With the notorious “far-right” Alternative für Deutschland winning 20.7 percent of the vote in the German elections — up from 10.4 percent in 2021 — and becoming the number two party, it is clearly the end of the world as we know it. But really, dear moderate German leaders, what do you expect a couple of days after another knife attack by an “asylum seeker?” Of course, maybe there wasn’t a knife attack. Maybe the whole thing was disinformation by bad actors on social media financed by operatives of USAID. Where are those three earnest German prosecutors dug up by 60 Minutes when you need them?
It is time to ask whose idea it was back in 1945 to dump the Morgenthau Plan that proposed to sensibly return the German lands to pastoral innocence after their cities had been conveniently reduced to rubble in World War II.
And how dare the Trump cabal send over the pipsqueak jumped-up white-trash JD Vance to lecture the great and the good in Europe about democracy and free speech!
But I agree with the globalists on one thing. It is the end of the world as they know it, for Niall Ferguson and Francis Fukuyama. It really is.
Now, I’ve just been reading a history of The Congress of Vienna by Harold Nicolson, and I am sure that Ferguson and Fukuyama have also read it. It’s all about the peace process at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, starring Metternich, Castlereagh, Tsar Alexander I, that preserved peace in Europe for 50 years until the wars of German unification starting in 1862. And it made me think. What if President Clinton had announced a Congress of Warsaw in 1995, starring Henry Kissinger, to roll up NATO and resolve the issues of the Cold War and invite a post-Soviet Russia back into the family of nations?
Yeah, why not? I will tell you. It is because nobody in power in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union after 1989 had the cojones to suggest such a thing. Nobody would dare. Not until Donald J. Trump came along.
What of Niall Ferguson? He accuses Trump of “a series of unforced errors… a policy of appeasement.”
What of Francis Fukuyama?
Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow. We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.
<img alt captext="Public Domain” class=”post-image-right” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/far-right-menace-the-end-of-the-world-as-they-know-it.jpg” width=”450″>A “global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government.” Which authoritarians would that be? The “far right” or the centrist parties building a “firewall” against the “far right?”
You know what is interesting to me about the new parties of the “far right?” They have chosen really bland names: Reform UK; Alternative for Germany; National Rally; Brothers of Italy; Hungarian Civic Alliance. And do you notice the word missing in their names? Democracy. I guess that is why experts agree that the populist nationalist parties are all authoritarian.
Like most moderns, I am all in favor of progress, and I see progress in respect of the global fight with Russia over the centuries. In 1812-15, according to Harold Nicolson, Tsar Alexander I got as far west as Paris. In 1945, Tsar Joseph Stalin got as far west as Berlin. So far, in 2025, Tsar Vladimir Putin has not even gotten as far west as Kyiv.
I really hope that this time Tsar Vladimir doesn’t get as far west as Lviv in western Ukraine, because my hero Ludwig von Mises was born there, when it was called Lemberg, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since 1900 Lviv has suffered eight regime changes, what with wars, revolutions, and collapse of empire. Eight is Enough, as they say out west in Hollywood.
Meanwhile Peter Savodnik celebrates George H.W. Bush’s 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech. He proposes the speech as “a blueprint for how America can support democracy abroad without becoming the world’s policeman.” At the end of the speech, Savodnik celebrates that:
[Bush] had always been a Cold Warrior, and toward the end of his speech, he seemed touched and even a little overwhelmed to be there. “The peoples of the USSR have entered a great enterprise, full of courage and vigor,” he said.
“I have come here today to say we support those who explore the frontiers of freedom. We will join these reformers on the path to what we call — appropriately call — a new world order.”
And then: “You’re the leaders.”
So, is using the U.S. intelligence community with the able assistance of NED and USAID to manipulate elections, as in Ukraine in 2014, a way to “support democracy?” Or is it just stupid IC bureaucrats doing what bureaucrats do, and Making Things Worse until DOGE comes along and stops them?
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Public Domain
