assault on the U.S. and its alliances. Meanwhile, what some Washington circles still call the liberal world order looks more illiberal and less orderly every day. In the Middle East, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya are plagued by conflict and militias. In Asia, Sri Lanka has collapsed, and Myanmar’s civil war grows uglier and more intractable by the day. The threat from North Korea continues to grow. Europe may be facing its worst energy and economic crisis since the 1940s. Jihadist violence is raging across Africa as food price inflation and supply disruptions from the war in Ukraine leave millions vulnerable to famine and want.

China, Russia and Iran have problems of their own, and their continuing rise is by no means foreordained. But if world events continue on their present trajectory, our current decade could fall into chaos and conflict as destructive as the 20th century’s world wars. To stop the grim downhill slide, American foreign policy will have to change course.

One idea in particular is going to have to go. Following the Cold War, the American foreign-policy establishment embraced the tragically misguided belief that we could set aside traditional forms of great-power competition and balance-of-power diplomacy while focusing our efforts on “global issues” like human rights, climate change and the construction of an ever-stronger set of international institutions operating under an ever-more-pervasive system of international law.

That destructive consensus rested on two mistaken perceptions. The first was that America’s victory in the Cold War was final and America’s economic and military power plus our diplomatic prestige ensured our unchallengeable supremacy for decades.

The second was that the so-called rules-based world order we were using our power to build would be popular abroad and uncontroversial at home. The economic benefits of the free-market, free-trading world system were so great that no serious country abroad or political movement at home would be insane enough to challenge it. And the elegant international system was going to be so ethically beautiful and politically inspiring that countries all over the world would be irresistibly drawn into it.

The war in Afghanistan illustrates the feckless nature of two decades of American foreign policy. In Afghanistan, we expanded our objectives, and our war aims shifted from removing and punishing a government that sheltered the terrorists who engineered 9/11 to changing the culture and political system of a society very different from our own.

Unfortunately, in the midst of our inspiring campaigns of institution-building and civil-society promotion, we neglected one tiny detail: We never developed and implemented a military strategy capable of winning the war.

The same disastrous mix of mission creep and strategic incompetence that wrecked our Afghan policy threatens our global strategy today. Our plans for world order grow increasingly ambitious and elaborate even as the security underpinnings of that system become dangerously weak. Global issues are real, and hard power on its own is never enough. But if you don’t get the hard-power issues right, nothing else matters much.

Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 general election by a landslide to Ronald Reagan, so it’s difficult to understand why Joe Biden continues to follow the Carter ‘malaise’ playbook today. Bettman via Getty Images/Shutterstock Composite: Mark Kelly

(THE CONVERSATION) Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked in May 2022 how Russia could claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis, since Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.

Lavrov’s response: “So what if Zelenskyy is Jewish? The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine.” In fact, he claimed, Hitler himself had “Jewish blood,” and “the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

Lavrov deliberately used offensive language aimed at a Ukrainian president who happens to be Jewish; his comments sparked an international uproar. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, said in a statement, “The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

Antisemitism has been used as a weapon against leading Jewish politicians in Europe for over a century, no matter how assimilated they were into their respective societies. As I wrote in my book, “In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism,” verbal attacks were often followed by physical assaults, and Jews served as scapegoats for all kinds of societal ills.

In Germany, the three most prominent Jewish leaders after World War I – the communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg; the moderate socialist founder of the Free State of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner; and the moderately conservative German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau – were all assassinated only a few months after they reached the heights of their political careers.

Political murders

Polish-born Luxemburg was assassinated in January 1919, together with her non-Jewish comrade-in-arms, Karl Liebknecht. Her body was found in Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. Both were leaders of the newly established Communist Party in Germany and hoped for a socialist uprising in the early days of the Weimar Republic.

Even though Luxemburg distanced herself from her Jewish heritage and refused to recognize any “special suffering of the Jews,” anti-Jewish tropes were often part of the fierce attacks against her.

Antisemitism played a much larger role in the attacks on Germany’s highest-ranking Jewish politician, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.

“Knock down Walther Rathenau – the God-damned Jewish sow!” was one of the most vitriolic anti-Jewish slogans of hate in the early years of the Weimar Republic. In fear for Rathenau’s life, Albert Einstein and the president of Germany’s Zionist organization, Kurt Blumenfeld, spent a long night at Rathenau’s house, trying to convince him that Germany was not ready for a Jewish foreign minister and that he should resign.

