A different August 23 other than the one we were used to: the one of the Molotov -ribbetrop

August 23 was the national holiday in communism, from August 23, 1945, initially declared the day when “Soviet troops released Romania from Nazi Germany.” But there was an August 23, the day of 1939, the date of Molotov-Libbetroper Pact, known as the Stalin-Hitler Pact, which he mirrors, in the context of the present, Professor Ioan Stanomir, in an opinion in Hotnews.

August 23, 1939 is the day that illustrates, tragic and bloody, the European tragedy. The Moscow Pact, concluded between the two totalitarian and revisionist states, is the road end of a policy that begins in 1922, by the Agreement from Rapallo. After almost two decades of fragile peace, the war was returning to Europe, to become a global catastrophe.

“Putin's Russia acts and thinks in the manner in which Stalin's state was doing”

Only one of the two signatory powers of the non -aggression pact has survived the war: the Soviet Union is the great winner of the carnage it causes itself, in 1939. The USSR passes the threshold of 1991, abandoning only the communist ideology, but not the imperialist and totalitarian project.

Today's Russia Putin acts and thinks in the way he was acting and thought of Stalin's state. The territorial kidney, terror, cruelty, tyranny are, then as now, the tools of Russian politics.

The place of Finland attacked in the winter warUm It is taken by Ukraine. The ambition of the spheres of influence remains the intellectual landmark that shapes Russia's steps. Russia cannot accept, like the USSR, the freedom of peoples to decide their own fate.

For the true victim of the Moscow Pact was the independence of the central and Eastern European nations: the common denominator of revisionism explains the Russian-German concord. The imperfect building after 1920 was founded, at least declarative, on the principle of self-determination. The understanding of Moscow removed, brutally, this foundation, replacing it with the aggression and the pirate rapture...

It can be argued, in line of Raymond Aron's visionary realism, that responsible for the August 1939 is Western indecision: the absence of the will to respond to Nazi politics, including through preventive attack, created the conditions for what followed. Aronian observation is a prophetic one: the cowardly pursued pacifism can encourage aggression and cause a bloody catastrophe. Peace can only be supported by determination and discouragement.

The 1920 system, consecrated by the peace treaties, was fatally undermined by two elements: the absence of the United States in the Security Architecture and the non -existence of an efficient discouragement mechanism. The fascist and communist totalitarian powers acted in this environment that offered the aggressor the invitation to brutality and violence. The deliberations of the “League of Nations” were irrelevant, in the absence of a military reaction formula.

“Beyond historical exegesis, there is a level of urgency”

August 1939 is the climax of a tendency to challenge the international order. It is not an accident, but it is based on the existence of a common vision of law and the role of states. The USSR is corresponding, along with Nazi Germany, for the Second World War: for two years it is not only ally, but also complicit in aggression. The Moscow pact confesses the triumph of Russian expansionism.

But what can be the lesson of the 1939 tragedy for today? Beyond historical exegesis and international relations, there is a level of emergency. Lucid realism is the only reading grid of the world we are in now.

And in this present of our time revisionism is one of the most redable forces: from Russia, to communist China, Iran or North Korea, this axis of evil is defined by the ambition to destroy the order that has in the United States that guarantees the stability of the international system. Russia's policy in Ukraine anticipates that of communist China in Taiwan. The nuclear ambitions of Iran are a form of hegemonic totalitarianism.

“In the absence of security guarantees for Ukraine, a new invasion is inevitable”

But the Europe of our era is no longer the Europe of 1939: it belongs, this time, to a wider community, the Atlantic one. With all their historical hesitations and errors, the United States is the only power capable of maintaining the cohesion of this alliance. Atlantism is not a moft, but a vital necessity.

And this atlantic community has the duty to exercise discouragement: the Russian or Chinese enemy must understand that there is a cost of aggression and that this cost can be an impossible to accept by the aggressor. Discourage is not militaryism, but a strategy meant to make peace possible.

At decades after August 1939, the Atlantic conversation on peace in Ukraine must start from this traumatic past. The Russian conduct is, like the Soviet one, one of duplicity and aggression. The security guarantees offered to Ukraine are the expression of discouragement. In their absence, a new invasion is inevitable.

August 1939 is the name of a tragedy. For our freedom is incompatible with totalitarian imperialism: calm and lucid firmness is the only way to avoid the return of the terrible past.

The article of opinion was initially published in contributors.ro.