Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2024, the German state-owned news service Deutsche Welle published an article with the headline “Trump’s election victory is a nightmare for Germany.”

A few hours later, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced that his three-party political coalition had collapsed. Disagreements about how to help strengthen Germany’s weak economy were a major factor, but Scholz mentioned that the U.S. election outcome also fueled the coalition breaking up.

One month later, Scholz lost a confidence vote, ending the government he has led since 2021. Germany will have federal elections on Feb. 23, 2025.

Germany is considered one of the United States’ closest allies in Western Europe, partnering on everything from economic trade to military defense.

But this might change with Trump returning to office. As Angela Merkel, the longtime former chancellor of Germany, said in November 2024, the looming second Trump presidency “is a challenge to the world, especially for multilateralism.” Indeed, Trump’s U.S.-centric approach to international affairs runs counter to multilateralism, which is the idea that different countries working together helps everyone involved.

As someone who researches German-American relations in the 20th century, I share German politicians’ worries that the incoming Trump administration poses a serious threat to the relationship.

The German concerns include Trump potentially launching a tariff-induced trade war, as well as the possibility of the president-elect withdrawing financial and military support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Both scenarios would further hurt the weak German economy – especially since, following the U.S. and the European Union, Germany is the third-largest donor to Ukraine and would be required to shoulder even more of this financial support if the U.S. stopped giving Ukraine money.

German politicians also remain dumbfounded by Trump’s particular style of politics, despite the fact that he already served as president.

Merkel wrote in her 2024 memoir “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021” that when she first met Trump in 2017, she acted as though she were having a conversation with “someone completely normal.” Merkel quickly realized, though, that Trump was not like other American politicians. She observed that Trump seemed to think all countries competed and the success of one meant the failure of another.

A long-lasting alliance

That was not the type of American president Merkel and other Germans were used to. Merkel was born in 1954, when Germany was split into two countries: communist, Soviet-aligned East Germany, where Merkel grew up, and capitalist West Germany, which was formed out of the three western sectors controlled by France, the U.S. and the United Kingdom at the end of World War II and was aligned with the U.S.

The U.S. embraced West Germany as an important ally shortly after the war. This alliance helped the U.S. make sure that Germany, not too long ago an enemy of the U.S. during World War II, would never again become a threat to world peace.

West Germany also served as an important front line in Europe as the U.S. navigated the Cold War with the Soviet Union starting in 1947.

West Germany, meanwhile, appreciated the power of having an American überpartner during the Cold War, especially since West Germany flourished economically during most of the conflict. East Germany’s economy, on the other hand, was relatively weak throughout the Cold War.

Perhaps the most visible symbol of Germany’s division was the Berlin Wall, a 96-mile partition that cut through Berlin. East German authorities built the wall in 1961 in order to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany.

It was only after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, symbolizing the looming end of the Cold War that year and opening up the possibility for German unification, that Merkel entered politics.

Unified Germany and the United States

As a politician in the 1990s, Merkel witnessed how then-President George H.W. Bush convinced France and the United Kingdom to put aside their fears about a new German dominance over Europe and allow their former World War II enemy to unify and gain full sovereignty.

The four main Allied powers of World War II in Europe – the United Kingdom, U.S., Soviet Union and France – had initially denied Germany the right to sovereignty after the end of the war.

But in 1990, the four Allies signed the Two Plus Four Treaty – an international agreement that allowed Germany to unify as a fully sovereign state in October 1990.

Immediately afterward, Bush praised the transatlantic alliance between the U.S. and Germany. The American president emphasized the two countries’ common “love of freedom” and expressed his hope that they become “partners in leadership.”

Bush’s words signaled an important turnaround in the international expectations of Germany, and the need for it to become a more influential political and military player in world politics. It was a turnaround, however, that many Germans did not necessarily welcome. Germans felt reluctant to step into the powerful leadership role that the U.S. expected of the country.

At the time, there was a common belief in Germany that military restraint had finally made their country a stable and prosperous one, following two devastating wars.

