Mister Applebaum marches to war

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw “Radek” Sikorsky raised eyebrows last week by tweeting, “The presence of #NATO forces in Ukraine is not unthinkable. I appreciate the President Emmanuel Macron’s initiative, because it is about Putin being afraid, not us being afraid of Putin.”

Sikorski is also Mr. Anne Applebaum, the husband of the Atlantic writer and neo-conservative publicist.

Sikorski added that “NATO soldiers are already in Ukraine,” but would not disclose which countries had sent them – “unlike some politicians.” That was a dig at German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who rejects the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine as a possible detonator for a wider European war with Russia.

Senior German Air Force officers earlier this month discussed sending German missile technicians to Ukraine to operate the long-range Taurus cruise missile – a weapon that Chancellor Scholz has emphatically refused to deliver to Ukraine, either directly or via sale to a third party. A recording of that discussion was released by Russian media and verified by the German defense ministry.

Meanwhile, Poland’s Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz ruled out the deployment of Polish troops in Ukraine. Poland has denied any connection to the Polish Volunteer Corps, consisting of Polish mercenaries fighting for Ukraine against Russia.

Sikorsky is a standout among European hawks, with an ideological chip on his shoulder consistent with his domestic circumstances.

In a 2020 book – or rather an Atlantic essay inflated into a book with large type and wide margins – Applebaum denounced as “authoritarian personalities” every politician who cast doubt on the inevitable march of democracy, including “the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with differences, the British right and the American right, too.” Her everyone-I-don’t-like-is-Hitler polemic conflates end-of-history utopianism and pop psychology. 

I reviewed Ms. Applebaum’s booklet here.

Her opponents are “authoritarian personalities,” she avers on the dubious authority of the Marxist critic Theodor Adorno. Such an individual, she says, “without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”

In her lexicon, “illiberal” (meaning anyone who isn’t a liberal) is the same thing as “authoritarian.” Adorno used the term “authoritarian” to mean Hitler or Stalin. Applebaum uses it to refer to her husband’s political opponents, or conservative leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who was re-elected in 2022 with a two-thirds majority of votes.

Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic in 2020, “Let me declare a personal interest. “I am married to a Polish opposition politician who is now a member of the European Parliament. He knows – we know – that politicized courts could, eventually, be used against us and our friend [and] politicized judges could … use fake evidence to lock up members of the political opposition.” But no one was locked up; her husband and his friends simply were out of work.

Here’s one of Applebaum’s most perfervid outbursts:

There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them.

Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. I am using the word forces, in the plural, deliberately.

Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China. But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us, too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others.

We might not want to compete with them, or even care very much about them. But they care about us. They understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power – and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.

American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who cited the passage, remarked, “Wait … what?! If a country doesn’t agree with Davos Man liberal democracy, it is ‘at war’ with us, and must be treated as an enemy nation?!”

That’s the logic of the neoconservative power couple bridging the Atlantic Monthly and the Polish Foreign Ministry: Anyone we don’t like is “at war” with us, even if it means expanding the Russia-Ukraine conflict into a European war.

Full disclosure: Among the many hats he wears, David Goldman serves on the Advisory Board of the Hungarian Research Network.