Seventy-five years ago
today, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, kicking off World War II in
Europe. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union would join and invade
Poland too. In 1941, Adolf Hitler would turn on the Soviet Union,
driving that country to the Allied powers. Today, Russia, the
successor state to the Soviet Union, still uses its role in the
latter part of World War II to frame its wider foreign policy.
Putin once said World War II
gave Russia a “great moral right” to a “security strengthening”
foreign policy because of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi
Germany.
In the United States, meanwhile, politicians don’t tend to
invoke World War II in the same way. Nevertheless, America’s role
in World War II (which began in December 1941 after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor), for better or worse, also shapes America’s
foreign policy today. It’s commitments to the United Nations, and
to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), are directly
linked to World War II. Those commitments haven’t been revisited
even though the war ended nearly 70 years ago.
NATO may have been useful
during the Cold War, too, but the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years
ago. Since then, NATO’s been used to enrich Western military
interventions in places like Kosovo and Libya, the latter of which
has contributed to a deteriorating security situaiton in North
Africa and the Middle East, but hasn’t appeared necessary as a
strictly self-defense alliance. Recent events in Ukraine, where
Russia, NATO’s historical nemesis, has seized Crimea and generally
treated Ukraine’s sovereignty as optional while operating in and
near the country, have led NATO to announce the creation of a
“rapid
response force.” Yet while Russia’s actions in Ukraine may
threaten the interest of the European Union, they have nothing to
do with the security of any NATO country. Ukraine has warned that
its conflict with Russia could be the biggest since World War II,
but several months into the crisis it continues to directly involve
only two countries, Ukraine and Russia.
The notion that the U.S. “ought” to be concerned about Russia in
Ukraine isn’t based on any contemporary political configuration but
on the legacy of World War II (which happened to start when an
aggressive country began seizing land it said its countrymen lived
in) and the Cold War that followed. So the United States’
commitment in 1941 to defeat Japan, which attacked it, and its
allies Germany and Italy, has led to Europe, which was on the verge
of being overwhelmed by the Nazis before the U.S. entered World War
II, to continue to rely on American military power and expenditures
to advances its own agendas. It’s an arrangement that ought to have
been revisited decades ago. More than 100,000 U.S. troops remain in
Germany and Italy.
World War II didn’t just
have a lasting impact on international politics, it had a profound
effect on the people who lived through it, as all wars do. My
81-year-old dad, whose novel about life in post-war Poland we
adapted into a
graphic novel about jazz, sex, money, and dodging the American
draft, talks about World War II every day. He spent the first two
years of the war living under Soviet occupation. You can download
the first two issues free here.
When the United States and its allies, including the Soviet
Union, won World War II those people living in areas “liberated” by
the Soviet Union lost. The countries of the eastern bloc spent the
next 40+ years under communist rule if not occupation. None of them
were communist before World War II, and a number, like Poland, had
been invaded by the Soviet Union when it was allied with the Nazis.
One of the unintended consequences of World War II was the burden
of a half century of communism over half of Europe.
I uploaded a six-page selection from the third issue of Skyliner
about “War Criminals” that illustrates what some of the aftermath
of World War II looked like in places like Poland. You can check
out the pages
here.
As you may or may not know, last week I launched a Kickstarter
to print Skyliner as a graphic novel. You can
check that out here and watch the video with my dad below:
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1pB5LTQ
via IFTTT