In fact, in almost all the global crises since 1990 – from the war in Bosnia in 1992 to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 – Germany has shown a reluctance to take the lead. Instead, Germany prefers a secondary role in navigating international conflicts, primarily through its membership with the military coalition NATO and the United Nations.

Germany’s international position today

After Russia launched a full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Germany’s approach to international conflicts dramatically changed, and it finally stepped into the leadership role envisioned by Bush in 1990. In a historic speech on Feb. 27, 2022, Scholz called the attack a “Zeitenwende”, meaning “a watershed era” in German, and announced a significant increase in military spending.

The U.S. and other Western allies have welcomed this shift.

While NATO members had already agreed to invest a minimum of 2% of their gross domestic product in defense spending in 2006, Germany – like other European countries – did not meet this commitment for many years.

It was only in February 2024 that Germany finally achieved its 2% spending target for the first time in the wake of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine.

That it did so was not just a result of that conflict.

Pressure by American presidents, above all Trump, also played a major role. Trump’s continuous threat throughout his first presidency to “pay your bills or we leave NATO” had apparently paid off.

It will be up to the new German government to remind Trump of the history of German-American relations and the many benefits of the transatlantic alliance between the two powers since 1945.

Sylvia Taschka, Professor of Teaching of History, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Monti Datta, University of Richmond

Several high-profile celebrities were slapped with human-trafficking charges in late 2024, from music mogul Sean Combs, known as P. Diddy, to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries. Neither has been tried yet, but in 2022 the R&B superstar R. Kelly was convicted of sex-trafficking crimes that dated back decades. He was sentenced to 30 years.

Sex trafficking, like forced labor, is a contemporary form of slavery. I am an academic who studies the mindset of slaveholders to understand more fully their rationale for what they do, in hopes of finding better ways to eradicate modern-day enslavement.

Early thinking on owning slaves

Historically, many revered figures have endorsed slavery.

“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient,” the ancient philosopher Aristotle reasoned in his book “Politics,” written around 350 B.C.E. “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”

Aristotle argued that some people, such as those with mental impairments, were inferior to those with greater mental faculties. He believed this was part of the natural order. Enslaved persons, as Aristotle saw them, could be seen as a public good, to be used by the elite for the productivity of society.

This kind of thinking continued with America’s Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson condemned slavery and warned of its dangers, saying in 1820 that enslaving a human was like holding “a wolf by the ears.” Yet Jefferson maintained that Black people were inferior to white people and owned hundreds of slaves. He repeatedly raped one enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, fathering six children with her.

Jefferson’s thinking and behavior is characteristic of U.S. slaveholders prior to the Civil War. As scholars Elizabeth Fox-Genonese and Eugene D. Genonese explain, although many antebellum slaveholders were pious, they used faith to justify the American slave trade.

Mindset of the modern slaveholder

Today, upward of 50 million people are enslaved worldwide, trapped in sex trafficking, forced marriage and various kinds of involuntary labor.

Many enslaved persons live in Global South countries and work in industries ranging from electronics and seafood to agriculture. Their free labor provides cheap goods and services for rich countries. Their enslavers may be individuals, criminal rings or families, but big global companies are often complicit. Several Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Samsung, Nestlé and Nike, have been charged with or admitted to using slave labor.

Academic research on the mindset of modern slaveholders is limited.

In perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date, sociologist Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick focuses on India, where an estimated 11 million people are enslaved, many in debt bondage in agriculture, textiles, brick kilns and stone quarries.

Choi-Fitzpatrick finds that slaveholders in India tend to be paternalistic; they think of the enslaved as part of their extended family. Slaveholders buy into a myth that without their help the enslaved would be helpless, like children.

“Like a shepherd who knows his herd, we know the laborers,” one slaveholder says in Choi-Fitzpatrick’s 2017 book.

Part of this mindset likely stems from India’s caste system, in which members of higher castes believe they are superior to those belonging to lower castes.

Journalistic accounts have identified a similar mindset among South Korean slaveholders, too.

Novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux of the documentary series “Unreported World” reported in 2015 that scores of disabled people were enslaved on salt farms in South Korea.

South Korea’s social welfare system lags other major developed nations. People with disabilities can end up homeless on the streets, where they become easy prey for criminal networks that ensnare them into debt bondage, forced to work off an unpayable debt on salt farms.

Yet, South Korean slaveholders often believe they are doing the enslaved a favor, Theroux’s reporting found.

“My wife and I are just like real parents to him. In fact, people say we are closer to him than to our real sons who’ve left home,” one slaveholder said of his relationship with an enslaved laborer.

Slavery in the US

People are enslaved in the U.S., too. The National Human Trafficking Resource center, which documents cases of forced labor and sex trafficking, has identified 197,000 victims of human trafficking since 2007.

In a bombshell revelation published after his death in 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Alex Tizon wrote about growing up in the U.S. with a domestic slave named Lola.

Tizon’s grandfather had purchased Lola in the Philippines as a present for Tizon’s mother, who then moved to the U.S. Lola stayed enslaved in Tizon’s family for 56 years until her death in 2011. Despite his misgivings about slavery, Tizon hailed Lola “a hallowed figure in (his) extended family.”

The U.S. has laws, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, that ban such behavior. But enslavers find ways to skirt the law. Coyotes and other middlemen who smuggle people into the country find a lucrative market for the forced labor of their victims.

Purchasing a slave is not expensive today. A domestic servant from Haiti can be bought for about US$50 with the requisite forged documents to bypass immigration. An Eastern European slave costs about $500.

This relatively cheap price stems from globalization along with the global population explosion. Human beings are, in scholar Kevin Bales’ words, disposable.

Survivors such as Rachel Lloyd and Holly Austin Gibbs have published their testimonies of being trafficked in Germany and the U.S., respectively. Their accounts offer some insight into the mindset of modern slaveholders.

In their memoirs, they write that their slaveholders thought of the people they enslaved as an economic commodity and cared little for their emotional well-being. Slaveholders, in their experience, were manipulative and violent. Their goal in trafficking teenage girls was simply to turn a profit.

This perspective recalls in some sense Aristotle’s thinking – that a slave is a tool to be used by another.

More research to be done

The field of contemporary slavery studies is relatively young. Data and research on modern slavery began to appear only about two decades ago, and that work focused on the systemic causes of enslavement – not on individual perpetrators.

Given the unique cultural underpinnings of slavery that vary around the world and over time, academia is still far from developing a general theory of what slaveholders think. There simply isn’t much research on their mindset.

Yet as the global population continues to explode, millions more people are likely to be enslaved in the coming years. Enslavement will continue to take familiar forms, from forced labor to sex trafficking, while the internet and social media provide new venues for online recruitment and cyber enslavement.

And if 2025 is anything like 2024, this year will see even more high-profile cases of celebrities accused of human trafficking.

I believe a better understanding of the mindset of slaveholders is crucial to combat contemporary slavery. Breakthroughs in understanding the thinking of other perpetrators, such as serial killers, has helped law enforcement better profile suspects, understand their thinking and develop better strategies and tool kits to apprehend them.

More fully understanding the people who dare to enslave another human being could give law enforcement worldwide a better shot at stopping this crime against humanity.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Rachel Lloyd was trafficked in Germany, correcting an error introduced during editing.

Monti Datta, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, University of Alaska Anchorage

President-elect Donald Trump is again signaling his interest in Greenland through a series of provocative statements in which he’s mused about the prospect of the U.S. taking ownership – perhaps by force or economic coersion – of the world’s largest island by area.

Talk of a takeover of Greenland may seem fanciful. But it wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. was able to procure a piece of the Arctic. The U.S. bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. To mark the 150th anniversary of the sale in 2017, we asked William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, a visiting professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, to write about that historic sale. This is the article we published then, with minor updates.

On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for US$7.2 million.

