Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age in Europe

Recently I reviewed Jamie Kirchick’s new book about Europe for National Review. What I wrote was much too long for them, though, so it had to be severely condensed. This is what I wrote originally. (National Review kindly gave me permission to reprint the parts of this that they own.)

When I re-read this, I thought perhaps it sounded too critical. I didn’t mean to be; I meant to give the book a good review. My criticisms are mostly a matter of detail and emphasis. Clearly, I found the book thought-provoking, and I do recommend it.

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James Kirchick The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, Yale University Press, March 2017, $17.78

Journalist James Kirchick’s first book is about Europe, not America, but throughout the reader will sense that it rests upon unvoiced axioms about America and its role in the world. These are axioms upon which no argument can rest confidently in the age of Donald Trump. As a consequence, although the book contains no obvious anachronisms, it feels as if it was written in another era, for a reader who no longer exists.

Kirchick was based in Prague and Berlin for much of the past decade, sending dispatches back to America about Europe and the former Soviet Union. During most of those years I did the same thing from Istanbul and Paris. Every writer imagines his readers; Kirchick’s imaginary readers seem to be much like mine. Call them Postwar Americans. Americans who feel it important to take a lively interest in the rest of the world, ones who are familiar, roughly, with the history of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, ones who instinctively feel the lessons of these catastrophes. Americans who elected such presidents as Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush, who understood that the relative global order in which Americans flourished for some seventy years did not emerge in sua sponte but was created, deliberately, by great postwar statesmen and maintained by American power—hard and soft. The United States was at the center of a system designed to promote peaceful trade among reasonably decent and democratic people, and for the most part, it did.

Those readers knew this system to be imperfect, but better than the alternatives. And they believed—wrongly, as it happened—that their country was sufficiently exceptional that such things as happened in Europe could not happen to them.

To the extent spectral qualities may be assigned to Donald Trump, there is a specter haunting this book, making a mockery of Kirchick and his imaginary readers. Trump is mentioned only four times, each time in passing. Clearly, Kirchick underestimated his significance and dismissed the prospect of his election. This is not a reproach. I didn’t see it coming, either.

Kirchick was, however, fully aware that the old order was dangerously frayed and that something was wrong with America. This is reflected in his exasperation with the Obama Administration’s passivity in the face of Russian aggression and its unwillingness to reprise America’s traditional, deeply involved role in Europe. But he was unable or unwilling to see how frayed it truly was: His tone suggests that he considered Obama’s detachment in foreign policy an aberration, rather than the warning it was that Postwar Americans had become too few in number, or had ceased to believe in their ideals, and indeed the Pax Americana was on the verge of collapse. Had he known, presumably, he would have written another book: not The End of Europe, but The End.

That he missed the big picture doesn’t vitiate his warnings of the dangers Europe confronts; he is right to say they are profound. But under the circumstances, the book seems fraught with unintended irony. He explains, for example, that it emerged in part from his six years of writing for Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe in Prague. “I was familiar,” he writes, “with RFE/RL’s gallant past of ‘broadcasting freedom’ behind the Iron Curtain. But like most of the people I later told about my new employer, I was unaware that the institution still existed.”

In retrospect, isn’t that pregnant with menace? No one in the West even knows that RFE/RL, one of our most successful Cold War policy instruments, still exists. But everyone sure knows its competitor:

Wildly popular on the Internet, particularly among young people, RT can be viewed in English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic. It “informs” its viewers that Ukrainians are neo-Nazi fascists and also, paradoxically, gay-loving degenerates; that the CIA shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17; and that Germany is a “failed state.” … Russian disinformation has found a receptive audience on the web, which, unable to control, the Kremlin has tried to render a cesspool.

A host of assumptions went into the creation of RFE/RL: that émigrés and refugees were a vast pool of talent who could be mobilized to serve the American cause, that the Cold War was a war of ideas, that we could win it by broadcasting truthful news reports into captive lands. No one assumes these things now.

