Denis MacShane / Nov 2024
Photo: Shutterstock
The US election is the most important election for Europe and more widely in the world so far this century. Trump incarnates the turn to populist, nationalist, identity, divisive politics which has sunk roots in Europe with the rise of Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Robert Fico, Viktor Orban, Jarosław Kaczyskni, the AfD in Germany or FPÖ in Austria, VOX in Spain. England’s Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, herself from a Nigerian immigrant family in Britain, incarnates the extent to which the Trump virus has infected so many politicians on the right in Europe.
The new sometimes racist, always anti-Muslim, anti-European right have cannibalised mainstream post-1945 centre-right or christian democratic parties backed by a media owned and controlled by billionaires who reject many of the more social and liberal values and policies that were rooted into Europe’s political culture after 1950.
Trump represents the European nationalist, exclusionary, right which is often anti-women and homophobic as in Italy under Meloni or Poland under Kaczynski. Trump aligns with Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban,Roberto Fico, Alexander Vucic and so-called Putinversteher in Berlin and Vienna who want Ukraine to surrender to Putin and accept the return of Russia as a semi-colonial power in the lands of the former USSR.
Trump has already sent his factotum Steve Bannon to promote the far-right in Italy and France after he became president in 2016. Trump also endorsed Boris Johnson’s support for Brexit in line with Putin’s geopolitical vision of Europe returning to a network of rival, frontier-closing national states which reject the partnership, common policies, or enforceable laws associated with the EU, the European Court of Justice or the European Human Rights Conventions and European Human Rights Court.
Kamala Harris did not know Europe but her political upbringing is rooted in Euro-Atlantic democracy and values. Trump is overtly contemptuous of European values and will seek to deal with EU nation states and the United Kingdom one by one weakening the Euro Atlantic community of nations at a time when new forces and powers - China, India, Russia, the BRICS want a very different world in which might is right and Hindu, Russian, or Sino or Middle East and Balkan nationalisms prevail.
Trump however also reveals the real, existing weakness in current European politics and statecraft. His complaint that European Union member states, including Britain, have been free-riders on US military might and have failed to invest in necessary arms and defence kit as well as soldiers, sailors and computer warfare specialists has the unfortunate merit of being true.
Europe builds 12 different tanks and national leaders revert to primitive protectionism rather than agree joint military hardware programmes rather like the Airbus which by some miracle was able to replace the UK Comet or French Caravelle to create one European world-class airliner.
At the time Airbus took off, Germany and Italy and Spain did not have a national airline industry so had nothing to protect. But now every EU nation wants to produce its own warships, its own drones, its own helicopters, its own armoured vehicles and while there are a few bi-laterally produced weapons like the UK-French mid-range missile called Storm Shadow in English and Scalp in French Europe has cottage industry defence sectors leaving many government no choice but to buy US arms.
Trump is coldly realistic in placing American interests first. Europe has no leaders who have any vision of a European presence in the world. Instead they promote the national interest of the different European states they lead including the UK.
Even if Kamala Harris had won, the failure of Europe to speak and act as one is giving oxygen to European nationalists who proclaim the return of the nation-state as the only guarantor of national identity and national interest.
The US saved Europe from its nationalist weaknesses when American soldiers were sacrificed and left their bodies on the soil of Europe in 1917-18 and 1944-45 to protect British and French national and imperial interests. That era is over. President Trump will expose Europe’s internal divisions with crude, brutal candour. 21st century America does not need Europe and will not help Europe save itself from its internal divisions based on the demons of nationalist policies and policies.
