Tag: German army
Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine
“The history of all coalitions is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.” Thus said Winston Churchill, who knew whereof he spoke. This summer of discontent has been one punctuated by complaints: from Ukrainian officials desperate for weapons, and from Western diplomats and soldiers who think that the Ukrainians are ungrateful for the tanks, training, and other goods they have received.
Most of the Western sputtering occurred in and around last month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, through anonymous
How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany
The short-lived Weimar Republic—which spanned the years after Germany’s defeat in World War I until 1933, when Hitler came to power—has become a paradigmatic example of democratic collapse. That has brought it renewed attention at this moment in America, when democracy is under threat from illiberal, would-be-authoritarian forces. We should rightly be suspicious of facile comparisons, especially the casual use of fascism as an imprecise epithet, yet Weimar’s fate provides us with some instructive parallels and important warning signals.
Nine Books to Read to Understand the War in Ukraine
Kyiv is burning. I am struggling to explain this to my young children; they know that I wrote a book about the 2013–14 Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square. They were too small then to understand that their parents’ friends and colleagues were being shot at by snipers. They do know, though, that I dedicated the book to them, “in hope of a better world to come.” And they have had their own experience of post-Maidan Ukraine, playing