“Traveling extensively across Europe and throughout the former Soviet Union,” Kirchick reports,

I came to understand that history had not ended, that Europe was not in a ‘post-ideological’ age, and that optimistic assumptions about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy, regulated market capitalism, peaceful coexistence, and political pluralism were premature even on the very continent that so prided itself in having founded and exported these values to the world.

All of this is true, but it suggests a question Kirchick doesn’t ask: How did we ever convince ourselves history had ended? Variants on these beliefs were indeed widespread, and often completely unexamined—certainly unexamined by me—throughout America in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What kind of widespread intellectual weakness allowed us to believe something so implausible in the first place?

But let us take The End of Europe on its own terms, its intended terms—as a book for people concerned about the future of liberal democracy in Europe. As Kirchick reports, Europe is imperiled again by Russian imperialism. Converging vectors of chaos are on the verge of leaving the Continent in “precisely the enervated state that Vladimir Putin seeks.”

Kirchick recounts the now-familiar story of Europe’s economic torpor, its alienated immigrants, and its demographically unsustainable welfare states. Europe is reeling, too, from the effects of the greatest wave of human migration since the Second World War, a series of deadly attacks by ISIS, Britain’s abandonment of the European Union, and eight years of neglect by the Obama Administration.

His description of this is in places excellent. His chapter about Brexit is well-written, fair-minded, and painful with the same unintended irony that pervades the rest of the book. He is scathing about UK Independence Party head Nigel Farage and the type of American conservative to whom he for some reason appeals. He recounts with dismay watching Farage address “a half-empty lecture hall at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC” in 2015:

At the end of his speech, I rose to ask the uncrowned king of British Euroskepticism what he made of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Although I was prepared for something unconventional, I did not expect what came out of Farage’s mouth. War in Ukraine, he said, was the result of a “democratically elected leader brought down by a street-staged coup d’état by people waving EU flags.” Russian president Vladimir Putin could hardly be blamed for thinking that the “message” behind the Maidan protests was “we want Ukraine to join NATO.” Invading and annexing Crimea were perfectly understandable reactions to European imperialism. Ukraine’s dismemberment, the thousands of deaths in its eastern provinces, more than a million displaced people, and heightened tensions between Russia and the West—all of it, Farage told me, was “something we have provoked.” A Kremlin spokesperson could not have scripted the response better himself.

Farage and those like him, Kirchick carefully argues, live in a morally inverted world where the bumbling and bureaucratic (but benign) EU is likened to the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin is respected as the Moral Custodian of the West, even as Russia— relying on largely unreconstructed Soviet organs of statecraft—literally invades Europe.

“If Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was the first external assault on the post–Cold War European political order,” Kirchick writes, “Britain’s rash decision to depart the EU was the first self-inflicted wound.” He marvels at this spectacle of self-destruction. “It is incredible to behold Great Britain, which once occupied more than 20 percent of the earth’s landmass, moving ever closer to the brink of its own disintegration.”

The sentiment is right but its expression is a bit garbled; it was not Great Britain but the British Empire that spanned the globe; at its height, it occupied a full quarter of the world’s land mass. Here one wonders if Kirchick is holding at bay, perhaps at the cost of some mental energy, a premonition of the truly incredible spectacle of imperial self-destruction ahead.

Kirchick is contemptuous of American conservatives who through naiveté or malice cheer Europe’s disintegration. He is absolutely right to say there is nothing in Europe’s past to support the idea that the EU, if destroyed, would be replaced by a democratic and cooperative collection of sovereign nation-states. The view is historically illiterate. The long postwar peace is unique and fragile. “Those who claim that the EU has failed,” Kirchick writes, “must answer the following question: In comparison to what? The Europe of the Thirty Years War? The Napoleonic Empire? Hitlerite Europe?”

He is also right to warn that Europe’s social cohesion is at risk from its “failure to devise a common approach to asylum and migration, its propensity to adopt nationalist solutions in response to this shared problem, and its sorry record in assimilating Muslim residents.” This is obviously true.