Rathenau did not heed their advice. Two months later he was shot dead.

‘King of the Jews’

The case of Kurt Eisner, the founder of the Free State of Bavaria, deserves special attention for its connection to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Eisner took office as prime minister of Bavaria – equivalent to a state governor in the U.S. – in November 1919 as the result of a peaceful revolution that ended the 700-year rule of the Wittelsbach dynasty. The last Bavarian king fled the country. With the help of newly established councils of workers, farmers and soldiers, the socialist Eisner proclaimed the Free State of Bavaria, a semi-autonomous part of Germany.

Eisner was the first Jew ever to be head of a German state. He had to deal with a campaign of defamation that came from well beyond the narrow circles of dedicated right-wing extremists.

The Berlin-born Eisner was widely described by his detractors as an East European Jew whose real name was sometimes given allegedly as Salomon Kosmanowsky, Koschinsky or another supposedly Jewish-sounding name. Among those who denounced him were respected conservative politicians and the papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII.

In Eisner’s papers in a Berlin archive is a bundle of two thick files with hundreds of mostly anonymous antisemitic hate letters against Eisner, which contain frequent incitements to violence. They include a postcard addressed to the “Hebrew Residence” and a letter to the “King of the Jews” which says: “Control yourself, or disappear to the country where you belong, to Palestine! The broad masses of the German people will eradicate you, something one person can accomplish!”

The tenor of all the letters was that Eisner is, as one letter said, “after all, a Jew, not a German.”

It was by no means only radical antisemites who participated in this campaign. The writer and later Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann was the son-in-law of the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim, one of the few Jewish professors at the University of Munich. Despite Mann’s Jewish-born wife, Katia, and his connection to the Pringsheims, Mann expressed his disgust about the prominent role of Jews and the “big-city piss elegance of the Jew-boy” leading to a “Jew regiment.”

And as early as Nov. 8, 1918, Mann asked in his diary: “Both Munich and Bavaria governed by Jewish scribblers. How long will the city put up with that?”

Not very long, indeed.

Three months after he became prime minister during the revolution, Eisner was assassinated while on the way to the Bavarian parliament with a letter of resignation in his pocket, after his party had lost the subsequent elections.

The Bavarian revolution was followed by two short-lived Soviet-style republics with a few additional prominent Jewish leaders, and a brutal conservative reaction. These developments might have remained nothing more than a footnote in history were it not for the fact that all of this was witnessed by a young Adolf Hitler, who had just returned to Munich from fighting in World War I.

Hitler would later claim in “Mein Kampf” that it was the “Jewish rule” he had witnessed during this time that inspired his early political activities including his leadership role of the Nazi party, founded in Munich shortly after the Bavarian revolution.

From Munich to Kyiv

After the Holocaust, European Jewry was reduced to a mere shadow of its prewar size. There were only a handful of Jewish political leaders, among them a couple of short-term prime ministers of France, and most prominently Bruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983. In contrast to Rathenau, who was shot after three months in office, Kreisky was reelected several times.

Official antisemitism was taboo in post-Holocaust Europe, and the voices who criticized Kreisky for his Jewish background did so indirectly. Kreisky had a difficult relationship with his own Jewish heritage. He invited former Nazis to his government and distanced himself from Austria’s Jewish community. He called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin “a little lawyer from Warsaw with a soul of a small-minded shopkeeper” while at the same time becoming the first West European politician to embrace PLO leader Yasser Arafat. The most famous Jew in postwar Vienna, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and Kreisky shared a well-known aversion for each other.

The first Jewish leader of a European state who speaks openly about his own Jewishness is Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy is president of a country that is certainly not free of its own antisemitic tradition.

The antisemitic attacks on Zelenskyy, who might one day be remembered as the most popular Jewish hero of this era, now come from outside the country. As a historian of European Jewish history and antisemitism, I believe they are designed to foment hate and undermine his extraordinary leadership in the face of an unsolicited attack on a free nation.

The fate of today’s Jewish politicians in Europe will most likely not be as tragic as Eisner’s, Rathenau’s and Luxemburg’s. But as the Russian attacks on Zelenskyy demonstrate, in times of conflict, the Jewish background of a leader can be used as part of a broader political and wartime strategy of defamation.

This latest version, originating in the Kremlin, is just a new, perfidious variant of the old virus called antisemitism.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/russias-antisemitism-aimed-at-ukraines-zelenskyy-is-just-the-kremlin-variant-of-a-very-old-european-virus-183592.