Trumpism is a greater danger to Europe than Putin
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Europe faces threats on two fronts from opponents using very different means to expand their power.
The first threat is military and external, and stems from President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The second is from Trumpism, a sort of updated version of 30s fascism, which is fast emerging as a far greater danger to European liberal democracy than anything posed by the Russian army.
European leaders say – though how far they believe this is another question – that the European Union and Nato states must cling together, remaining closely allied to the US, to stop the Russians defeating Ukraine on the battlefield. Were Ukraine to fall, Russia could then sweep into eastern and central Europe, in a re-run of the victorious Red Army’s advance westwards in 1944-5.
The Kremlin would like to do just that in its dreams, but the course of the Ukraine war so far suggests that such an apocalyptic outcome is far beyond its strength. Russia’s original invasion of Ukraine was a fiasco, since when it has failed to make significant territorial advances. Last weekend, Ukrainian drones were able to wipe out parts of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in surprise attacks as far away as Siberia.
The military conflict in Ukraine is stalemated, but Maga Republicanism backed by US state power is swiftly expanding its ideological influence in Europe. Trump-type populist nationalist movements are well positioned in country after country to stage a wide-ranging, if chaotic, counter-revolution against frail establishments defending what passes for European civilisation.
As in the US, the old status quo has much wrong with it but what may follow it in a Trumpian world will be much worse. The political winds already favoured radical change as defined by the far right, but President Donald Trump’s return to the White House massively reinforced the trend.
Trumpism, in its variable guises, is on the march in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Poland, to name only the major European states. In all these countries, the political tinder of popular dissatisfaction is dry and catches fire with alarming speed.
The signs are that the Trump playbook has the same toxic impact in Europe as at home. As in the US, successful European populist nationalist movements include a charismatic leader skilled in media manipulation and with a personality cult. Such figures become increasingly irremovable as they progressively gain control of the judiciary, media, security forces and other centres of power. Elections are held but permanently skewed in their favour.
US Vice President JD Vance fired the starting pistol for Trumpism in Europe in front of a horrified audience at the Munich Security Conference in February.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” he said. “What I worry about is the threat from within.” He accused Europe of retreating from fundamental values shared with the US, such as free speech, but it predictably turned out that this was to be confined only to those who adhered slavishly to the Trump party line. Those too vigorously defending non-white, immigrant communities, women’s equality, or criticising the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza were denounced by Trump as “left-wing radical lunatics” or “terrorists”.
Many in Munich were insulted by Vance’s words but probably did not foresee that Trumpism had become evangelical, seeking and supporting converts across the world. In May, for example, the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, travelled to Poland to call on voters to elect Karol Nawrocki, the presidential candidate of the far right Law and Justice Party. She described his liberal opponent as an “absolute train wreck of a leader”. In the event, Nawrocki won the vote by a sliver a week ago to become Poland’s new president.
Unsurprisingly, the US denounced the court decision in France to ban the extreme right leader Marine Le Pen from standing for office for five years. The crudity and blatancy of US interventions in European domestic politics are astonishing, but they are effective because they exploit racial and cultural divisions in Europe just as they do in the US.
Since it triumphed in local elections on 1 May, Reform UK has made no secret of its plans to ape Maga Republicanism in the US, even setting up its own version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to discover how cash-strapped or near bankrupt local councils won by Reform can save money.
Even the many Americans opposed to Trump were astonished by the counter-revolutionary zeal shown by him and his supporters after he re-entered the White House. It seems as if anything of a progressive nature achieved by the US since the “New Deal” – the social and economic reforms implemented by Franklin D Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 30s – is being torn up and discarded. These include anti-discrimination measures protecting non-whites and women, while universities are targeted as bastions of liberalism.
Assumptions of racial superiority and inferiority flavours government actions at home and abroad. South Africa is ludicrously accused of conducting a genocide against whites, while a Palestinian who says the same about Israeli actions in Gaza risks deportation out of the US.
