Can Europe resist Trump’s gangsterism?

Does it have the willpower to even try?

Photo by Jose M on Unsplash

I cannot begin to tell you how unprepared Europe in general and the UK in particular are for Trump’s embrace of Putin. Nato, the most powerful alliance in military history, is not being defeated by its foreign enemies but is being destroyed from within. And Europe didn’t see the destruction coming.

In Shakespeare’s Richard II, John of Gaunt laments

“That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

You can say much the same about the West.

If you attended foreign policy seminars over the years, you would have heard security analysts talk about “thinking the unthinkable” and “war-gaming” implausible scenarios. Yet never once would you have heard them discussing what Europe should do if the American alliance failed, let alone what to do if America switched sides and became an ally of dictators.

In the Lowdown podcast (out tomorrow) I interview Arthur Snell, a former British diplomat and now one of the best analysts around. I asked him whether the Foreign Office had a contingency plan for America walking away from Europe that officials might dust down and present to the prime minister.

There was nothing, he replied.

Far from there being a plan for coping without the US, there had been a deep antagonism to thinking about a future without America.

When the UK was in the European Union, “we were always extremely unhappy” with proposals for a common EU defence policy because they threatened to weaken military links with the US, which the UK believed must be preserved at all costs.

After Brexit, the fantasists who promoted withdrawal from the EU were lost in a dream that Britain could join an “Anglosphere” dominated by the United States – a delusion the actual United States never showed the smallest interest in sharing. They, too, failed to imagine a future without the American alliance.

The Victorian prime minister Lord Palmerston said:

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Palmerston’s successors in Whitehall forgot his warning. They thought the American alliance would last forever.

You hear the same story in every European country west of the Oder-Neisse line. Germany, which goes to the polls today, believed that it could depend on Russian gas, and refuse to invest in defence, and still count on the Americans.

Whatever war games the European foreign policy establishment played, the idea that America would become a neutral or hostile power was too extraordinary to contemplate.

Now that the horrific consequences of those illusions are clear for Ukraine and the rest of Europe, we should ask if there is any hope left.

Although it goes against my nature to be optimistic, there is a glimmer of hope in the knowledge that Russia’s boasts about its superpower status are hollow.

It is a creaking terrorist state. Europe has the wealth to defeat it. The question is whether there is the political will and popular support to mobilise its resources.

The first task in mobilising both is to rid ourselves of false comfort.

When the world turns against them, people cling to a dead past. If Donald Trump had been born poor, we would have no trouble in saying that he was a criminal, a bully and an extreme right-wing braggart. Because he is rich and because he is now the President of the United States European politicians and diplomats pretend that he something better than a political gangster.

Like a Victorian family with a dirty secret, European leaders still try to keep up appearances.