In places, though, he overstates the case or gets the details wrong, even to the point of echoing the populists and Russian propagandists he rightly deplores. “The rude facts of demography also matter,” he insists before asserting that eight percent of France is Muslim and a quarter of teenagers identify as Muslims. But these are not facts, let alone rude ones. We don’t know how much of France is Muslim because the French government is forbidden from asking, by law. A recent and credible private survey found that self-identified Muslims constitute only 5.6 percent of the metropolitan population in France. Kirchick also seems to have confused an article about a survey of teenagers in Bouches-du-Rhône (which would presumably be heavily skewed by the immigrant-heavy population of Marseille) with a national survey.

His chapter on France, generally, which is meant to stand for the problem of European anti-Semitism, is misconceived and shallow. For example, he gives no source for his assertion that “[t]he number of anti-Semitic attacks in France doubled to more than 850 in 2014,” but I would guess from the year and the number that the figures come from the 2014 report on anti-Semitism in France compiled by the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive. This in turn is based on data from the Interior Ministry. The real figures suggest that if Jews are leaving France in response to anti-Semitic crime; or at least, if they are, they are very bad at appraising risk. The number comprises a range of crimes from homicide to “insults.” The latter would not be counted as a crime at all in the United States. (By these standards, to judge from Kirchick’s Twitter account and mine, we have both been the victims of at least 850 anti-Semitic attacks each in the past year alone, most, unfortunately, coming from Americans.)

Homicide rates tend to be robust and significant. So it is more meaningful to track the number of homicides in France judged by the Interior Ministry to have been committed with specifically anti-Semitic intent. In the year in question, this figure rose from 0 to 1. This is not statistically significant, and moreover suggests that France is a safer place to be a Jew than the places to which Jews are emigrating.

I do not point this out to trivialize the problem of anti-Semitism in France, which is real, but to note that that there has been a great deal of exaggeration in reports of it, and something less than academic rigor in the studying of it. In 2015, the ADL found a dramatic decline in anti-Semitic attitudes in France.

But both sets of statistics tell us something less than they purport. It is true that many Jews have left France in recent years, but they are not the only ones to leave France, in record numbers, since the beginning of the Eurozone crisis. According to the chair of a 2014 French Parliamentary commission on emigration, the French are leaving because of “an anti-work mentality, absurd fiscal pressure, a lack of promotion prospects, and the burden of debt hanging over future generations.” None of this augurs well for Europe's future, either, but had the chapter focused on this, it would have yielded a more insightful account of the problem with France.

Nor does it seem to me quite accurate to write of Germany, as he does, that “Historical guilt for the crimes of Nazism inspired an open-door refugee policy as ill considered as it was well intentioned, the negative consequences of which will be felt for generations.” I couldn’t know the extent to which Germany’s policy was inspired by guilt for the crimes of Nazism—no one could—but the authors of the policy say they were inspired by the Geneva Convention on Refugees, to which Germany is a signatory. It is probably also true that the decision was made easier because Germany has a large, ageing workforce and a low birth rate. Without immigration, its population will decline, with disastrous economic effects.

Kirchick is right to say that “German industry’s want for skilled young labor could far more easily be met by hiring some of the millions of unemployed Spanish, French, and Italians than importing untold numbers of difficult-to-assimilate and poorly skilled.” But this misses the point: These difficult-to-assimilate and poorly skilled men and women hiked overland to Germany from Afghanistan with all their possessions on their backs; sailed the Mediterranean on rubber dinghies; fled war and forced conscription into armies such as Assad’s, where they would have been pressed into committing war crimes; ISIS; the Taliban; and other horrors. Not only does this mean they are entitled to protection under the terms of an international covenant to which Germany is a signatory, it means they are entitled to the compassion of decent and civilized people. Unemployed Spaniards, French, and Italians, by contrast, live in safe countries and are not refugees.

Germany did not open its doors simply to see what would happen if it admitted a million migrants; it did so in the context of the greatest humanitarian challenge of this century: a series of crises that have displaced 60 million desperate refugees, on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. As Kirchick does say, the refugees are a rebuke to the West, proof of its failure to stabilize failed states and bring unending wars and intractable conflicts to a close. If we could do it over and stop these conflicts from breaking out and these states from failing, one hopes that we would. But it’s now too late: They’re here. Short of tossing them back into the Mediterranean, what does Kirchick suggest?

