With his most recent post at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead is bound to raise some hackles, beginning with his first paragraph:
Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has an American President done anything so cruel and bigoted. And only Barack Obama has exhibited this degree of callous indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people. President Trump signed an executive order on Friday suspending the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspending the U.S. refugee program for 120 days, and restricting immigration from parts of the Muslim world. Implementation failures—chaos and screw-ups at various airports as low-level officials wrestled with what the new order meant—compounded the callousness.
The entire cast of characters from the 1930s is represented. The actors playing the roles aren’t who you might think they are.
In my view the comparison is not apt. I won’t go as far as Henry Ford; I agree more with Sam Clemens.
Let the disagreements begin!
I pretty much agree with him, except that the currently developing crisis involves the Middle East, not Europe. That’s significant because it’s less clear that there was much that the US could have done (we could, of course, have not exacerbated problems.)
On the other hand, perhaps its only obvious in hindsight that American foreign policy contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany and it may become more clear when we eventually look back, that a different course could have been taken with regard to Syria and the region.