Historical parallels are often attractive intellectual exercises in the sense that, whether they are reassuring or disturbing, they partly lift the veil on the future, whose unknown is particularly scary. Seem to be in known ground is reassuring, we then tend to twist the stick of the facts on the layer of the past. Karl Marx said that history is still repeating itself twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce. If this is the case, the questions that arise in the face of the reversals we are witnessing on the international scene between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, with Ukraine and Europe at the center of the game, are of two orders: we are witnessing an alliance reversal of the same nature as was the German-Soviet pact of 1939, prelude to the Second World War, and if not a farce? Or, another possibility, are we witnessing a new era that opens?
Let’s first see the protagonists: is Trump Hitler and Putin would he be a Stalin? Regarding the American president, this parallel borders on the Godwin point, that is to say the argument which consists in definitively disqualifying a person, or his thought, by comparing them to the Führer or Nazism. There have been some Hitlerian salutes around him (Elon Musk, Steve Bannon), and the interested party himself uses authoritarianism in matters of customs duties, budget cuts, administrative degreasing, moral code or censorship of new ideologies that have flowered in the United States.
However, after a few weeks of this mode of governance, we realize that the presidential desires are not necessarily orders. Trump must go back (customs duties) or compose with existing (judicial, especially) counter-powers. It is true that Hitler himself took five months to install his dictatorship after being, as the American president, democratically elected. We can still argue that Hitler and Trump have attempted both to use force to seize power or to keep it, the first in Bavaria by his missed putsch in Munich in 1923, the second with the assault of the Capitol by his supporters in January 2021.
The links between Putin and Xi Jinping much stronger than with Trump
Regarding Vladimir Putin, the parallel with Stalin, his declared hero, does not lack relevance. The designated successor of Boris Yeltsin in December 1999, the former KGB officer undoubtedly carried out a campaign of deadly attacks against residential buildings, then instrumentalized a war in Chechnya to establish an undisputed power by terror. Subsequently, he put in step the oligarchs who could possibly shade him.
The omnipotence of his power was ratified in February 2003, during a meeting at the Kremlin: the conduct of the policy returned to Putin, the oligarchs dealing with their affairs not without paying comfortable royalties to the master of cets. In the Soviet era, Stalin also established a climate of terror to impose himself on his peers after Lenin’s death, then he ensured a court of affidues in order to govern without sharing, not without having exterminated by the hunger of the millions of people before practicing great bloody terror. Apart from this dreadful human assessment and the financial dimension, the methods of power of yesterday and today are alike. Stalin was a character wheel, Putin has nothing to envy him in this area.
That said, can Trump and Putin sign a pact that would upset international relations, as their illustrious predecessors did in August 1939, to finally run Europe? Again the parallel is tempting. That the old continent embarrassments both Washington and Moscow is obvious. At the White House, it is the commercial competitor who displeases, in Kremlin, it is the democratic model. It is no longer a question of sharing Europe, but of putting it in step. For Trump, it is by weighing on trade, therefore on the economy of the European Union by the taxation of customs duties. For Putin, he must consolidate a safety cordon (Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine for the moment) capable of preventing democratic contagion in his empire. Incidentally, wanting to be each master in their pre -square can also encourage them to get along to let the other push their respective pawns, Trump by putting hands on Greenland and who knows Canada, Putin on Moldova with aims on Romania.
Like any historical parallel, it has its limits. We know that the German-Soviet pact of 1939 stole after the invasion of the USSR by German troops on June 21, 1941. It is difficult to imagine a similar scenario today between the United States and Russia. On the other hand, and it is essential, Hitler was interested in an alliance with Stalin to invade Western Europe without risking being taken back by the Red Army. A similar reasoning concerning China and Russia can certainly occupy Trump’s mind, but it would be a serious mistake on his part, of the same order as that committed by Hitler, prisoner of his obsession with the Judeo-Bolshevism which encouraged him to conquer eastern territories, which led him to his loss. The current, circumstantial rapprochement of Washington and Moscow will probably have no impact on the upcoming conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. If Trump imagines that he can buy the neutrality of Putinian Russia as part of the upcoming force test with Beijing, he is wrong. The links that unite Putin and Xi Jinping are much more solid and important than the interests that the Kremlin master has to get along in the long term with Trump.
New step in the evolution of our world
For years, Moscow and Beijing have been repeating that they want to establish a new world order. This speech is struggling to be heard by the Western powers, while the two capitals only make it dry in this sense. The ultimate goal is to chase the western influence of the rest of the world, as it has been reigning since the end of the Second World War. There is not the thickness of a sheet of cigarette paper between Putin and Xi Jinping on this subject. To think the opposite is to deeply ignore the political interests of the two countries concerned. Putinian Russia, nostalgic for the USSR, is in a perspective of historical revenge that only a good alliance with the powerful People’s Republic of China can make it glimpse. Beijing, for its part, continues to arrest to impose its order, first in its nearby stranger (Taiwan, Southeast Asia), then beyond relying on a “global south” whose Chinese communist regime claims to defend interests against Western imperialism, while looting its wealth.
José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher of the last century, estimated that to see his time it is necessary to look at it from afar. On condition, however, not to be mistaken. The thunderous and very destabilizing beginnings of Trump’s presidency should not blind us. We do not relocate the late 1930s in the end of the 1930s with the release of Munich and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, as many elements can make it believe, but rather a new step in the evolution of our world.
The war of 1914-1918, at the origin of all the dramas of the 20th century, resulted from a confrontation between nation states, which then extended with the Second World War. Nation states still exist, of course, but they tend to blend into large sets, of which the European Union is an example. We are, it seems, rather at the dawn of a confrontation between Empires, America on one side, China on the other, with in the middle of the immense Russia and Europe, both themselves in conflict, then the rest of the world as a battlefield, with all the annex wars that tear it. No more than the flourishing trade of the 19th century has softened the customs of the nation states and allowed to avoid the war of 1914-1918, current globalization is a factor of peace. It is the dimension of the confrontation that seems to change. Basically, it is not so much the history that is repeated as the behavior of men in the face of adversity, whatever it is, which is perpetuated.
*Journalist and specialist in communism, Thierry Wolton in 2024 published The return of barbaric times (Grasset).
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