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100 years on from the Armistice, is Europe headed for another Great War?

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« on: November 12, 2018, 02:10:05 pm »


from The New York Times…

Trump's Nationalism, Rebuked at World War I Ceremony,
Is Reshaping Much of Europe


As world leaders marked the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War,
President Emmanuel Macron of France declared that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.”


By PETER BAKER and ALISSA J. RUBIN | Sunday, November 11, 2018

President Donald J. Trump arriving at Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris on Sunday as part of the commemoration the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.
President Donald J. Trump arriving at Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris on Sunday as part of the commemoration the 100th anniversary
of the end of World War I. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.


PARIS — Dozens of leaders from around the globe marched in the soaking rain down the Champs Élysée on Sunday, expressing solidarity for an international order that had its origins in the end of a world war 100 years ago, an order now under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Only after these leaders arrived by foot at the Arc de Triomphe did President Trump show up, protected from the rain as he made an individual entrance. A few minutes later, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did the same.

For Mr. Trump, at least, the separate arrival was attributed to security concerns. But somehow it felt apt that these two leaders would not arrive with the crowd.

No one has done more to break up the postwar global system in the last couple of years than Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. As the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I was commemorated on Sunday, Mr. Trump's brand of “America First” nationalism was rebuked from the podium while he sat stone-faced and unmoved, alienated from some of America's strongest allies, including his French hosts.

But while he may have been out of step with many of the leaders gathered around him, Mr. Trump remains at the vanguard of forces that are redefining the Western political paradigm in countries like Poland, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. In Britain and Germany, two of the Continent's major powers, nationalist movements are gaining influence.


Led by President Emmanuel Macron of France, world leaders marched down the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Sunday. — Photograph: Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
Led by President Emmanuel Macron of France, world leaders marched down the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Sunday.
 — Photograph: Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


So a ceremony meant to celebrate the ties that bind the world today in effect showcased the divisions that are pulling it apart.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a speech at the Arc de Triomphe, welcoming the leaders and extolling an old system now under siege. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying: ‘Our interest first. Who cares about the others?’”

Recalling the forces that led to World War I, Mr. Macron warned that “the old demons” have been resurfacing and declared that “giving into the fascination for withdrawal, isolationism, violence and domination would be a grave error that future generations would very rightly make us responsible for.”

Mr. Trump, who recently declared himself “a nationalist”, appeared grim as he listened to the speech through an earpiece and clapped only tepidly afterward. He had no speaking role and made no mention of the issues Mr. Macron raised during an address later at a cemetery for American soldiers killed in the war.

The ceremony led by Mr. Macron encapsulated the tension in the international arena as Mr. Trump seeks to rewrite the rules that have governed the world in recent decades. He has abandoned international agreements on trade, nuclear proliferation and climate change, and disparaged alliances like NATO and the European Union.

On the campaign trail this fall, Mr. Trump railed against what he called the “rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists,” as he put it at a rally in Houston. “You know what a globalist is, right? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can't have that.”


President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived late to the ceremony, and shook Mr. Trump's hand before taking his place. — Photograph: Pool picture by Ludovic Marin.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived late to the ceremony, and shook Mr. Trump's hand before taking his place.
 — Photograph: Pool picture by Ludovic Marin.


Mr. Macron has now, in effect, given a rebuttal. In addition to the speech, he also used an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN that aired on Sunday to define himself as “a patriot” rather than a “nationalist.”

“I do defend my country,” Mr. Macron said. “I do believe that we have a strong identity. But I'm a strong believer in cooperation between the different peoples, and I’m a strong believer of the fact that this cooperation is good for everybody, where the nationalists are sometimes much more based on a unilateral approach and the law of the strongest, which is not my case.”

Despite the friction with Mr. Macron, Mr. Trump's views have been embraced by other Western leaders, some of whom, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, have made an anti-immigrant stance the keystone of their policy.

“He's not isolated,” said Bruce Jentleson, a scholar at Duke University, citing nationalist politicians across Europe. “They've all benefited from him as precedent.” Other leaders have even adopted and adapted Trump phrases like “fake news” and “America First” for their countries.

