Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve.
It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t.
Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this brutal reality. The future of Greenland is being misunderstood. Trump is not going to “invade” it. He doesn’t need to. He’s already there. What will happen is that the threats to Arctic security posed by China and Russia will crystallize in European minds, performative statements about “sovereignty” and NATO’s future will fade, and serious discussion will take over. Together, the US, Denmark and other allies will address how the Arctic region is properly secured with a considerably beefed-up role and status and military deployment by America.
European leaders are guilty of a lazy interpretation of ‘America First’ to mean ‘America Alone’
The bigger issue is how both sides of the western coin – America and Europe – are going to establish a modus vivendi in this Age of Trump.
This era (of which, as I argued in September in my Ditchley annual lecture, Trump himself is more consequence than cause) is coming to terms with myriad conflicts going on in the world at the moment. Their handling, and the larger struggles and confrontations on the horizon, are all made more complicated by the fact that, for a long time, the “rules-based system” beloved of foreign offices, think tanks and academic seminars has effectively not existed.
President Trump is not some populist disruptor bent on destroying it; it ceased to have meaning before he was elected. He has not single-handedly broken up the postwar “global order”: if that ever fully existed, it started to evaporate two decades ago when China emerged as a great power contesting the US-led unipolar world. Under Xi Jinping, China is no longer prepared to accept the status of junior partner. The implications of this new bifurcated world can be seen in Ukraine, where colonialist Russia is backed by Chinese diplomatic power, Iranian technology and North Korean fighters.
As ambassador in Washington, I had a ringside seat as the Trump administration made sense of this world and how it is changing America’s outlook and global role. I am afraid I don’t think, even now, that European leaders have adjusted to the revolution under way. They are guilty of a lazy interpretation of “America First” to mean “America Alone,” even though President Trump is expending huge effort to end the war in Ukraine and has acted in a decisive way to halt the conflict in Gaza, where he remains committed to the vital “phase two.”
Europe is transfixed by the Truth Socials coming out of the White House but without following the arguments underpinning them. When these were brought together last month in the administration’s National Security Strategy, Europe’s reaction was one of horror that America’s allies were allegedly being relegated and America’s European security guarantee apparently discarded.
They would do better to ask themselves why the US is making an adjustment and how they, as America’s allies, can mitigate its consequences and offset the transfer of American resources elsewhere. In other words, how and when the piggybacking stops and Europe starts assuming its full military and financial responsibilities beyond fine words – which is what they amount to in most cases at the moment, notwithstanding the future “military hubs” promised by Britain and France to Ukraine.
Presently, Europe’s consideration of the hard military power and reliable diplomatic muscle it needs to bring to the table is being masked by outpourings about a sheriff president who does not follow conventional practice or a traditional diplomatic rule-book. Europe’s leaders need to ask themselves whether this is because it is intrinsically wrong for a US president to take powerful, unilateral actions or because Trump and his playbook trigger a particular and instinctive allergic reaction in Europe’s capitals.
In Caracas last weekend, as earlier last year in the case of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow, Trump did more in a day than orthodox diplomacy was able to achieve in the past decade. This is likely to continue in the Age of Trump, so what are America’s allies going to do: use hard power and hard cash to increase their relevance and influence or continue to slide into unimportance?
Britain’s interests and those of other liberal democracies lie in how we harness the power of the US to continue safeguarding the principles – if not always the letter – of the UN Charter. This will mean accepting that Trump’s decisive approach when faced with real-world situations is preferable to the hand-wringing and analysis paralysis that has characterized some previous US administrations or, indeed, the deadlock and prevarication that so often characterize the UN and the EU respectively.
In the meantime – and this should worry us more in Europe – MAGA reservations about foreign “interventionism” will stiffen as pressure mounts on Trump to focus on pocketbook issues rather than foreign policy. Hopefully, this pressure will not get the better of Trump’s attention to Ukraine, Gaza and, as is coming down the track, Iran’s democratic transition.
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