Kirchick writes that the prolongation of the crisis “is a damning verdict against Europe’s lack of a coherent foreign policy.” Had Europe, along with the United States, decided to act as something other than a passive bystander in Syria—by assisting the most moderate elements of the opposition, creating safe zones, and destroying President Assad’s air force in the early months of the rebellion, years before Iranian and Russian troops hit the ground—the conflict might not have dragged on for so long. Reflexively citing the Iraq experience as a counter-argument to any and all methods of military intervention will not do: In both Libya and Syria—unlike Iraq—war against civilian populations was ongoing and the genocide was imminent.

But so allergic are Europeans to the use of military force, and so anemic are their resources, that the thought of picking a side and seeing it through to victory was, as he notes, unimaginable:

Maybe Europeans are more comfortable playing the role of altruistic humanitarians, caring for refugees after they’ve fled, than that of global power players ready to intervene overseas in pursuit of national (and supranational) interests. If that is the case, then they will be dealing with an unending wave of migrants and instability on their borders for years to come as the Middle Eastern political order continues to disintegrate.

Quite possible. But not necessarily more ignoble and irrational than the American approach, which does not seem to have brought stability to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. To the contrary. If the United States, overwhelmingly the world’s strongest and most experienced military power, operating under a single and unified command, was unable to produce a result that protected civilians in these lands, even at the cost of some five trillion dollars, how realistic was it that fractured Europe, with its unintegrated command structure and inexperienced militaries, would have succeeded? And what difference does this reproach make to these refugees now?

It is also an exaggeration to write, as he does, that “Of the 1.5 million asylum seekers who came to Europe in 2015, 73 percent were male.” His source is The Economist, but that is not quite what the Economist wrote:

currently there are 106 male 14- to 17-year-olds for every 100 women. If all asylum applications are granted [my emphasis], this will change to 116 men to 100 women, while for those aged between 18 and 34 the male-to-female ratio will go from 105:100 to 107:100. … But the example of Sweden does not reflect what will happen across the whole of Europe. … The countries that will be most affected are small, with populations under 10m. Sweden, Hungary, Austria and Norway would see the biggest sex-ratio changes (and only if they accepted all the asylum-seekers who applied). Germany has less to worry about. If it accepted all the young males who sought asylum in the year to October 2015, its sex ratios would go from 106:100 to 107:100 for 14- to 17-year-olds and from 105:100 to 106:100 for 18- to 34-year-olds. Europe does not have a man problem. Sweden may have.

It may be problem, in other words, but hardly so much of one as alarmists represent it to be, particularly because there is no chance all asylum applications will be granted. In 2016, for example, Hungary granted asylum to only 425 out of 29,432 applicants.

Nor is it true, as he says, that Germany practices an “open-door immigration policy.” It is not easy to establish one’s status as a refugee in Germany at all. Following the initial influx of 2015, incoming migrant numbers were swiftly and drastically reduced. The Balkan countries, Morocco, and Tunisia were declared safe states; their citizens are no longer eligible for asylum. Merkel brokered a deal with Turkey to prevent onward migration into the EU, almost entirely shutting down the refugee influx from Greece. Austria shut its borders, cutting off the so-called Balkan route. Last October, the EU and Afghanistan signed a deal that permits member states to deport an unlimited number of Afghan migrants. In December alone, some 11,900 were sent back.

So almost as soon as the numbers of asylum-seekers in Germany reached record highs, deportations, too, soared to match. If 2015 was the year Germany opened its doors to refugees, 2016 was the year it slammed them shut. Almost 300,000 of the 700,000 asylum requests it received that year were denied, and 80,000 asylum-seekers deported. Kirchick is quite right to say, though, that Europe’s inability to develop “a coherent and robust foreign policy that would tackle the migrant crisis at its source” has left it at the mercy of the autocrats on Europe’s periphery:

Europe finds itself in hock to autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—the former offering himself as a “partner” against ISIS while bombing Western-backed opponents of Russia’s client Assad (whom the vast majority of refugees are fleeing), and the latter demanding political concessions in exchange for reducing the outflow of migrants languishing in Turkish refugee camps. By entertaining Putin’s cynical proposal of an “anti-ISIS coalition,” Western leaders willfully ignore how Moscow’s Syrian intervention is fueling the very migrant wave they supplicate him to help plug. Russia’s interest is very clear: In exchange for its supposed help in fighting ISIS, the West would lift sanctions on Moscow and effectively give a green light to its ongoing subversion of Ukraine. Astonishingly, many in the West apparently support this idea. A late 2015 survey of seventy-six diplomats, elected leaders, and advisors from across Europe and the United States found 53 percent supporting cooperation with Russia in Syria, while listing migration, Islamist terrorism, and the rise of populist parties as the most critical threats to Europe—three problems Moscow is actively aggravating by its intervention in Syria. Maintaining Bashar al-Assad in power will only prolong Syria’s misery by driving the Sunni majority that detests him even more into the arms of ISIS, therefore prolonging the conflict as well as the stream of refugees whose presence in Europe is driving up support for the far-right politicians Russia abets in numerous other ways. While the Russians have repeatedly demonstrated their overreliance on hard power to achieve their aims, Europe’s overconfidence on soft power, far from keeping the world’s problems at bay, has imported them into Elysium.

This is precisely the right diagnosis, alas. Once, recently, Americans would have suggested that the cure for this strategic confusion was “American leadership.” But now our hopes are more modest. We just pray our leadership stops tweeting.

As Kirchick notes, Russia has exploited the refugee crisis to serve its disinformation objectives. The impression many Americans have of a Europe simply overrun by migrant hordes has its origins in Russian agitprop, which is full of thrilling but often fictional stories of migrant rapes and rampages. Russian media offers a platform and legitimization to Europe’s most extreme nationalist and anti-immigrant figures, all with the transparent goal of furthering European division.

Kirchick is too exculpatory of Europe’s far right. It isn’t true, as he writes, that decent people with reasonable concerns have been forced into the arms of the far-right by taboos against the rational discussion of Islam and immigration. “One accepts unrestricted immigration, the nostrums of multiculturalism, and the claim that Muslims integrate just as well as any other group, or one risks being branded an incorrigible bigot,” he writes, but this isn't so; there is no mainstream European politician who advocates unrestricted immigration from the Islamic world, and if there is a taboo against discussing the failure of Muslims to integrate, it doesn't impede politicians—of both the mainstream right and the left—from doing it.

Europe’s far right is shunned because it is, in fact, incorrigibly bigoted. There have been 1,200 attacks on refugee shelters in Germany since the beginning of 2015, including some 100 arsons. More than 2,500 refugees there have been violently assaulted, beaten, or firebombed. Some have been clubbed with bats by Nazis chanting “Sieg Heil.” Asylum-seekers in Hungary have been herded into concentration camps. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has said that “ethnic homogeneity” is key to economic success and “too much mixing” causes trouble. The lure of Europe’s far-right is, truly, incorrigible bigotry.

It is true, as Kirchick writes, that German police were stunningly unprepared on New Year’s Eve 2015 for the mass assault on women by North African assailants, and also true that the media failed to report this for fear of ginning up hatred toward immigrants. But it is also true that this story has now been reported so many times, in such hysterical detail, that a good many Americans believe this happens every night in Germany. It doesn’t. The long-term effects of the migrant influx are still unclear, but a recent Centre for European Research study found “no association between the number of refugees and the number of street crimes in Germany” beyond small increases in drug offenses and fare-dodging.

The End of Europe is strongest when it treats the self-defeating Brexit vote, the contagious authoritarianism of Hungary, and, especially, Russia’s revanchists, who are clenching Europe in a vice. While Americans have been encouraged to expect “great deals” and “getting along” with Putin, Russians are being readied for something quite different. The Russian playwright and former delegate to the Congress of People’s Deputies, Aleksander Gelman, tells Kirchick that Russian society “is being prepared for the idea that we might have to fight” a world war.