But, Mr. Jentleson said, it “mostly gives him second-tier players like Poland, Hungary, Italy, and not the big guys like Germany and France.”

And even some of those nationalists do not favor unraveling the world order entirely so much as changing the rules, as with President Xi Jinping of China or the Europeans who want better arrangements within the European Union, not a departure from it.

Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe, said Mr. Trump's nationalism did not reflect a consensus even within his own administration, which still has senior officials with a more traditional internationalist outlook.

“The danger to the world is not that Trump will lead the nationalists, sweeping them to remake the world in an ugly, pre-1914 image or a dystopian counter-world of the U.S. siding with the fascists in World War II,” he said. “The danger is that Trump may take the U.S. out of the game — à la the interwar period — long enough for one of the serious nationalists, Putin or Xi, to do major damage.”


French troops during the commemoration ceremony in Paris. — Photograph: Michel Euler/Associated Press.
French troops during the commemoration ceremony in Paris. — Photograph: Michel Euler/Associated Press.

Aside from the discord with the French president, Mr. Trump's two-day visit to Paris was marred by his decision on Saturday to scrap a planned visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at the foot of the hill where the Battle of Belleau Wood was fought. Aides cited the rain in canceling a helicopter flight, but it went over badly in Europe.

Mr. Trump had another chance to pay respects to the war dead on Sunday at the Suresnes American Cemetery outside Paris, where 1,565 American soldiers are buried. Speaking in a drenching rain, Mr. Trump paid tribute to the soldiers and praised Franco-American relations, largely sticking to his prepared text without responding to Mr. Macron.

“The American and French patriots of World War I embodied the timeless virtues of our two republics — honor and courage, strength and valor, love and loyalty, grace and glory,” he said after visiting a field of white crosses. “It is our duty to preserve the civilization they defended and to protect the peace they so nobly gave their lives to secure one century ago.”

In contrast to the stiff interactions with the American president, Mr. Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, representing two nations that were once bitter enemies, demonstrated the close friendship that has emerged from the rubble of war. In appearances over the weekend, the French and German leaders — who are facing their own political struggles at home — appeared affectionate, and Mr. Macron on Saturday posted a picture of the two holding hands along with the single word “Unis,” or “United.”

Mr. Putin, on the other hand, seemed focused on Mr. Trump, approaching him at the Arc de Triomphe, shaking his hand and giving a friendly pat on the arm. The two later chatted briefly at a lunch for all the visiting leaders, according to the Kremlin, but will wait for a formal meeting until later this month, when both will be in Buenos Aires for a Group of 20 summit meeting.

In marking the centennial of the armistice, Mr. Macron said that from the ashes of that war and the next one came hope. “This hope is called the European Union, a union freely entered into, never before seen in history, a union that has freed us of our civil wars,” he said.

Yet absent from the ceremony was the prime minister of Britain, which is currently in the throes of trying to detach itself from the European Union. Prime Minister Theresa May attended her own country's commemorations on Sunday, although she made a point of visiting France and Belgium on Friday to lay wreaths at the graves of soldiers killed in the war.

Among the leaders present on Sunday were Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, King Felipe VI of Spain, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine and dozens of others.


Mr. Trump at the Élysée Palace after the ceremony. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.
Mr. Trump at the Élysée Palace after the ceremony. — Photograph: Tom Brenner/for The New York Times.

The ceremony, in some measure Franco-centric by dint of being held in Paris, made a palpable effort to reach out to other countries that lost hundreds of thousands of people.

While the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, opened the ceremony, the most moving moments came when high school students in yellow scarves read century-old letters from eight men and women who either fought or lived through World War I, sticking to the language in which they were written, including English, French and German.

After the ceremony and subsequent lunch, Mr. Macron opened the Paris Peace Forum, a three-day conference to discuss fostering multilateralism. “History will retain an image — that of 84 chiefs of state and of governments united,” he declared.

“What is uncertain for the future is how this image will be interpreted,” he continued. “Will it be a ringing symbol of a durable peace among nations or the photograph of the last moment of unity before the world goes down in new disorder?”

Mr. Trump was not there to help answer that question. He skipped the forum and headed back to the United States.


