The Trump-Zelensky summit is a geopolitical Rashomon. Some saw a lying, maniacal bully and his snarling sidekick berate a patriot for telling the truth about his nation’s attacker and refusing to surrender to him. Others witnessed a bratty ingrate haughtily shaking his begging bowl while dictating to his benefactors the terms on which he would accept their charity. Or you might, like me, have watched a medley of the two, a war-worn leader grown impatient with diplomacy and unwilling to tell the great despotic lump in front of him whatever he wanted to hear.
It’s possible to sympathise with Volodymyr Zelensky’s desperate situation, and his nation’s larger cause, and still regret his tactlessness in handling a neuralgic personality. Zelensky’s insistence on truth and his country’s interests was righteous but it was a righteous vanity given the stakes. Agreeing with Donald Trump’s every word, heaping praise on his genius, pledging to nominate him for a Noble Peace Prize — all would have surely stuck in Zelensky’s craw but might have coaxed the president in a more pro-Ukrainian direction. Sometimes you just have to let the bully have your lunch money.
European liberals raging at Trump and JD Vance’s treatment of Zelensky would do well to watch those exchanges again, and not out of noble indignation or hypertensive masochism, but to look for another interpretation. It’s there, staring us right in the face, however much we might want to avoid it. The American president is able to address Zelensky with such contempt because the balance of power lies overwhelmingly, crushingly on the American side, and it lies there because that is where Europe has been happy for it to lie since World War II and even more so since the end of the Cold War. Europe poured its treasure into public services, state employment, social welfare and, latterly, foreign aid and development, and was content to allow the United States to foot the bill for the Continent’s security.
The United States was willing to do so in the years of global hegemony, when the world’s most benign empire was happy as long as everyone was buying its cheeseburgers and F-16s. But it was a fatal and entirely self-inflicted wound on Europe’s part to proceed as though what was would always be. Wise statecraft, to say nothing of national self-respect, should have led European nations to shelter under the American military umbrella while building up their own armaments for a day when that umbrella was withdrawn.
It is no excuse to say that no one could have predicted the coming of Donald Trump. The point of contingency planning is that it insures against developments which no one could predict, though it must be said that there have been omens over the years, including Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge to George Bush, Barack Obama’s muddled foreign policy, and the Tea Party movement and other nativist spasms in Republican politics. For generations now, European social democracy has been underwritten by American geopolitical designs, and all of a sudden those designs have been torn up. Trump doesn’t want to lead the free world, and enough of his countrymen feel the same way that we must regard the American century as finally, definitively, unrevivably over. It’s every John, Pierre and Helmut for himself now.
European strategy and spending urgently needs to reflect this. It may feel satisfying to protest that European nations have collectively pledged more financial assistance to Ukraine than the United States, but it obscures the more important point that Europe has for decades tried to defend itself on the cheap. Even today, we are expected to regard the UK’s uptick to 2.5 per cent of GDP as a bold stepping up to the challenges of an emerging world order, rather than the pittance that it actually represents. Double that figure and even then the best Britain could hope to fund would be a Sainsbury’s Basics defence capability.
Outside of immediate threats, it’s difficult to convince the public of the need to direct resources to military and strategic budgets, not least because doing so would require sacrifice on a scale that Western European governments stopped asking of their populations after 1945. Fortifying Europe will require citizens to forgo certain expenditures to which they have become accustomed and consider themselves entitled, whether that is generous public sector and old age pensions, subsidised healthcare and higher education, or price-regulated energy and transportation. Those citizens are not going to like that and, even after watching the blood-letting in Ukraine, many will insist that higher defence spending is wasteful since the UK/France/Germany isn’t about to be invaded by Russia or anyone else.
Perhaps nothing will persuade these doubters, determined as they are to cling to an American-guaranteed good life which America is no longer prepared to guarantee. But their leaders should at least try. They should direct them to those 40 awkward minutes in the Oval Office and let them see what it looks like to plead for your country’s survival with someone who simply does not care. Volodymyr Zelensky is a patriot, his leadership of Ukraine has been heroic, but watching his internationally broadcast scolding should motivate other European leaders to ensure they are never put in the same position. Europe should stand strong, independent and fearsome to enemies apparent and potential, and to stand strong it must stand on its own two feet. No longer someone else’s tab to pick up, European defence must become central to European budgets and political priorities.
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