Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly
The world’s most admired democracy is being held hostage by a clique of far-right thugs. It would be a mistake to placate them
Mon 3 Mar 2025
It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about
saving Ukraine,
or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do
about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a
dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no
longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles
are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered
world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and
brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy
harbinger.
Take the issues one at a time.
Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an
extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares
nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for
his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant
leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”.
As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is
not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their
voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done.
Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried
to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.
“Everybody
in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on
that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.
It
seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime
occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must
do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right
clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.
Trump’s
minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and
free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they
impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph
Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD
Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic
culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.
Ukraine,
despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The
Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic
self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer
be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and
better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more
humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds;
and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as
Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and
more honest defiance.
To
be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US
government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine
and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor
the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European
peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should
not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too,
to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could
stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he
refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention
that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed
further.
Right now, the opposite is happening.
Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western
discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on
Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan
to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders,
meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.
Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan.
Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt
to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process
inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior
concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close
borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed
forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all
unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west
has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression
with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense
about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer.
He’s also a coward.
Given Trump’s treachery and
threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a
chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine
forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it
would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan
and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.
Marco
Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last
month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US,
Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence.
It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to
maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the
partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails
and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.
Such a
global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great
empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which
deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics:
totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross
inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of
Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present,
recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”.
Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that
has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia
towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless
they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.