That sum, amounting to just $138 million in today’s dollars, brought to an end Russia’s 125-year odyssey in Alaska and its expansion across the treacherous Bering Sea, which at one point extended the Russian Empire as far south as Fort Ross, California, 90 miles from San Francisco Bay.

Today, Alaska is one of the richest U.S. states thanks to its abundance of natural resources, such as petroleum, gold and fish, as well as its vast expanse of pristine wilderness and strategic location as a window on Russia and gateway to the Arctic.

So, what prompted Russia to withdraw from its American beachhead? And how did it come to possess it in the first place?

As a descendant of Inupiaq Eskimos, I have been living and studying this history all my life. In a way, there are two histories of how Alaska came to be American – and two perspectives. One concerns how the Russians took “possession” of Alaska and eventually ceded it to the U.S. The other is from the perspective of my people, who have lived in Alaska for thousands of years, and for whom the anniversary of the cession brings mixed emotions, including immense loss but also optimism.

Russia looks east

The lust for new lands that brought Russia to Alaska and eventually California began in the 16th century, when the country was a fraction of its current size.

That began to change in 1581, when Russia overran a Siberian territory known as the Khanate of Sibir, which was controlled by a grandson of Genghis Khan. This key victory opened up Siberia, and within 60 years the Russians were at the Pacific.

The Russian advance across Siberia was fueled in part by the lucrative fur trade, a desire to expand the Russian Orthodox Christian faith to the “heathen” populations in the east and the addition of new taxpayers and resources to the empire.

In the early 18th century, Peter the Great – who created Russia’s first navy – wanted to know how far the Asian landmass extended to the east. The Siberian city of Okhotsk became the staging point for two explorations he ordered. And in 1741, Vitus Bering successfully crossed the strait that bears his name and sighted Mt. Saint Elias, near what is now the village of Yakutat, Alaska.

Although Bering’s second Kamchatka expedition brought disaster for him personally when adverse weather on the return journey led to a shipwreck on one of the westernmost Aleutian Islands and his eventual death from scurvy in December 1741, it was an incredible success for Russia. The surviving crew fixed the ship, stocked it full of hundreds of the sea otters, foxes and fur seals that were abundant there, and returned to Siberia, impressing Russian fur hunters with their valuable cargo. This prompted something akin to the Klondike gold rush 150 years later.

Challenges emerge

But maintaining these settlements wasn’t easy. Russians in Alaska, who numbered no more than 800 at their peak, faced the reality of being half a globe away from Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the empire, making communications a key problem.

Also, Alaska was too far north to allow for significant agriculture and therefore unfavorable as a place to send large numbers of settlers. So they began exploring lands farther south, at first looking only for people to trade with so they could import the foods that wouldn’t grow in Alaska’s harsh climate. They sent ships to what is now California, established trade relations with the Spaniards there and eventually set up their own settlement at Fort Ross in 1812.

Thirty years later, however, the entity set up to handle Russia’s American explorations failed and sold what remained. Not long after, the Russians began to seriously question whether they could continue their Alaskan colony as well.

For starters, the colony was no longer profitable after the sea otter population was decimated. Then there was the fact that Alaska was difficult to defend, and Russia was short on cash due to the costs of the war in Crimea.

Americans eager for a deal

So, clearly, the Russians were ready to sell, but what motivated the Americans to want to buy?

In the 1840s, the United States had expanded its interests to Oregon, annexed Texas, fought a war with Mexico and acquired California. Afterward, Secretary of State Seward wrote in March 1848:

“Our population is destined to roll resistless waves to the ice barriers of the north, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”

Almost 20 years after expressing his thoughts about expansion into the Arctic, Seward accomplished his goal.

In Alaska, the Americans foresaw a potential for gold, fur and fisheries, as well as more trade with China and Japan. The Americans worried that England might try to establish a presence in the territory, and the acquisition of Alaska, it was believed, would help the U.S. become a Pacific power. And overall the government was in an expansionist mode backed by the then-popular idea of “manifest destiny.”

