The conflict at the heart of German foreign policy

Hitler's favourite theorist envisioned a world in which great powers dominated smaller neighbours. His ideas are still surprisingly popular today.

Photo by Dave Photoz on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

I came across an article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit recently, which charted the re-emergence of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt as an influence on 21st-century international politics.

I had never heard of Schmitt before. So I’ll give you a summary of what the article says about him.

A professor at Berlin's Humboldt University in the 1930s, Schmitt was deeply suspicious of both Britain and the US, which he saw as maritime powers that sought to impose their values on the entire world.

Land powers like Germany, he believed, never had such world-beating ambitions.

He was particularly resentful of the occupation of the Rhineland, which he saw as an extension of Britain's humiliation of countries like Egypt and India.

Anglo-Saxon "universalism" were, in reality, a front for naked imperial ambition, he believed. (He also despised Jews, whom he saw as proponents of the same universalism as the English.)

His solution to this Anglo dominance w…