The threat that Trumpism poses to Europe has grown exponentially in the last few months and has the potential to damage Europe to a degree far beyond anything Putin can hope to achieve. Yet European leaders continue to view Russia under Putin as the great existential danger, as if Russia today was a mighty, born-again Soviet Union under the iron rule of Stalin 80 years ago.
These historic memories are important because Europeans in general, and those in or near those parts of eastern and central Europe occupied by the Soviet Union for nearly half a century in particular, view Russian capabilities through a prism shaped by the Soviet era and the Cold War.
Add to these genuine fears a more self-serving attitude among some leaders that Russia is “a useful enemy”, an evil monster against whom disunited Europeans can unite – with the bonus of enabling unpopular politicians like Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to wrap the flag around them and pose as saviours of the nation.
I do not believe that the threat-enhancement towards Russia is a cynical manoeuvre, but it does bring with it one great disadvantage in combating Trumpism. So long as the Ukraine war goes on with fears of a Russian victory, European leaders must rely on the US as their all-important military ally. They cannot be too offensive to Trump, however much they are provoked by his interference in their domestic politics.
Moreover, this hobbles them in counter-attacking far right parties in Europe as clones or puppets of Trump, vastly unpopular though he is personally in EU countries; just 13 per cent believe that he respects democracy and more than half see him as an enemy of Europe. In the UK, a quarter of those polled thought that Trump was a bigger threat to the country than any terrorist organisation.
JD Vance was unintentionally correct when he said that Europe faced an enemy within more dangerous than Russia and China – but the true identity of that enemy is Trump and Maga Republicanism.
Further Thoughts
It is truly a bit of cheek for Sir Keir Starmer to demand that immigrants improve their English-language skills to prove their loyalty to the UK. In his bid to out-Farage Farage last month, the Prime Minister insisted that “when people come to our country, they should also commit… to learning our language”.
Those settling here permanently will be expected to pass an exam, requiring them to understand “complex text on both concrete and abstract topics” and “interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity”.
If Starmer took such an exam he might just squeeze past on the texts, but he would surely be stumped by any requirement for “fluency and spontaneity” in spoken English.
His style of speaking is robotic, and he sounds as if he is reading from a prepared text even when he is not. Moreover, the text in question appears to have been poorly translated from a Latin original.
Starmer’s vocabulary appears to be limited to about 600 words, and his sentences are chock-a-block with over-used words like “turbo-charged” along with mind-numbing platitudes such as “every citizen has a role to play because we have to recognise that things have changed in the world of today”.
His lack of fluency in speech does not necessarily mean a lack of intelligence and ability, but it is difficult to take seriously somebody whose spoken English is so weighed down by clichés and statements of the obvious.
Starmer strikes me as a career apparatchik with conservative instincts, but limited political skills, who got lucky as the Conservative Party self-destructed. As a member of the hard right of the Labour Party, he wants to preserve a faltering system rather than radically change it, were such changes feasible.
As it is, fear of disappointing the bond markets and sparking another financial implosion à la Liz Truss narrows his options – even supposing he knows what he wants to achieve.
Beneath the Radar
A friend who is half British and half German told me an interesting anecdote which illustrates the degree to which Germany’s view of the world is still shaped by the legacy of the First and Second World Wars.
My friend is writing a book about her family, three of whom were killed in the First World War, two of them in the battle of Verdun in 1916, and a third who was the captain of a U-boat sunk in the last year of the war.
She was interested in obtaining a model of a U-boat, many of which were produced in Germany 1914-18, when the submarine was going to be the war-winning weapon. Going to an antique shop in Germany, the shop owner admitted to having a model U-boat but had it hidden away in a back room as something illicit and controversial.
Such historic inhibitions are significant when the future standing of three greatest powers in the West – Germany, Russia and the US – is once more in flux.
Cockburn’s Picks
I do not usually pick a story from The i Paper, but everybody should read Ian Birrell’s piece. It’s about how the world’s richest family in Abu Dhabi is making money out of Britain’s ill-run children’s homes and schools for children with special needs.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.