Putin has superintended over a campaign of historical revisionism in Russia; Stalin’s reputation has been rehabilitated; the liberation of central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union have been recast as an amputation. Russia has been building and upgrading underground nuclear bunkers around Moscow, which officials claim are big enough to house the whole city’s population. “In reality there are no real reasons for a world war at present, except for our own insane ideas,” Gelman tells Kirchick. “But we have to remember that insane ideas can be made real.”

These “insane ideas” comprise the new-but-old doctrine of Russian imperialism, known as Eurasianism, explicated, Kirchick writes, in key government documents:

A 2014 Russian Culture Ministry report outlining the “Foundations of State Cultural Politics” defines the country’s identity only in negation to the West: “Russia is not Europe.” By that it means that Russia is illiberal, authoritarian, nationalistic, illiberal, authoritarian, nationalistic, Orthodox Christian, and economically autarkic …

As Kirchick notes, Russia views itself in moral and material opposition to what it views as a West mired in depravity, decadent materialism, and “globalism.” (As far as I can tell, the use of “globalism,” as opposed to “globalization,” entered the English language only recently and as an artefact of Russian propaganda.)

Russia’s faux-traditional values, Kirchick laments, along with its widely-publicized campaigns against homosexuality, have proven attractive to European populists and far-right parties such as UKIP in Britain, Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy, and France’s Front National Front. The Kremlin cultivates and finances these and other kooks, far-leftists, and blood-and-soil nationalists. They in turn feed on the Eurozone’s stagnation and the refugee crisis.

The whole crew of misfits is on display in Greece, a country for which Kirchick exhibits a broad contempt. He is unsympathetic to arguments that the Eurozone and the Troika immiserated the country; his perspective is broadly that of the German bankers: Greece had it coming; it produced nothing; it undertook massive debts to live lavishly; and it lied. What’s more, he argues, the Greeks exhibit a susceptibility to populist politics that derives from their traumatic civil war. “Polarization nurtured an emotive, resentment-based politics with little room for compromise,” he writes. Syriza, Kirchick says,

portends the rise of a European hard left exuding the same authoritarian populism of the extreme right. From French Poujadism, the rural movement of farmers and shopkeepers that arose in early opposition to European integration, to today’s National Front, Law & Justice, and Fidesz, postwar European nationalism has typically been a reactionary right-wing phenomenon. But in the form of Syriza, the reigning Corbynite wing of British Labor, and Spanish PODEMOS, illiberal populism is becoming a bipartisan affair. All three of these parties advocate greater state control over the economy, are deeply suspicious of markets, and seek greater ties with Russia at the expense of the Atlantic alliance.

Russia is only too eager to provide. “Syriza has found admirers in unlikely places,” he writes:

“It’s fantastic to see the courage of the Greek people in the face of political and economic bullying from Brussels,” says United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel Farage. Similarly enthused by its effrontery toward the EU, leaders of the French National Front and the Hungarian Jobbik have also lavished praise on Syriza, accolades one hopes the proudly antifascist Greeks find at least slightly worrying.

Kirchick could have spelled out the connections more clearly still. In January 2015, The Financial Times published a detailed analysis of the links between Syriza and Putin’s circle. Titled “Alarm bells ring over Syriza’s Russian links,” it reported the association between Nikos Kotzias, the Syriza-appointed Greek foreign minister, and Aleksandr Dugin, the prominent Russian ultra-nationalist, a proponent of Christian Orthodox domination over Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The day after he was elected prime minister, Alexis Tsipras made known his objection to sanctioning Russia for the rising violence in Ukraine. The book begins and ends with Russian hybrid warfare.

In the first scene of his book, Kirchick describes the so-called Bronze Night in Tallinn, when, in 2007, the Estonian parliament irritated Moscow by proposing to move the Bronze Soldier to the outskirts of the city. The Soviet-era war memorial was seen by ethnic Estonians as a symbol of Soviet occupation. Russia took fantastic umbrage. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov deplored the move as “blasphemous.” Protests, instigated by Estonia’s ethnic-Russian minority, turned into two nights of deadly riots and a three-week wave of DDOS attacks on Estonia’s institutions. These were of a previously unseen sophistication. Everyone knew who was to blame, but NATO in the end claimed to be unable to find proof of Moscow’s involvement. It was the world’s first cyber-war.

