European leaders behave like supplicants to an almighty Trump. Putin just sees him as a protege | Rafael Behr
A Hungry pigeons giving food at frequent but irregular intervals will develop strange rituals – tics, dances, erratic tremors – in the hope of invoking another piece. BF Skinner, the psychologist who demonstrated this effect for the first time in 1947, described the birds adopting “a kind of superstition … as if there was a causal relationship between his behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relationship is lacking”.
It would be bad to compare this affliction to the braining of birds to the behavior of European leaders trying to give meaning to the erratic distribution of Donald Trump of favors. Their diplomatic maneuvers are more rational. And they get results. But there is also a superstition element. Visiting politicians make sumptuous gestures, hit unusual poses, cultivate contacts of the White House, in search of the sequence of the stages which will unlock a regular supply of American friendship. There is no shortage of the causal relationship, but it is not reliable.
In February, Keir Starmer courted Trump with an invitation to visit Great Britain as the guest of His Majesty the King. The Prime Minister was rewarded with the relative leniency under the punitive pricing regime of the White House. In March, Finnish President Alexander Stubb impressed his American counterpart with technical prowess on the golf course. Between shots, he treated the conversation with warnings so as not to trust Vladimir Putin. He followed a noticeable drop in Trump’s patience with the Russian president.
During a summit in June, NATO leaders presented hikes in their national defense budgets while tributes paid in honor of the US president’s higher reference. The secretary general of the Alliance, Mark Rutte, produced a rhetorical kowtow, praising “dad” Trump, thanking him for having made Europe more for his own defense. The choreographed sycophance seemed to work. Trump spoke of NATO with unusual warmth. His tone towards Russia has become colder.
It didn’t last. Putin a countered with her own flattery campaign. Trump emerged from the bilateral summit last week in Alaska with a peacemake to peace in Ukraine which followed the twisted directions of the Kremlin-no imminent ceasefire and hundreds of unstopped land in Russia.
And so ritual dance has started again. A herd of European pigeons ran to Washington, cooing and beating in support of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, hoping to generate a new part of transatlantic solidarity.
The result could have been much worse. There was no repetition of the notorious ritual humiliation that Trump inflicted on Zelenskyy for the cameras in February. Instead of intimidation, there was a bonhomie. On the substance of a peace regulation, there are security guarantees for resembling Ukraine but not reproducing article 5 – the mutual assistance clause of the founding charter of NATO. What this really means, how it could be applied, if it will be subscribed by the American army, and therefore the way in which Russia would be discouraged from any renewed territory element is all suspended questions.
The next step is an opposite face to face offered between Zelenskyy and Putin, followed by a trilateral summit with Trump. The Russian president would be open to the idea of direct talks with his Ukrainian enemy, but there is no enthusiasm for such a meeting in the Kremlin.
To justify a large -scale invasion, Putin threw Zelenskyy as the despised boss of a neonazian junta with drug addiction preventing the impatient reintegration of Ukraine in the greatest Slavic Fatherland. When this fiction has proven to be difficult to maintain, the emphasis was placed on the presentation of the Ukrainian leader as a pawn in a long -standing Western campaign to reduce and humiliate Russia. This story was to end with the death or the discount of Zelenskyy. It will not be easy for the propagandists of Moscow to tell a different outcome where the Ukrainian president talks about the terms with Putin as his unannounced peer.
Avoiding such a scenario had been one of the two great achievements of the Russian president in Alaska. First, by insisting on a bilateral meeting, Putin was able to bounce Trump by approving a peace model which contains no suspicion of reprimand or repair for a flagrant territorial aggression.
Secondly, by recreating the optics of the Cold War Relaxation – a top of superpower to settle the fate of lower nations – Putin pointed out to its domestic audience that Soviet style parity with the United States was restored. For European democracies, he hoped to prove that their efforts to isolate Russia as a noisy pariah state will come to nothing.
The notion of Russia as an eggs in America on any power measure (with the exception of the size of the nuclear arsenal) was an illusion before the USSR collapsed, but Trump willing himself. It is a corollary of his obsession with making America great again, and doing so by authoritarian measures. This predisposes him to denigrate the achievements of 20th century American democracy and the greatness of projects to the regimes which present despotism under a cult of personality.
Putin is clever to handle this attraction. While European leaders put pressure on Trump in the style of the suppliants at the court of a king, the modern Tsar of Russia cultivates him as something more like a protégé – a recruit for the exclusive club of world historical figures which dictate the destiny of millions. These are the kinds of men who redraw the borders and distribute the land between them, not the gender that groans when the territorial allowance is unfair. It is a concept of geopolitics that despises international law and denigns multilateral alliances as clever games that Minnite countries play to trap large fish.
This testifies to the narcissistic personality of Trump and the aversion to any institutional constraint on his power. This means that the Russian president communicates with the White House on his own special canal, on a higher frequency.
European counter-signals are not blocked. The evidence shows a real success in Trump’s distance from an alternating pro-Kremlin alignment policy. But there is a perverse imbalance of influence. Just when the leaders of the oldest and most faithful allies in America think they have mastered the art of Trump’s perception, they find that his ears were deeply folded by Russian disinformation.
In the short term, there is not an obvious alternative but to continue the current method, using the strength of numbers and repetition to persuade Trump that his way towards grandeur goes through sustainable Ukrainian independence with guarantees of muscle security.
It is certainly possible that the diplomatic dance of Europeans can push the position of the president in a more equitable direction on the path of a peace agreement. But they do not affect any revision of his vision of a world divided between powerful players, to whom no rule applies, and vassal states.
The challenge is then to develop European capacity as a coherent and autonomous power player – to evolve and coordinate the economic and military weight of the continent with confidence and on a scale to grant respect in the only language that the American president understands.
The current approach is not exactly failed. But Trump-Hispering is at best an unstable and intrinsically transient method. At worst, it is starting to look like a superstitious belief that the realization of the rituals of an old alliance will make it in fact. Straight pigeon steps can gain vital favors from the American president. The idea that he could never be the real friend that Europe wants him to be is for birds.
