I was listening to someone smart talking on the radio about the new situation Europe finds itself in. Previously, the U.S. groused that European nations didn’t carry their weight in NATO, they didn’t spend 2% of GDP on defense; now, with the U.S. switching sides and backing Russia in its war on Ukraine, this well-informed person was saying that Europe was going to have to become “independent.”
I had never thought of Europe as other than independent, but, yeah. European history is longer than American history, and European thought and culture is basically where ours comes from, which creates a sense of Europe as immutable or eternal or something, but for these past 80 years Europe has not been independent in the sense of being able to defend itself. The meaning of NATO was that America was with Europe and for Europe if anything bad happened. The deal was mutual, theoretically, but in practice America was not cutting military spending because we figured Europe had our back. Not hardly! Instead we outspent everybody and fought wars big and small from Korea to Panama to Iraq.
Over the course of this dispensation, I have sometimes been bothered by the sense that anything going wrong anywhere was somehow our responsibility. Sure, we’re a powerful country, but when the Hutus start slaughtering the Tutsis in Rwanda it’s somehow Bill Clinton’s fault? Stuff like that just seemed out of balance. The notion that the U.S. is one of the nations in the world, rather than the nation, was eclipsed after the second world war; okay, but for how many generations?
Well, I don’t have to sweat that stuff anymore. Whether it’s interethnic violence in Africa, climate change everywhere or cyber threats from Russia, the U.S. is definitely not on the case anymore. Uh, hurrah?
It is now being said that European leaders need to “thread the needle” between supporting Ukraine and offending Trump. I hope and assume that this foolishness will burn off and European leaders will soon grok the new truth: they will defend Ukraine, if they do, against a new axis consisting of Russia, the U.S., China (which has aided Russia materially) and North Korea. It’s not a needle that needs threading; it’s a continent and a civilization that needs defending.
NATO is dead. The idea that the U.S. (aka D.J. Trump) is going to go to war to defend Latvia, Moldova, Poland or anybody else against a Russian invasion is laughable. If European leaders are thinking right, they are wondering if they can defend Ukraine against Russia without being attacked in one way or another by the U.S., and how they will defend themselves against that attack when it comes.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may also be having a hard time absorbing the turnaround. He still seems to think there is something to be gained by meeting with Trump; there isn’t. No one in Trump’s administration is making the slightest pretense of pressuring Putin in any way; all Zelenskyy will get for meeting with these people is what he already got– an earful about how he is risking WWIII by continuing to defend his country.
His path to “peace”, per Trump, is to give Russia everything it wants. What Russia wants, of course, is not merely to retain the territory it has occupied, but for Ukraine to be structurally incapable of defending itself from the next invasion. (It is also possible that President Zelenskyy sees all this clearly and chooses to continue meeting with Trump people anyway, for reasons of his own.)
Europe is hardly a monolith. The European Union, once a smallish club of largish nations, has welcomed quite a few polities into its embrace and some of them skew Russophile. Then there are the hard-right and frankly neo-Nazi parties in mainstays like France and Germany. The future– for Ukraine, for the entire Eurasian landmass– is up in the air.
What European leaders in particular and world leaders at large need to understand is that America’s turning away is not merely a Trump thing. At a mechanistic level, let’s say he dies tomorrow– then the world gets President Vance. Is that better? But more basically, this bombastic “America first” tyrant actually won in 2024. What does that say to the world about America’s role?
It means that America is likely to stop trying to help you with infectious diseases, agronomy, infrastructure or anything else. It means that if you cross Putin, look out! That’s what it means right now, but going forward, is it reasonable to imagine an America that comes to its senses and realizes that democracies are cool and dictatorships aren’t, and that America should care? I don’t see it.
People in America are having a really hard time making rent. The high-water mark of the buying power of the minimum wage here was in 1968; it has been a long slide since. People who do not inherit money, education, and privilege here have been downwardly mobile for generations.
As the billionaires dismantle every program intended to further the common good here, don’t be looking for the American public to be interested in problems overseas. Our government will be interesting itself on behalf of Putin as long as Trump is in power; that much is certain. Beyond that, you’re on your own. We’ll be busy putting out fires and arguing about whose fault they were.
If you want there to be some sort of international consensus in favor of liberal democracy, human rights and the rule of law, get cracking! It sounds like a great idea.
Eric Kuhn lives in Middletown.