Next, Russia invaded Georgia, and six months later, the newly-inaugurated Obama Administration declared its intention to reset relations with Moscow. Kirchick is infuriated by what he identifies as a “recurring feature” of the Obama Administration’s diplomacy: Eager to smooth the path to the New START treaty, the administration averted its eyes to evidence of Russia’s growing external aggression and internal repression.

Russia, meanwhile, undertook the military modernization upon which it would rely for its warfare in Ukraine and Syria. Having fed the crocodile well, Obama was eaten next. Infamously, during the United States’ 2016 election campaign, Russian hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers and delivered their content to Wikileaks. Kirchick joins a growingly alarmed cohort warning that Moscow may soon try to “neuter NATO with an attack on alliance territory that will prove the worthlessness of Article 5,” and failing that, may go “the institutional route, diluting the West’s alliance structure, legal norms, and political cohesiveness from within through bribery, coercion, subversion, and disinformation.” It certainly seems that way.

His chapter on Hungary and historic memory is particularly useful. In a pattern characteristic of the far right, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has presided over a campaign to obscure “both the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s active collaboration in mass murder,” writes Kirchick, featuring “government-sponsored historical institutes, publicly funded documentaries, revisions to school curricula, bestowal of state honors to extreme right-wing figures, and erections of public monuments and museum exhibitions,” all functioning to obscure Jewish victimhood.

Kirchick describes a Hungary awash in “maps, postcards, posters, bumper stickers, and other ephemera” displaying the Greater Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, complete with Slovakia (in whole) and parts of present-day Romania, Serbia, and Croatia. A government-funded website describes the Treaty of Trianon as “20th-century Hungary’s greatest tragedy, the wounds of which remain unhealed even today.” Upon assuming power, Orbán quickly declared the anniversary of the treaty’s signing a day for mourning “the unjust and unfair dismemberment of the Hungarian nation by foreign powers.” By contrast, Kirchick notes, no day was devoted to considering “the reasons why Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory—namely, its membership in the belligerent axes of both world wars.”

As the historian Lewis Namier observed, there is a morphology of politics; certain forms occur and reoccur. Historical revisionism appears to be intrinsic to the form that Kirchick terms Orbánism. You could also call it Putinism or Erdoğanism. Contemporary political scientists describe it as illiberal democracy, partial democracy, low intensity democracy, empty democracy, or hybrid democracy. Namier called it plebiscitary Caesarism.

The cultivation of nostalgia for an authoritarian past, Kirchick warns, tends to presage an authoritarian future. Orbán’s government

has rewritten the constitution, centralized power in the executive, weakened checks and balances, empowered an oligarchic class, dispensed state awards and ceded cultural policy to extreme right-wing figures, rendered parliament a rubber stamp, overhauled public media institutions into partisan outlets, harassed civil society, and reoriented Hungary’s traditionally Atlanticist and pro-European foreign policy toward Russia and other authoritarian regimes.

The End of Europe concludes with a warning that Europe’s collapse would be a catastrophe.

A Europe unmoored from the Enlightenment values it brought to the world, ignorant of and unwilling to protect its civilizational achievements, captive to chauvinist demagogues, indisposed to defend itself, bereft of its Jews, estranged from America, cowed before Russia, and reverted to its traditional state of nature with nations pursuing mercenary self-interest at the expense of unity would not only spell the end of Europe as we know it. Such a collapse would usher in nothing less than a new dark age.

Exactly so. It is a lucid assessment. But Kirchick doesn’t once confront the possibility that by the time his book went to print, the United States would be led by an unstable Putinversteher and committed trade protectionist who views the architecture of the West’s postwar peace and freedom as obsolete—leaving an unsteady Angela Merkel the de facto leader of the Free World.

He can’t really be criticized for this. It is so incredible that even now I have trouble believing it. But it does give the book a strange, alternate-universe aspect. It will perhaps one day enjoy pride of place in a thick Chinese volume titled, An Anthology of Hubristic Things Americans Wrote about Europe, Oblivious to the Disaster Awaiting them at Home.