Trump’s true enemy isn’t China or Russia but liberal democracy

The new Cold War between Europe and America

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Americans looking with some desperation for a reputable rationale behind the betrayal of Ukraine have reached for the comfort of realpolitik.

America’s superpower rival is China, they say. Geopolitical reality dictates that Europe must fend for itself while the US turns to face east.

MAGA loyalists repeat the party line – one would expect no less. But intelligent American writers, who are by no means members of the Trump personality cult, still want to believe that the US radical right is upholding a broader American national interest that transcends the vicious idiocies of its culture war.

Writing in the Atlantic, a journal that I think it is fair to say detests every atom of Trump’s being, Eliot A. Cohen took seriously the administration’s claim that it was focusing on securing its own borders and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”.

Noah Smith, another journalist who is worth reading, added, “America does not have the resources to defend both Europe and Asia at the same time anymore”. Europe has vastly superior resources to Russia, and must learn to defend its own frontiers.

However reasonable these explanations sound, they fail miserably to capture the danger we face.

The radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism.

The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.

Indeed, “culture war” is too mild a term for what the US is inflicting on Europe. Rather it is a new cold war that includes the withdrawal of military support, the elevation of Vladimir Putin from pariah to partner, propaganda attacks, and subversion.

Britain and Germany had an early experience of the conflict when Elon Musk, who lest we forget is a member of a US administration that is meant to be our ally, used the propaganda resources of his Twitter (X) network to build up far right movements – including, in the case of my country, far right movements that were actually rioting on the streets, and threatening to burn Muslims and asylum seekers alive.

People talk about Russian sabotage in Europe. The head of the British intelligence service MI6 said Putin was engaged in a “staggeringly reckless campaign". But how is Putin’s behaviour different from the reckless incitements of Elon Musk?

One might almost think they were on the same side.

J.D. Vance. Trump’s deputy, brought the cold war against liberal democracy into the open. He was quite explicit.

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance told the Munich Security Conference.

“What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.”

After Russia had invaded a European country and called in forces from North Korea to help it do it, after all that blether about taking on China, the baldly-stated truth was that what really moves the radical right is hatred of the liberal enemy within.

It should not be too hard to see the importance of ideology. After what we went through in the 20^th century, are we seriously going to pretend that it cannot change the world?

From the point of view of the American right, a hatred of liberal democracy makes perfect sense. They hate it at home, after all. And contrary to the cliché, travel does not broaden the mind.

Liberals threaten to regulate tech oligopolies such as Elon Musk’s Twitter, which has become the right’s greatest weapon. They have laws against corruption and racism, which can be used against Trump and his European imitators. They hold free elections, and do not allow mobs to storm their parliaments and congresses to demand that the legitimate vote be put to one side and the far-right candidate installed.

Europeans are outraged that Trump’s America is not defending a European democracy from an unprovoked attack from an autocratic power. We need to understand that the American right favours Russia precisely because Russia is an autocracy.

Mutatis mutandis, it is precisely because Ukraine is a democracy that the radical right in the form of Vance, Tucker Carlson and Trump himself rolls out every variety of stupid, lying conspiracy theory to denigrate Ukraine and its people.

Like Musk, Vance bigged up the Alternative for Germany, a far-right and, crucially in this context, a pro-Putin party.

He went on to demonstrate that his most urgent concern was the first round of voting in Romania’s 2024 presidential elections.

Yup, I had to look that one up too. The short version of the story is that last year the Romanian supreme court annulled the first round because Russia was trying to rig the election in favour of Călin Georgescu a pro-Kremlin candidate.

Vance was not outraged by the interference of the Russia dictatorship in the affairs a sovereign European democracy. Why would he be when Russian only ever interferes to support Trump and fellow members of the far right? It was the fact that the courts stopped Russia that infuriated him.

Meanwhile European politicians who opposed far-right parties and refused to enter into pacts with the Alternative for Germany and other Putinesque outfits were not making moral and political choices, Vance continued. They were betraying democracy itself.

“You’re running in fear of your own voters, [and] there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

I want you to re-read those disgraceful sentences. Vance was saying that, unless European governments went along with far-right movements, American support would go.

This is not deal we can take.

Those foreign-policy analysts who still believe Trump’s foreign policy is all about geopolitics should face a few hard facts.

If Trump were serious about taking on China, he would want to humiliate Putin rather than pander to him. Russia is well on its way to becoming a Chinese vassal state, after all, and a defeat for Moscow would be a defeat for Beijing.

Does anyone seriously believe that an America that won’t defend Ukraine will go to war to defend Taiwan.

If it were willing to fight, Trump would want to line up allies for the coming struggle. He would not needlessly alienate Canada by threatening to annex it, Denmark by threatening to annex Greenland, Britian and Germany by building up far-right forces within their borders, and the whole of Europe by saying that we must submit without complaint to Russian interference in our elections.

This cannot go on and we will have to break free. Being allied to Trump’s America is like being chained to a lunatic. The task will be grim. Europe cannot institute a drastic readjustment in the military balance of power overnight and in the middle of a war.

But the sooner we start distancing ourselves the better. Breaking with the US will be a hell of a wrench but it is better than staying in an abusive relationship.

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