__________________________________________________________________________

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times covering President Donald J. Trump. He previously covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Mr. Baker joined The Times in 2008 after 20 years at The Washington Post. He began writing about Mr. Obama at the inception of his administration, through health care and economic debates, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the re-election campaign and decisions over war and peace in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. During his first tour at the White House, Mr. Baker was a co-author of the original story breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal and served as The Post's lead writer on the impeachment battle. During his next White House assignment, he covered the travails of Mr. Bush's second term, from the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina to Supreme Court nomination fights and the economy. In between stints at the White House, Mr. Baker and his wife, Susan Glasser, spent four years as Moscow bureau chiefs, chronicling the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, the rollback of Russian democracy, the second Chechen war and the terrorist attacks on a theater in Moscow and a school in Beslan. Mr. Baker also covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the first American newspaper journalist to report from rebel-held northern Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and he spent the next eight months covering the overthrow of the Taliban and the emergence of a new government. He later spent six months in the Middle East, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq and around the region before embedding with the United States Marines as they drove toward Baghdad. He is the author of four books, most recently Obama: The Call of History, an illustrated history of the 44th president. A native of the Washington area, Mr. Baker attended Oberlin College.

Alissa Johannsen Rubin is the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. She joined The Times in January 2007 as a correspondent in Baghdad and covered Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming bureau chief in Baghdad in the fall of 2008, and then moving to Afghanistan in October 2009, becoming bureau chief there a couple of months later. She was in Kabul for almost four years, leaving in the late summer of 2013 to take up the job as Paris bureau chief. However, she continued to work on projects in Afghanistan and joined the team covering the Islamic State's takeover of northern and western Iraq in 2014. That August, she was seriously injured and nearly killed in a helicopter crash in Kurdistan, covering the beleaguered Yazidis. Before joining The N.Y. Times, she was the Los Angeles Times co-bureau chief in Baghdad, and its bureau chief for the Balkans for five years. She started at the L.A. Times' Washington bureau in 1997, covering health care policy and financing, abortion politics and legislation, and the fight over tobacco legislation on Capitol Hill. Before the Los Angeles Times, she was a reporter for Congressional Quarterly magazine, where she covered health care and then taxes and trade on Capitol Hill. She came to Washington after working for four years as a reporter in Wichita, Kansas, for the Knight-Ridder newspaper then known as The Wichita Eagle-Beacon. She also covered taxes there as well as the troubled farm economy. Her career in journalism started at The American Lawyer magazine where she was a researcher. While in Washington, D.C., she freelanced for The New Republic, The Washington Monthly and The Washington Post's Outlook section as well as The Washington Post Magazine. Ms. Rubin, was born and brought up in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980 from Brown University with an honors degree in Renaissance studies and a minor in classics (Latin). She received a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to pursue her graduate studies in modern European history (with a focus on the history of the Catholic Church) at Columbia University, where she received an M.A. in 1986. She is a winner of a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting; the 2015 John Chancellor Award for journalistic achievement; a 2010 Overseas Press Association award for a piece on women suicide bombers titled “How Baida Wanted to Die”, and a 1992 Washington Monthly award for a piece that appeared in the Washington City Paper, “What People Talk About When They Talk About Abortion”. In 1992 she won an Alicia Patterson Fellowship to report on the medical and religious roots of the abortion controversy in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's 1989 Webster decision. She was twice part of teams that won the National Farm Writers of America Award at the Wichita Eagle in 1986 and 1988 for their coverage of farm issues. She also won the William Allen White Award in 1989 for her coverage of Kansas' overhaul of its real estate taxes. Her college thesis, which was a translation and annotation of some of the letters of Lionardo Bruni, a Renaissance humanist, was published in Allegorica, an academic journal. Ms. Rubin lives in Paris with her husband, James E. Castello, a lawyer who specializes in international arbitration.

• A version of this article appears in The New York Times on Monday, November 12, 2018, on page A3 of the New York print edition with the headline: “‘America First’ Gets a Rebuke At Ceremony”.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • In Photos Unpublished for 100 Years, the Joy of War's End on Armistice Day

 • Remembering World War I, 100 Years Later

 • The War Stories Their Families Never Forgot


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/us/politics/macron-trump-paris-wwi.html
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