So a deal with incalculable geopolitical consequences was struck, and the Americans seemed to get quite a bargain for their $7.2 million.

Just in terms of wealth, the U.S. gained about 370 million acres of mostly pristine wilderness, including 220 million acres of what are now federal parks and wildlife refuges. Hundreds of billions of dollars in whale oil, fur, copper, gold, timber, fish, platinum, zinc, lead and petroleum have been produced in Alaska over the years – allowing the state to do without a sales or income tax and give every resident an annual stipend. Alaska still likely has billions of barrels of oil reserves.

The state is also a key part of the United States defense system, with military bases located in Anchorage and Fairbanks, and it is the country’s only connection to the Arctic, which ensures it has a seat at the table as melting glaciers allow the exploration of the region’s significant resources.

Impact on Alaska Natives

But there’s an alternate version of this history.

When Bering finally located Alaska in 1741, Alaska was home to about 100,000 people, including Inuit, Athabascan, Yupik, Unangan and Tlingit. There were 17,000 alone on the Aleutian Islands.

Despite the relatively small number of Russians who at any one time lived at one of their settlements – mostly on the Aleutians Islands, Kodiak, Kenai Peninsula and Sitka – they ruled over the Native populations in their areas with an iron hand, taking children of the leaders as hostages, destroying kayaks and other hunting equipment to control the men and showing extreme force when necessary.

The Russians brought with them weaponry such as firearms, swords, cannons and gunpowder, which helped them secure a foothold in Alaska along the southern coast. They used firepower, spies and secured forts to maintain security, and they selected Christianized local leaders to carry out their wishes. They also met resistance, however, such as from the Tlingits, who were capable warriors, ensuring their hold on territory was tenuous.

By the time of the cession, only 50,000 Indigenous people were estimated to be left, as well as 483 Russians and 1,421 Creoles (descendants of Russian men and Indigenous women).

On the Aleutian Islands alone, the Russians enslaved or killed thousands of Aleuts. Their population plummeted to 1,500 in the first 50 years of Russian occupation due to a combination of warfare, disease and enslavement.

When the Americans took over, the United States was still engaged in its Indian wars, so they looked at Alaska and its Indigenous inhabitants as potential adversaries. Alaska was made a military district by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

For their part, Alaska Natives claimed that they still had title to the territory as its original inhabitants and having not lost the land in war or ceded it to any country – including the U.S., which technically didn’t buy it from the Russians but bought the right to negotiate with the Indigenous populations. Still, Natives were denied U.S. citizenship until 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act was passed.

During that time, Alaska Natives had no rights as citizens and could not vote, own property or file for mining claims. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, in conjunction with missionary societies, in the 1860s began a campaign to eradicate Indigenous languages, religion, art, music, dance, ceremonies and lifestyles.

It was only in 1936 that the Indian Reorganization Act authorized tribal governments to form, and only nine years later overt discrimination was outlawed by Alaska’s Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945. The law banned signs such as “No Natives Need Apply” and “No Dogs or Natives Allowed,” which were common at the time.

Statehood and a disclaimer

Eventually, however, the situation improved markedly for Natives.

Alaska finally became a state in 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act, allotting it 104 million acres of the territory. And in an unprecedented nod to the rights of Alaska’s Indigenous populations, the act contained a clause emphasizing that citizens of the new state were declining any right to land subject to Native title – which by itself was a very thorny topic because they claimed the entire territory.

A result of this clause was that in 1971 President Richard Nixon ceded 44 million acres of federal land, along with $1 billion, to Alaska’s Native populations, which numbered about 75,000 at the time. That came after a Land Claims Task Force that I chaired gave the state ideas about how to resolve the issue.

Today, Alaska has a population of 740,000, of which 120,000 are Natives.

As the United States celebrates the signing of the Treaty of Cession, we all – Alaskans, Natives and Americans of the lower 48 – should salute Secretary of State William H. Seward, the man who eventually brought democracy and the rule of law to Alaska.

This article was first published on March 29, 2017.

William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of Alaska Anchorage

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.