1930s Revived? Donald Trump Raises Spectre Of Return To Dark Days

European territory annexed, democracies stunned into paralysis and Nazi salutes — Donald Trump’s shock re-engagement with Russia looms over a geopolitical landscape that, for many, has dangerous parallels with the rise of fascism and the West’s feeble response in the 1930s.

Though a century separates the two eras, historians on both sides of the Atlantic are plumbing the depths of Trump’s break with decades of US and European doctrine, at a time of military escalation worldwide.

“We go back to the 1930s because it was a crucial period, when democracies were put to the test and failed to stop dictators,” said John Connelly, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

“These days it’s acknowledged that they could have formed a united front against Hitler and avoid the war,” he told AFP.

As a case in point, for many, was Trump’s public slapdown of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, and his conciliatory tone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin despite three years of invasion, evoke Germany’s 1938 annexation of Sudetenland.

Hitler’s seizure of the territory in then-Czechoslovakia was contested but eventually accepted by European powers with the Munich Agreement — which failed to blunt the Fuhrer’s military aspirations.

Zelensky has voiced the same fear: that letting Putin keep seized Ukrainian territory will only embolden him to take other lands, such as in Moldova or even NATO- and EU-member Romania.

And Trump himself is insisting that he will take over Greenland “one way or another” — even though the island is part of Denmark, a founding NATO member along with the United States.

‘Inescapable’ comparison

“The comparison is inescapable because the major political players — in short, the rulers of the world — themselves refer to the development that led to the Second World War, which is Nazism,” said Johann Chapoutot, a French specialist in Nazi Germany.

Even before a suspected Nazi salute by Trump’s new billionaire advisor Elon Musk, the president’s firm term had already sparked intense debate over a fascist nature of his power.

Trump’s chief of staff in his first term, John Kelly, said Trump fits “the general definition of fascist”. Other ex-aides, including the head of the US military’s joint chiefs of staff under Trump’s first term, Mark Milley, agreed.

The debate has only grown with Trump’s disregard of congressional conventions since returning to the White House and moves to unilaterally upend public administrations as well as foreign policy.

Robert Paxton, an American political scientist and historian, has long resisted the use of “fascism”, saying it’s “a word that generates more heat than light”.

But he reversed his position with regards to Trump even before his re-election by just over half the American electorate last November.

Paxton pointed to Trump spurring his supporters on to assault the US Capitol in January 2021, as he sought to wrest power despite losing the election weeks earlier.

“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton told The New York Times in October.

“It’s the real thing. It really is.”

Brute force

Since returning to power, Trump’s dismissal of international law, his trade war with allies and foes alike, and his scorn of national sovereignty all evoke for some historians the “might makes right” mentality that dominated between the two World Wars.

“There are lots of identical boxes being ticked in terms of political inertia, the fragility of some accepted ideas, the trampling of international law, and the uninhibited use of force, of brutalness against his allies,” said Tal Bruttmann, a French historian and Holocaust expert.

“There are several definitions of fascism, but if they all have a cardinal virtue: it’s brute force,” he said.

But much has also changed over the past 100 years. Both the United States and Europe enjoy economic prosperity unimaginable in the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression, which provided fertile ground for the authoritarian regimes of Germany and Italy.

“The strange thing is that the United States elected a man hostile to democracy even as the economy is growing,” Connelly noted.

And after World War II, the international community forged institutions to ensure cooperation and avoid bloodshed including the United Nations and the World Bank.

The International Criminal Court and the European Court of Human Rights were also bolstered to encourage respect of the rule of law.

“After 1945, we decided to literally civilise the world, to make the world a ‘city’ were we would respect the law instead of killing each other,” Chapoutot said.

But these guardrails now appear to have taken a beating.

“These laws exist but the problem is that the Trump adminstration, to everyone’s surprise, has no respect for them,” Connelly said.

“The United States has not learned the lessons of history.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)