In August 1968, as my family took a summerlong camping trip through Europe, 500,000 troops from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down what Moscow perceived as the country’s intolerable deviation from its leadership of the Warsaw Pact nations.
It was tempting at the time to view this as a successful demonstration of Soviet force. After all, Moscow not only halted the rapid liberalization of Czechoslovakia—which had been driven by popular demands for expanded political freedoms and economic reforms—but had gotten other Warsaw Pact allies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, to help it do so.
In August 1968, as my family took a summerlong camping trip through Europe, 500,000 troops from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries rolled into Czechoslovakia to put down what Moscow perceived as the country’s intolerable deviation from its leadership of the Warsaw Pact nations.
It was tempting at the time to view this as a successful demonstration of Soviet force. After all, Moscow not only halted the rapid liberalization of Czechoslovakia—which had been driven by popular demands for expanded political freedoms and economic reforms—but had gotten other Warsaw Pact allies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, to help it do so.
In the fullness of time, though, history has come to see the events of that fateful summer very differently. And how could it fail to do so? Two decades later, an even greater wave of popular protests on behalf of political freedoms, known as the Velvet Revolution, arose in Czechoslovakia and quickly spread throughout Moscow’s client states in Eastern Europe, bringing about an end to four decades of communism in the region.
Much has been written in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s astonishingly naked bid to bully Denmark—and with it, all of Europe—into accepting a U.S. takeover of the world’s largest island, Greenland, with numerous commentators concluding that his moves have permanently ruptured the West’s trans-Atlantic alliance system. But few have looked back to the Soviet precedent, which perhaps offers the surest key to understanding how a decadent superpower’s final years of domineering sway might play out.
In some ways, the dissolution of the U.S.-led order that was patiently and assiduously built in the decades following World War II has already been swifter and more surprising, not to mention more gratuitous, than the fate that befell the Soviet empire. In the span of just a few days at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—during which Trump made shocking displays of grandiosity, arrogance, and incoherence—the United States was rebuked by Canada, its most closely allied neighbor, and saw its Greenland demands rebuffed by a newly energized Europe.
One may feel revulsion toward the Soviet Union for its 1968 crackdown in Czechoslovakia, but it is hard to minimize the seriousness of the ideological stakes. Moscow was properly alarmed that if the Czech people were able to achieve what they called “socialism with a human face”—which meant being able speak their minds publicly, having a press that could print what it wanted, and living under an economic system organized around more politically autonomous labor unions—then Soviet allies, and inevitably the Soviet Union itself, would become fatally infected by the subversive spread of new rights.
What is worse is that this history is being repeated less as outright tragedy than as tragic farce. However repugnant, the threat of ideological contamination from a Czech revolt was a coherent motive for a crackdown and stands in contrast to the incoherence of Trump’s various Greenland bid rationales.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev complained bitterly to his Czech counterpart, Alexander Dubcek, about the “defamatory ravings” of the Czech people against the Soviet Union. But in Davos, all of the ravings came from the leader of the alliance itself. Trump browbeat Washington’s European allies, warning them that their greatest threat lay in the immigration of people from the nonwhite world. (Never mind that Russia, a revanchist former superpower, is waging an extraordinarily costly and brutal war of territorial aggrandizement within the borders of Europe itself.)
Trump claimed that he needed to take ownership of Greenland in order to strengthen the defenses of NATO, and hence of the West, even as he pursues measure after measure to slacken U.S. commitments to the military protection of Europe.
To support his demands for Greenland, Trump repeatedly invoked threats posed to the West by Russia, which he then invited to his nebulous Board of Peace—an organization that one European democracy after another declined to join.
The other big threat Trump invoked was, of course, China. But he has undermined any coherent claim he might have had on this subject through his own deep ambivalence toward democratic rule as well as his shocking and repeated insistence that fossil fuels are the keys to future Western prosperity.
Meanwhile, as every European, including Germany’s best carmakers, knows, China is running away with many of the genuine industries of the future, including electric vehicles, advanced batteries, and renewable sources of energy, such as wind and solar.
It is unclear how the future of the West will play out from here. What seems certain, though, is that a trans-Atlantic project that began half a millennium ago—with the shipment of what became millions of enslaved Africans to the New World, helping to make the settlement of European migrants viable and lucrative—has entered onto an uncertain new path after 80 years of U.S. leadership. As a result of the deep wounds inflicted by Trump’s geopolitical follies on the once healthy political and economic relationships that united peoples across the North Atlantic, uncertainties abound almost everywhere one looks.
In city after city that my family visited in 1968, European citizens demonstrated en masse against the outrage of the Czechoslovakia invasion. In the wake of Trump’s would-be territorial grab of Greenland, it was Europe’s leaders themselves who stood up. After one Trump insult after another, they seem to have finally understood that the United States they once knew and relied on for military, economic, and political leadership has vanished and will probably never fully return. Will Europe be able to summon the will and wherewithal to build a sufficiently robust security architecture to protect itself from ongoing predations by Russia and from a vindictive Trump?
Will European democracies survive the tempting rightward drift underway in much of the continent, which both Russia and the Trump administration have each, in their own ways, encouraged?
Will China plunge the world into even greater atavism by invoking Trump’s example in claiming rightful dominance of its hemisphere and in seeking to absorb Greenland? If so, a war to take control of Taiwan would shatter the security architecture of Asia and bluntly challenge U.S. power in the world, regardless of whether Washington defends the island.
Will so-called middle powers, led by countries such as Canada, be able to pick up the pieces of a rapidly deteriorating global order in the way that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suggested they should in Davos? Or will they manage little more than small, ad hoc, and circumstantial coalitions that can barely keep up with the sweep of events?
Finally, will the scores of countries of the global south, where the world’s population is increasingly concentrated, manage to eke out an economic way forward for themselves amid the chaos and waste of spreading war and rampant defense spending? This should be considered more than an afterthought, especially in light of the increasing stinginess toward economic assistance and rejection of global migration seen in the rich world.
In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping invoked the advent of a new era of “great changes unseen in a century.” He seems to have had the strengthening of China’s relationship with Russia and the relative decline of the West in mind. At the time, that seemed excessively smug to me, but given the decay in U.S. leadership and the turmoil it could unleash, to compare today with a previous era of world wars and a great depression no longer feels so farfetched.
