Everything they taught you in school is a lie. Carthage was not salted, Canute knew he couldn’t control the tide, Marie Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’, and Mrs O’Leary did not start the Great Chicago Fire. Yet the biggest fallacy of the best years of your life is peddled not by teachers but by parents and schoolmates: namely, that you must always stand up to bullies. The logic is tempting. It sounds right all of the time, proves right some of the time, but gets you punched in the face most of the time. Bullies are bullies because they have power and should only be confronted directly if you have, or can amass with others, a greater quantity of power. The most dangerous bullies should be avoided, flattered, bribed or placated unless and until you can hit them so hard they daren’t hit you back.
Donald Trump is a bully, which is why some – the SNP’s John Swinney, the Tories’ Alicia Kearns – want his second state visit to the UK cancelled. The president and vice-president JD Vance’s treatment of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was a display of verbal thuggery that sickened even the most devoted Atlanticists in British politics. (It sickened me, even if, as I wrote over the weekend, I think Zelensky mishandled the meeting.) Even so, cancelling the president’s visit would be a mistake. Keir Starmer’s dismissal of calls to do so is the first time in eight months that the prime minister has looked like a leader. Because Trump is not only a bully, but a dangerous bully, one who cannot be stood up to because he has all the power. As Owen Matthews observes, no matter how tough Europe talks on defence, until it spends, procures and recruits like a superpower, it will be in no position to defend Ukraine or the rest of the Continent.
So Europe must buy time. Truth be told, Ukraine’s fate is probably already sealed and those territories annexed to Russia will likely remain so for the foreseeable. But any other territorial ambitions on Putin’s part can still be checked by a massive build up of defensive and offensive capabilities.
The goal should not only be to make Europe a superpower Continent but to re-run Ronald Reagan’s SDI playbook and spend Moscow into the ground, destabilising the regime and eventually making the recovery of Occupied Ukraine possible.
Until that time, it is imperative that Trump be kept broadly in Europe’s camp, inveighing against its free-riding on US defence spending and its political follies (mass immigration, censorship) but ill-disposed to any expansion of Russian aggression, whether in western Ukraine or elsewhere.
Europe needs the bully on-side, for now at least, and so instead of condemnation or confrontation, the strategy on Trump should be to heap upon him the thing to which he responds best: flattery.
What do we know about Trump? He’s an egomaniac, in his late Seventies, a New Yorker, somewhat of an Anglophile and has said that he ‘feels Scottish’ as a result of his mother’s birth on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. This makes the UK the natural leader of Operation Suck Up, for we can draw on our traditions and the purchase they enjoy with a status-seeking American boomer.
A few suggestions: Give him an honorary knighthood. The Queen made knights of Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, as well as senators Dick Lugar and John Warner, and New York City major Rudy Giuliani. She even gave a knighthood to Teddy Kennedy, and whatever else might be said about Trump’s treatment of women, as far as we know he’s never driven one into a pond and left her to drown. Trump would beam like a lighthouse at the thought of being billed ‘Sir Donald’, even though technically he wouldn’t be able to use that title outside the UK.
Slip a few quid to the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar and get them to award him the Freedom of the Western Isles. It’s a rarely issued honour, typically restricted to military recipients, but Trump’s maternal connections to the Outer Hebrides would give this a personal poignancy.
Bribe a Scottish clan to make him an honorary chieftan. (This is a real thing; I checked with an actual chieftan.) Stick a bunch of kilted worthies in a castle with a couple of pipers, give Trump a wee tartan bunnet and a claymore, and call it an investiture ceremony. Go all out and commission a one-off Trump tartan. It would be gaudy and ridiculous and cheapening, as everything connected to Trump is, but you wouldn’t believe just how much good will this would buy us.
The idea of handing Trump a knighthood or other bauble might stick in the craw, but it would make the UK his new favourite country and increase the chances of the White House listening to Downing Street’s concerns about European security.
Use that opportunity to gush in gratitude for America’s generous funding of European defence, agree that it’s time for Europe to take on more of the burden, and suggest a timeframe for reducing American outlay and increasing European spending.
Negotiate as much time as possible for the ramping up of the Continent’s defence capability so that Europe can start to become guarantor of its own security and decrease its reliance on the United States. Flattering the bully might feel wrong, and that’s because it is morally wrong, but it’s the only practical option at this juncture. Every time Trump lashes out, we should bite our tongues and try even harder to ingratiate ourselves. We need America’s friendship now if we are ever going to do without it in the future.
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