Alan Zendell, February 26, 2024

It’s a cliché that experience is the best teacher. As a tutor, I tell kids that learning from their mistakes is the best way to improve their skills. Every important scientific discovery was preceded by countless failed attempts. When the stakes are high, when the cost of failure is intolerable, those truisms usually spell the difference between success and catastrophe.

The elephant in the room is the two-sided coin of isolationism versus building alliances. America tried isolation after World War 1. Our soldiers returned home victorious to a country physically unscathed by war but mourning the deaths of more than 100,000 of its young men, and the survivors came back with horror stories of what they’d seen overseas. Given the devastation in Europe, and those big oceans that separated us from the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why Americans wanted to be rid of Europe’s problems, especially the millions of immigrants who’d recently fled Europe to settle here.

In the 1920s, isolationism went hand-in-hand with rising nationalism and reckless economic policies. Historians still debate how much isolationism contributed to the Great Depression, but there’s no doubt that twenty years of isolationism left most Americans eager to look the other way when Adolf Hitler turned the Weimar Republic into a Nazi war machine. Had we stood strong with our Allies in the 1930s and recognized the need for war preparedness, we might still have been involved in the second war, but with our Pacific Fleet still intact. Have we learned anything from that?

Almost a century later, those huge oceans no longer feel like protective moats. For seventy-five years, only Mutually Assured Destruction and world leaders on all sides who behaved sanely during crises kept the world from nuclear war. But the same M. A. D. that averted war left the world with a legacy of thousands of intercontinental nuclear missiles. We like to console ourselves by assuming that no sane leader would ever launch them, and therein lies the problem.

Should Donald Trump win the 2024 election, the two most powerfully armed countries in the world will be ruled by power-mad narcissists who have no regard for the people they govern. How do we know? Donald Trump thought sacrificing a half million Americans to COVID was a fair price to avoid any potential threat to our economy and the wealth of his benefactors. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cost nearly a half million Russian lives to fight a war whose only potential benefit is an expansion of Putin’s power. A pittance compared to the seven million Russians sacrificed by Josef Stalin, but a clear measure of the kind of adversary we face in Putin.

Europeans recognize Putin as this century’s Hitler, and not by coincidence, the thirty-one nations that comprise NATO have never been more united, militarily and economically. That remarkable fact by itself should be enough to define the threat Putin poses. Could anything else possibly result in the unity of the nations of western and central Europe? Unlike the people who like to talk tough and make threats on this side of the pond, Europeans have been killing each other since the Greek and Roman Empires. They understand the causes of war better than anyone, and collectively, they learned the lesson of appeasement the led to World War 2.

Joe Biden did a remarkable job of pulling NATO back together after Trump shattered our allies’ confidence in the United States, but it was the easily recognized threat of Russia that made his success possible. The handwriting on the wall couldn’t be clearer. Turning our backs on Europe and allowing Russia to crush Ukraine will have the same long-term result as failing to stop Germany from destroying Czechoslovakia did in 1938. Poland clearly sees it that way.

Why, then, you might ask, would the MAGA extremists in our Congress refuse to aid Ukraine after they’ve held off massive Russian attacks for two years? The MAGA movement has become a complex power cult. Like most cults, it’s comprised of a few people willing to do anything to increase their own wealth and power, and a large number of followers who seem to have lost the ability to think for themselves and recognize their real self-interest. Witness the nearly 500 people serving prison sentences for attacking the Capitol who only now realize how they were deceived by Trump.

The most dangerous aspect of the MAGA movement’s attempt to dominate America’s future is its blind loyalty to an amoral sociopath who is mentally ill, unwilling to learn from the experience and errors of people far smarter and more qualified to lead than he is, and worst of all, who is in Vladimir Putin’s thrall. If it’s not clear, I’m talking about Donald Trump. A Trump victory in November would put Europe, America, and the entire world at risk.