Nick Westcott / Feb 2025
Image: Shutterstock
As Trump swings into tariff action, sowing confusion amongst friend and foe, and springing diplomatic surprises in the Americas and the Middle East, a sense of unease and alarm is spreading amongst those, particularly in Europe, who remain attached to a rules-based international order. But I see three reasons for optimism, whatever the scale of immediate disruption. Decision-makers need to bear these in mind.
Trump’s style is to move fast, break things, dominate the news cycle, and keep others guessing. This has worked for him in the past and he expects it to work for him as President. He knew many US voters were unhappy and frustrated with the established democratic offerings and would respond to some populist braggadocio, patriotism and promises of dramatic action. European populists are pursuing the same course. The fact that their prescriptions will fail – as they have in the past and as Brexit shows they still do today – seems in no way to diminish their appeal.
Trump’s solutions are based on trashing the rule of law, at home as much as abroad. He firmly believes that political power comes from money and guns alone, and that having friends is a sucker’s game. Trump has no friends, remember – only people who are useful to him. Yet the bedrock of US power for the past 70 years, as much or more than its booming economy and overweight military, has been having friends and allies. It is based on building trust. Once you shatter that trust, you undermine your own power. Britain, in its own small way, found the same with Brexit.
So Trump the self-proclaimed ‘tariff-man’ lays about him threatening tariffs on all and sundry in the name of rebuilding US industry, and thereby ensures that no former ally or trading partner will trust the US again. This will blow-back on US growth and jobs, and do the same to the rest of the world. Poverty and destitution look set to grow again.
But amidst this gloom, there are still reasons for hope.
Firstly, Trump is testing the limits of the US Constitution. Its authors knew all about arbitrary power, and went to great lengths to create a system that contains it. Trump will bend it, for sure. But I doubt it will break. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the Constitution against Mr Trump. It has survived 250 years; Trump won’t. This will work in two ways. As the federal government shrinks or falls into disrepair under the tender care of Elon Musk and Trump’s startlingly incompetent appointees, power will seep back to the states. They will choose to look after themselves, especially those where Mr Trump is less than popular, and a right-wing Supreme Court of constitutional fundamentalists will support them. The second way it works is through Congress where, for all their subservience to the MAGA base, congressmen have to think about all their voters to get themselves re-elected. As things get worse for their voters, they will begin to exercise restraint on the Executive, not least through their grip on the budget, which even tariff-man Trump will find hard to loosen.
Secondly, Europe. The threat to Europe is real. Both Putin to the East and Trump to the West want to divide and weaken Europe because they fear its potential power. The populist parties are their weapon. This too will test the institutional structures of the EU. They are not as old as the US Constitution, but successive crises have shown them to be more robust than people think. Greece is still in the euro; Poland’s populists were voted out; Hungary is still in the EU.
In retrospect, the UK did Europe a big favour: it demonstrated for all to see that leaving the EU is a really stupid idea: it makes everyone poorer and the country weaker. No-one wants to follow these footsteps. Other member states will test the rules to the limit, but ultimately stay within them. This is perhaps a less certain bet than the US one, but the threat the US now poses to the world economy underlines what a precious thing the single market and the common trade negotiating position is (and how vulnerable Britain has made itself outside it). For Europe to survive in a multipolar Trump-world where might alone makes right, it has to hang together, or its members will all hang separately. That is what it was designed for, and that is what it must do.
Thirdly, now we are seeing the reality of Trump unchained, he will have to bear the consequences of his actions. He faces two particular opponents which cannot be brow-beaten, bamboozled, bullied or beaten-up: the world’s climate, and the world economy. As ‘Drill, baby, drill’ turns into ‘Burn,baby, burn’, more Americans might want their government to do something about climate change. And as the chill winds of protectionism destroy more jobs than they save, more people will start running out of money, America will lose its primary place in the world, and Trump will start losing popularity. Labour are already finding that blaming your predecessors may get you through the first six months, but not more.
All this is rather cold comfort. We still face a bumpy ride and rough times ahead. There will be no shortage of unexpected crises to complicate matters. But it shows there is hope and why it is worth hanging in there and holding on to what we have.
For the UK, though, the challenge is stark.
Keir Starmer says, repeatedly, that Britain does not need to choose between the US and EU. Of course. He has to say that: Britain has always been heavily dependent on both and does not want to have to choose. But Trump’s arrival shows that it has become vulnerable in both directions, and the government need to undertake a rapid, hard-headed assessment of where its future political as well as its economic interests lie before external factors force it to make a choice. Trump is no doubt already thinking of ways he can force the choice, in a way as painful for the UK as possible. He preys on the weak and vulnerable, as Denmark has found over Greenland.
So Britain may be forced to make the uncomfortable choice between being a subordinate partner to the US, or an equal partner with our European neighbours.
Some British diplomats and politicians are grasping at straws that ‘Trump likes the UK’, ‘he loves the Royal Family’, ‘his conversation with Keir was really friendly’, ‘we are still America’s closest ally’… Trump has no loyalties: vanity, yes; sentimentality, never. To expect an unearned favour from Trump is like walking unprotected into a lion’s den and expecting it not to eat you. Institutional links will remain, the trappings of a once-special relationship, but at the top it is transactional or nothing.
If we accept that the world really has changed permanently, that Trump is not an aberration but a symptom of underlying change in the global system, that we face a ‘poly-world’ as Mark Leonard calls it, where patron-client relations between great powers and the rest are the order of the day, the UK needs to face up to its uncomfortable position.
Britain still has tremendous assets others would die for, including the BBC World Service, the British Council and one of the best educational and research systems in the world; but as Emily Thornberry has said, it has a tendency to ‘fritter them away’. The economy has potential, but is still suffering the depredations of a Brexit that hobbled exports and discouraged investment. The steady leakage of listings from the London Stock Exchange and the decay of infrastructure are symptoms of this.
The Labour government’s commitment to a ‘reset’ with Europe is firm, but the substance of that is harder to discern. Starmer’s attendance at the February European Council is a good sign; starting with security and defence makes a lot of sense. There will be progresss on this by the UK-EU Summit in May. But to really stimulate growth, the Uk needs to rejoin the single market; and if you take its rules, you should have a say in making them. The fact that Italy, Austria, Hungary and even Luxembourg have more influence over EU decisions than the UK will increasingly come back to haunt us. So the ‘reset’ needs to be a lot more substantive, and a lot more rapid than currently planned.
The Labour Party risks making a historic mistake if it thinks rejoining at least the single market should wait until after the next election. For starters, it may be out of power. For seconds, public opinion has moved ahead of the politicians – people know a mistake when they see one. And Trump and Putin won’t wait – they are acting now and in four years’ time it may be too late, the moment to re-connect with Europe may have passed.
To be quite clear, the aim is not to preserve wholesale the old, rules-based order. The world has changed. The US cavalry will no longer ride to the rescue. The question is how Europe, including the UK, survive in this new multipolar world. Views in Europe differ over how to do this. But the UK needs to be part of that debate; it needs to be back in the room where it happens. Sooner rather than later.
