As Trump and Putin loom over us, Europe lives in a world of make believe

We cannot face a crisis that is just weeks away

Photo by rob walsh on Unsplash

In September 1939, days before the outbreak of the Second World War, W.H. Auden went for a drink in New York, and marvelled at how people carried on as if everything was normal.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

It feels like that in Europe today. I turned on the radio this morning and the news was dominated by planning disputes. Can the British government force local authorities to reduce house prices by building more homes, the presenters asked. (Probably not. Nimbyism is the only religion the English middle classes now adhere to.)

Then there was a bit on Syria, a conflict far from our shores, and a lot on football. But nowhere was there an honest appraisal of the coming crisis of a Trump presidency – now barely a month away.

Keir Starmer and the British establishment maintain the charade that, somehow, they can keep the defence and intelligence relationship with the US going once the radical right is in charge in Washington.

"The idea that we must choose between our allies, that somehow we’re with either America or Europe, is plain wrong," Starmer said a few days ago.

"I reject it utterly. Our relationship with the United States has been the cornerstone of our security and our prosperity for over a century. We will never turn away from that.”

Well, you may never turn away from the United States, mate, but that doesn’t mean the United States won’t turn away from you.

Surely Starmer must know that America will soon stop being a reliable ally.

Hasn’t he even noticed how Elon Musk, Trump’s leading crony and fundraiser – Musk gave the Trump campaign a quarter of a billion dollars – egged on racist rioters on the streets of Britain in the summer and is an open supporter and possible bankroller of Nigel Farage?

You can call the relationship with a supposed ally who whips up extremism in the UK “special” if you want. But it is special only in the sense that never in our lifetimes has the US treated the UK so badly.

Meanwhile, when Trump showed up in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame, European leaders begged him for help like vassals importuning an unforgiving emperor.

Afterwards Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Trump backed a just settlement of the Ukraine war.

It was another pretence. An understandable and desperate pretence in Zelensky’s case but still a pretence that we are not sleepwalking towards a crisis.

Instead of fantasising about Trump’s secret desire to maintain the Nato alliance, Europeans would do better to look at the American right’s admiration for Putin as a white Christian strongman who hates the liberals and the woke.

Then we should observe the reverse side of that debased coin and look at its shameful and perverse hatred of Ukraine.