Donald Trump is on a roll. He has plenty of reasons to feel pleased with himself. For a man who from childhood on has done his utmost to attract the attention of others and, while about it, to get even with the many who had seen him as a figure of fun that nobody in his right mind could possibly take seriously, knowing that he can make or break entire nations at will must be highly enjoyable.
For Trump, payback time has well and truly arrived. As he showed when addressing Congress on Tuesday night, he delights in needling his Democrat foes and everyone he associates with them, making them all splutter with impotent rage. Far from being magnanimous towards former US president Joe Biden, he rarely forgoes a chance to give the poor fellow more kicks in the gut.
As was to be expected, Trump’s approach to the war raging in Ukraine has far less to do with geopolitics, let along the compassion he says he feels towards the hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians who have been killed or wounded since Vladimir Putin began the full-scale invasion of a neighbour he says belongs to Mother Russia, than with his personal dislike for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump thinks the Ukrainian collaborated willingly with the Democrats who wanted to see him put in jail. To make matters worse, Zelenskyy went on to acquire an enviable international reputation as a crusader who, with exemplary courage, was defending Western democracy against a ruthless tyrant determined to destroy it, thereby usurping a role that Trump believes should be his and his alone.
For the historically minded, Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington a week ago surely resembled that of the embattled Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden in February 1938, where the Fuhrer subjected him to a furious dressing down and told him that his country was finished. Hardly a month went by before Austria was incorporated into the rapidly expanding German Reich.
Trump may have little in common with Adolf Hitler and only wants to get his hands on Ukraine’s rare-earth deposits, but the way he and Vice-President J. D. Vance treated Zelenskyy before a worldwide television audience did nothing to make the many who loathe him stop comparing his behaviour to the Nazi dictator and seeing what is happening now in Eastern Europe as a repeat of the appeasement years that preceded World War II.
This way of interpreting what is going on is a bit far fetched. After over three years in the field, Putin’s armies have been unable to conquer Ukraine and would surely face disaster if they tried their luck against NATO in Western Europe, even if the US refused to intervene, but such considerations have not prevented senior politicians from suggesting that, if Ukraine loses, their country could be next on his hit list so they had better prepare themselves for war.
Fears that history could be about to repeat itself are behind the decision by some European leaders, most notably the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s next chancellor Friedrich Merz to beef up their military forces and increase the production of armaments. This should please Trump and his supporters who have long been demanding that the Europeans make a much bigger contribution to their own defence instead of relying on the good ol’ USA to do all the heavy lifting, as most have been happy to do since 1945, but would they really like it if their transatlantic partners became entirely self-reliant and started throwing their weight around as they did in the past?
After all, from Trump’s imperious point of view, European weakness does have its advantages. This was made clear in the days preceding the televised fracas between Zelensky and his extraordinarily aggressive hosts when first Macron and then Starmer flew in and did their best to butter them up by flattering Trump and smiling benignly in the direction of Vance. As on returning home they had to explain to those who derided them for kowtowing in public to a US president they do not respect, it was a demeaning chore for both of them which they had to perform for reasons of realpolitik.
In politics, pride can matter as much as fear; awareness that US politicians despise them has given European leaders, who until a couple of months ago seemed to be sleep-walking towards the edge of a cliff, a much-needed jolt. Unless they mend their ways, all their countries – including the biggest – could share the fate of many others that flourished for a time but then sank into obscurity before vanishing entirely, leaving behind little more than the names of a few towns, rivers and mountains.
Critics of generous social-welfare programmes have always insisted that, in the long run, they do more harm than good by turning people who in other circumstances would learn to stand on their own feet into querulous dependents on the kindness of others. Much the same happens when large communities or countries get used to being mollycoddled by richer and stronger ones which put them under their tutelage and provide for their needs. This is why foreign aid usually does more to help the donors feel good about themselves than it does to encourage the recipients to become self-sufficient.
Have the Europeans stumbled into the dependency trap? Trump and his cronies evidently think they have and therefore deserve to be treated like the supplicants they are. This is especially galling for the British and French who – much to the indignation of progressive intellectuals apparently convinced that, with few exceptions, their ancestors were a murderous lot with disgraceful opinions – retain folk memories of the days when their countries were powerful enough to boss others around. This no doubt is why Starmer and Macron, lifelong advocates of “soft power,” have suddenly become keen on the hard variety, the kind that interests Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping. To make their new policies more palatable to the electorate, they could remind it that, though re-arming will cost money most politicians would rather spend on vote-winning social programmes, experience suggests it spurs economic growth, as it did in the United States where, until war loomed over the horizon, the Great Depression obstinately refused to respond to attempts to bring it to an end.
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