Europe cannot bet on a post-Trump US turning back to sanity | Rafael Behr

DDonald Trump is a despot and the United States is a democracy. These things can be true simultaneously but not indefinitely. The struggle between a president who would like to become king and a constitution written to reject the monarchy is now at an impasse. But it’s a battle to the death. Tyranny will break the spirit of the republic or be suppressed by it.

Since the United States is the world’s supreme power, the outcome of this competition will have epic consequences for countries, like the United Kingdom, that depend on Washington for their security.

Trump’s malicious disparagement of Keir Starmer and other European leaders for their reluctance to join the bombing of Iran demonstrates the impossibility of partial alignment with a leader who wants total submission. The American president’s only recognized source of authority is himself. When asked earlier this year if there was anything that could limit his actions in the world, he replied: “My own morality, my own mind.” »

To accompany such a man is to put aside the law and submit to his will. This is the choice that the Republican Party has made in American domestic politics and it is the only offer offered to foreign allies.

The European response has been a confusing mix of acquiescence and evasive action. The flattery was deployed to convince Trump to renew his vows of mutual assistance to NATO and to prevent a total betrayal of Ukraine. Defense budgets have been rewritten to prove that the continent can contribute to the alliance and thus dissuade it from taking the lion’s share.

There is a strategic rationale here. Preparing for the nightmare scenario – Europe left to its own devices facing a belligerent Russia – makes this outcome less likely, as increased military spending deters Moscow and appeases Trump. But fear and denial also play a role. European adaptation to the difficult new transatlantic relationship has been delayed by the hope that the old friendly relationship will not be lost forever.

There is a psychological need to believe that the devastation wrought by Trump, while extreme, is exceptional – a singular event, like the Covid pandemic; painful and costly, but it is not a permanent change in the order of things. The president is mortal. His powers could be limited if Democrats win the November midterm elections. Ceasefires can be negotiated. Closed waterways can be reopened. Supply chains can be rewoven.

But Trumpdemia is a more complex syndrome. The United States was completely exposed for a full term after the 2016 election, culminating in an acute anti-democratic crisis on January 6, 2021. This serious infection has not cultivated enough immunity in the body politic to prevent a second term that is already proving more virulent in its attacks on probity and basic human decency than the first.

There is no guarantee that a Trump successor will be able to restore old constitutional norms, even assuming he is someone willing to try. America’s former allies would be grateful to have a less deranged president, but they cannot be sure that sanity will endure longer than any election cycle. The trust is gone.

American conservatism is steeped in paranoid and apocalyptic thinking that equates European traditions of liberal democracy with civilizational decline and the erasure of white Christian culture by Muslim immigration. In this light, any appeal to international institutions and multilateralism is understood as the pathetic lamentations of geopolitical weaklings.

European leaders have known this speech for years. Their mistake was to think that they could still operate in a special channel, reserved for historical allies, and that Trump’s extreme language and deference to dictators does not always define American foreign policy. When he declared himself prepared to seize Greenland by force – an assault on Danish sovereignty that would dissolve NATO as a functioning alliance – they understood that they were dealing with someone who treats his partners like prey and only concedes in the face of resistance.

Europe’s unified response, coupled with market nervousness over the prospect of a transatlantic trade war, pushed Trump toward a downfall. The crisis was Starmer’s first foray into public conflict with the White House, calling the president’s threats over Greenland “completely false.” and insisting he “would not give in” to US pressure for a more accommodating stance. But even then, the Prime Minister stuck to his formula of strategic equidistance between Europe and the United States, without obligation to express any preference.

The Iranian crisis exploded this fiction. The choice Starmer insisted he did not have to make was forced upon him by Trump’s unsatisfactory demand for unconditional support in an illegal war. By refusing this call and attracting sharp recriminations from the White House, the Prime Minister has oriented British foreign policy towards his own continent. It helps that economic gravity and geography – proximity to the single market – also pull in this direction.

The new imperative of solidarity does not dissolve all the old obstacles to rapprochement. Brexit is a thicket of thorny legal obstacles to reintegration. Within the EU, there are still competing priorities between 27 member states of varying size, economic complexity and historical experience. There is always a tension between the demands of domestic voters – who want to spend on things other than weapons, for example, or cheaper gas than could be obtained in Russia – and the gains to be made from supranational collective coordination.

Europe has not responded with one voice to the war in Iran. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, barely spoke during an excruciating appearance in the Oval Office, staring as Trump spewed bilious judgment about the pacifist perfidies of Starmer and Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister. By contrast, Micheál Martin, the Irish taoiseach, met the same challenge with a dignified rebuff, defending his British counterpart as a “very serious and solid person”.

No Democratic leader has fully mastered the art of whispering to Trump, because the president shows no respect for power when he speaks in a whisper. The EU is still figuring out how to project a unified message. The UK has wasted a decade muttering myths about pristine Brexit sovereignty when its interests are and always have been better served by strengthening the European chorus.

Continental solidarity is not an antidote to chaos amid the waves of Trumpdemic, but it is the necessary condition for resilience. Europeans don’t get a vote when Americans decide whether or not to repudiate a tyrant and restore their constitution. The only democracies they can save are their own, and they must do it together, always hoping, but not assuming, that they will once again have an ally on the other side of the Atlantic.