On 1 September 1939, early in the morning, the superannuated German warship, the Schleswig-Holstein, a ship built before World War I and already obsolete by the First World War, and supposedly in the harbour of the Free City of Danzig for a ceremonial visit, opened fire on a nearby Polish military installation, thereby initiating a global conflict that lasted just short of six years.

That war brought about the deaths of many tens of millions – military, civilian alike – including the millions killed through a sustained, industrial-scale genocidal fury, as well as the destruction of much of the continent’s infrastructure. (Danzig had been separated from Germany as part of the peace arrangements after 1918, in order to give the new nation of Poland open access to the sea.)

In the end, fighting raged from the far northern Arctic snows to the North African desert; from flyspeck Pacific Ocean atolls to the first (and hopefully, only) use of two newly constructed atomic weapons through a massive research effort. And with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese on the deck of the American battleship, the Missouri, sitting at anchor in Tokyo Bay, the world – supposedly – was finally at rest from further fighting. Of course, there were many smaller wars, rebellions and conflicts yet to come, but not the big one.

Total war in Europe became inevitable once Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s territorial integrity and independence after Germany had completed its bloodless annexation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, to stave off further expansionist demands or actual attacks.

That safety guarantee to Poland had come about after Britain and France’s appeasement of German leader Adolph Hitler’s demands for Czechoslovakia’s surrender of its German-speaking regions, the Sudetenland. That, in turn, had occurred after the merger of Austria with Germany in 1938. And that had taken place after Germany had sent its army back into Germany’s Rhineland in 1936, a region whose forced demilitarisation by Germany had been a condition of the Versailles Peace Treaty, signed after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and in which some parts of Germany had been handed to the newly revived, independent Polish state.

This latter territorial change had separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, thereby helping fuel the revanchist fervour that had led to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Meanwhile, in East Asia, a growing Japanese militarism fuelled a desire to expand the country’s sphere of influence and control over resources such as oil, tin, rubber, and iron ore. Once the Germans had conquered the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and the British were seemingly on the ropes, the Japanese first seized control of French Indochina. Then, in the days following its attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the Japanese quickly conquered the Dutch East Indies, the American-controlled Philippines, and British Malaya, in quick order. The Pearl Harbor attack drew the seemingly rapidly expanding war that continued for four more years – until the Americans’ use of two atomic weapons, followed by the USSR’s late entry into the Pacific war, finally sealed the fate of the Japanese.

And so, on 1 September 2019, representatives of many of the participating nations came together in Warsaw, Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of this global near-apocalypse. Invited as a guest of honour by Polish President Andrzej Duda, American President Donald Trump ultimately decided to skip the entire event – on the thin pretext that the famous “stable genius” needed to be focused like a veritable laser beam on Hurricane Dorian’s possible landfall on the southeastern coast of the US.

As a result, Vice President Mike Pence was substituted to fill in for the absent president in Warsaw. While Germany’s Angela Merkel arrived for the ceremony, the Poles had chosen not to invite the Russians to this particular event. This may not have been particularly surprising, given that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed their infamous non-aggression pact in 1939 that included the division of Poland between the two nations and the Soviet Union’s reannexation of the three Baltic nations, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Merkel was in Warsaw to offer her nation’s apologies for the devastation of Poland and the murder of many of its citizens. The result of the pact and the quick conquest of Poland gave the Germans a free hand in the West, allowing them to defeat the allies in the spring of 1940.

The president, of course, per his usual habit, had sent out a plethora, a welter of confusing, conflicting, and even obviously fraudulent messages about the impending storm, including falsified weather charts that showed it was poised to threaten parts of the country many hundreds of miles from any conceivable landfall. The point seemed to be an attempt to justify his need to stay in Washington to keep his hands resolutely on the tiller of state. Just like in the movies. Perhaps he even saw himself being played on-screen by Harrison Ford or Sean Connery.

Of course, the problem is that real life isn’t the movies. Crucially, it turned out that the president actually was to be found on one of his personally owned golf courses, swinging away at the little white ball, and chalking up mulligans by the score, even as the occasional photo of him being briefed by FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and other senior officials was released, as well as images of him replete with one of his falsified hurricane path charts. This one was complete with an extra trajectory inked in to include Alabama, drawn with the kind of black felt tip marker he uses to sign big, important things. (Just out of curiosity, since whenever and wherever the president travels anywhere White House secure communications always follow, it seems very unclear why he could not follow the adventures of this hurricane, even if he was standing on a foreign golf course.)

Anyway, while this outrageous farce in Washington was playing out, Vice President Mike Pence was at the Warsaw ceremonies instead. Unlike what Donald Trump might well have said there (he had, after all, tweeted his “congratulations” to Poland on this solemn anniversary of a horrific event), Pence delivered a rather blunt appraisal of Russian actions and intentions globally, words significantly at variance with Trump’s own loving embrace of Vladimir Putin as a leader who naturally belongs back at the head table at the next G7, er G8, in 2020 to take place, if Trump has its way, at Trump’s own Doral Golf Club in Florida.

More cynical, or perhaps ultrarealist, observers are beginning to see if there isn’t a bit of daylight poking through between the president and his vice president on the hot button issue of dealing with the Russians. Such a position that could be assumed to be in sync with real dyed-in-the-wool, conservative Republicans – precisely the kind of supporters needed for a 2024 presidential bid by Pence, something assumed to be virtually inevitable.

Inevitably, too, the vice president had been cajoled (or ordered, or at least bullied) into staying at the Trump-owned golf course in Ireland in Doonbeg, so conveniently located just many hours away (including two separate motorcades and an air flight) from Dublin, where he was to meet Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar. Previous vice presidents on such visits usually stayed at the American ambassador’s residence in Dublin, just a few terribly inconvenient minutes from the Irish prime minister’s office.

Given that Doonbeg has, according to financial reports filed with the Irish government, been losing money for years, any encouragement to have the whole kit and caboodle of a vice president’s official team staying in Doonbeg to help with Trump’s income flow seems a pretty fair version of “snollygostering”, the kind of effort by a president to earn personal money from government activity, something that seems in contravention of both US law and the American Constitution.

While the president has been busy confusing hurricane trajectories, releasing super-secret intelligence photographs of Iranian missile test sites, and toggling back and forth dizzyingly on trade war policy with the Chinese, the larger strategic vision of the US has been allowed to drift out of sight. The post-World War II world that had been so painfully (and hopefully) constructed on top of the ashes of the earlier world continues to suffer willful destruction at the hand of Donald Trump. As commentator and analyst Fareed Zakaria has written in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in his article, “The Self-Destruction of American Power”:

“Some time in the past two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unravelling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come, but at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

“As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington – from an unprecedented position – mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.”

Zakaria wound up his analysis, arguing:

“The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. Foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put ‘America first’. But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat) and it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions – such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea – what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.”

What should be added to Zakaria’s cogent critique of the Trumpian world view is that it is also totally, astonishingly, uninformed about any understanding of how the architecture of the global system came together after 1945, in the wake of the massive global conflict, in order to prevent a repeat of such a catastrophe yet again. But, with no understanding of or interest in history or its challenges and successes, the narrative and metaphor of Donald Trump’s presidency will, more and more, come to be one of the biblical story of Samson. As we all remember at the end of the story, yes, he pulled down the pillars of the Philistines’ temple – but he pulled them down upon himself. DM