Trump acts — others just watch as history is made

From 1933 to 1945, Adolf Hitler and his psychotic regime turned Germany into a police state that imprisoned and massacred political opponents and conducted a vicious genocide that killed more than 13 million Jews, dissidents, Slavic peoples and other human beings considered socially or politically undesirable.

The regime plunged Europe and parts of Africa into a ruinous war, costing tens of millions more lives, including through the starvation of millions of prisoners of war. That war pulverized much of continental Europe and resulted in a nearly 45-year occupation by the Soviet Union, which visited two additional generations of oppression and misery on central and southeastern Europe.

But I guess it could have been worse. 

Or at least, that’s what I imagine most of the chattering classes must think, right? Any forceful intervention against any authoritarian regime is going to end badly. Regime change is always wrong. Any action results in a catastrophic butterfly effect that will assuredly wreck the future — Ray Bradbury “proved” that in 1952’s “A Sound of Thunder.” The only way to practice geopolitics is to do as little as possible. Make empty statements, engage in the occasional boycott and exist on the “right side of history” — surely, that is the path forward. 

Unfortunately, this logic does not work. For there is no proof that a foreordained “right side” exists.

History is made through action, not inaction. To be paralyzed by fear of making any mistakes or of imperfect results is to leave the door open for others to act. Brutal tyrants like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Putin and Khamenei have no compunction about taking action, and they don’t think much of Bradbury.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, thanks to the incompetence of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, along........

© The Hill