Cover of latest Stern magazine shows Trump and Putin bowing to each other over the corps of Ukraine. German text is discussed in main post.

The title of this cover from a prominent German news weekly borrows from a famous Ronald Reagan quote: “Axis of Evil” (Die Achse der Bösen). Only this time a Republican president is casting the United States on the side of evil. The remaining text points to the “danger of war in Europe” and asks “what Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine means for us."1 The cover also mentions a statement by Joschka Fischer in an interview: “Germany needs conscription again."2

POSTSCRIPT: See comments for connection to 1939

  1. “Us” could refer to Germany, given the magazine, but note the European flag that the two bowing men are standing on—with the corpse of Ukraine laid out face down between them. If the corpse is hyperbole, the betrayal and its geopolitical consequences are very real, ↩︎

  2. Fischer was a politician in the Greens who served as Germany’s popular foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. ↩︎