Indeed, the collapse of these two Soviet empires was the most profound retreat of any major nation’s or empire’s power, without war, in all of recorded peacetime history.Īt that time, views regarding Germany’s future coalesced. This “problem” had to of course remain “solved.” Second, the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet internal and external empires appeared (erroneously) to many observers to be at least a partial solution to the problem of Soviet power in Europe and, more broadly, elsewhere in the world. First, by the beginning of the 1990s, it became evident that the German “problem” had been “solved,” in large measure because of developments within German society-a truly remarkable event in European history. The Second World War and the defeat of Nazi Germany-and especially the central role of Soviet forces in bringing about that defeat-brought Soviet military power and then progressively developing communist control to the middle of Germany, as well as north and south along a line that stretched, as Winston Churchill put it, “rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” 3 Thus, the problem of Soviet power overlapped with that of German power from the late 1940s until the end of the Cold War, when further basic transformations took place. Beginning in the mid-1940s, there was awareness of Soviet power in the heart of the continent-awareness that had been building for some time, certainly from the solidification of Bolshevik control in Russia and the formal creation of the Soviet Union in 1924-that embraced the old Russian empire at close to its furthest historical dimensions. 2 Furthermore, once the lines of division in Europe solidified, with Germany divided between the American, British, and French occupation zones on one side and the Soviet zone (later becoming the separate nations of West Germany and East Germany) on the other, there was tacit East-West agreement to keep the country divided-one of the few things on which all could agree.īut concern about growing German power from 1867 onward was not the only problem plaguing Europe. One key objective, shared by all the nations of Europe and extending into the time of the division of Europe between East and West, was to keep Germany from again being a principal source of instability and potential conflict in Europe-in other words, to “keep Germany down,” in the oft-quoted phrase attributed to Lord Ismay, NATO’s First Secretary General.
#The geopolitics of world war iii how to
After the Second World War, one of the central problems on the continent was how to deal with the future of German power. These efforts, too, failed and cataclysmically so. From that time until 1945 (with a hiatus from 1918 until the late 1930s, or the “phony peace”), dealing with the “German problem” was central to forging arrangements that could bring some reasonable predictability and a method of preventing a radical imbalance of power (and hence the risk of a major European war).
#The geopolitics of world war iii full
This had emerged with full force upon the completion of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s project to forge a more or less united Germany, with the final phase in the period between 18.
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The collapse that led to the Great War had many causes, but perhaps none so important-and certainly none so consequential for the aftermath-as the problem of German power. The modern history of this subject can be said to have begun with the end of the Napoleonic wars, when the Congress of Vienna fashioned a set of understandings that, based on the overarching concept of the balance of power, largely kept the peace on the continent until 1914, when it fell with a crash that led to the most cataclysmic war (to that time) in European history. NATO has been only one of the many instruments and political-security efforts designed to deal with problems of power in Europe.
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Power in Europe: Until the End of the Cold War He was Director of the Center for Transatlantic Security Studies at NDU from 2010 to 2012. representative to the Western European Union.
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Ambassador to NATO from 1993 to 1998, as well as U.S. Robert Hunter is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.