The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things, but in foreign policy it may well be remembered as the year our luck ran out.
How so? The period after World War II was one of those incredibly plastic moments in history, and we were incredibly lucky that a group of leaders appeared who understood that this moment of Western and U.S. dominance would not necessarily last. It was vital, therefore, to lock in our democratic values and interests in a set of global institutions and alliances that would perpetuate them.
They were leaders like George Marshall and Dean Acheson and Harry Truman in America, and Jean Monnet, a founding father of the European Union, and Konrad Adenaur, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, across the Atlantic.
