THE world is feeling increasingly dangerous. The prospect of a global trade war, thanks to President Trump’s excited enthusiasm for tariffs, was bad enough. But now the US President has destabilised the international order by cosying up to the warmonger in the Kremlin. And his Vice-President came to Europe to rap us over the knuckles, peculiarly, for undermining democratic values and free speech. A new volatility is in the air.
The most disturbing element in all this is President Trump’s decision to open direct negotiations with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine — without involving Ukraine — and also excluding the European nations across whose borders President Putin’s armies loom. But there is an inconsistency in the approach of the Trump administration which is equally alarming.
His trade policy suggests a retreat into isolationism. But his 90-minute phone call to President Putin, and this week’s talks in Saudi Arabia — both a clear win for the Kremlin — hark back to an imperialist era in which the great powers carved up the world to suit them, regardless of the other nations. Add to this the US Vice-President, J. D. Vance, travelling to the Munich Security Conference to upbraid the Europeans over freedom and democracy, while he ignores the rulings of judges back home, and the contradictions are clear. Sir John Major this week went further, calling it hypocrisy.
Sir John was right in his general thrust. The United States has, since the Second World War — through the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, and NATO — played the key part in upholding a largely stable rules-based world order. Retreating from all this, the US will leave a power vacuum that may well be filled by China and exploited by Russia.
President Trump’s bizarre rhetoric about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and Gaza can only embolden Russia and China in their own territorial ambitions in Ukraine and Taiwan. And his attacks on judges who have made rulings opposing his fusillade of executive orders (which undermine important US government institutions) will legitimise, in the eyes of his fellow autocrats, a contempt for the independence of the courts and the separation of powers. We have entered, says the former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, a rules-free amoral world order in which the only commodity that matters is raw power.
But the world has changed since Sir John Major’s time. The US could go unchallenged as the world’s policeman at the end of the Cold War, but the geopolitical landscape is shifting toward a multi-polar order. President Trump’s style may be wild and inchoate, but his views reflect the opinions of those who elected him and were disillusioned by US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is unarguable that Europe has, for decades, piggybacked on US defence expenditure and not paid its way in defending NATO’s Eastern flank.
How should Europe now respond? Which Europe? The old liberal order of the European Establishment? Or the Europe that must take on board the rise of the nativist populism of Orbán, Meloni, Le Pen, Wilders, Fico, Farage, and — possibly, after next week’s election in Germany — Alice Weidel of the AfD, currently second in the polls. President Trump has twisted the kaleidoscope. The pieces are yet to resolve themselves into a new picture.
