Did Trump just declare war on Europe?
Yes and no, or not quite but close. Still, it's not all bad news out there.
It won’t come as news to Real Story subscribers that the long peace won by our parents and grandparents in 1945 is over, that the “rules based international order” has collapsed and the American Epoch has come and gone, perhaps forever.
We are just three weeks away from the end of the 20th year of democracy’s retreat around the world. It has been my annoying habit to associate this trajectory with the consequences of December, 2001, when the world’s liberal democracies put a knife to their own throats by admitting China into the World Trade Organization. But there have been several “inflection points” along the way.
We appear to have reached a kind of event horizon in the latest out of Washington. Over at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Max Bergmann says this about the Trump administration’s just released National Security Strategy:
“The strategy effectively declares war on European politics, Europe’s political leaders, and the European Union.”
It may well mark the United States’ full abdication from NATO, too, which has been in the offing for some time now.
The document explicitly breaks with an American policy favouring European integration - the core of Washington’s transatlantic policy every since the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957. The Trump administration strategy sides with Russia on excluding Ukraine from NATO membership and anticipates direct American interventions, either openly or by clandestine operations, in European parliamentary democracy.
In Bergmann’s view, the strategy signals that the Trump administration “plans to orchestrate the downfall of almost all of Europe’s political leaders, which come from center-right and center-left parties.”
That might be a bit of a stretch, but only a bit.
The document goes remarkably soft on China and raises no objection to the rising powers of the United Nations’ police-state bloc, but makes much of Europe’s “civilizational erasure” by way of censorship and mass immigration.
This strikes me as a bit rich coming from America, where “civilizational erasure” is well advanced, and from a Republican Party, 37 percent of whose members say the Holocaust was exaggerated or didn’t even happen, 36 percent say the moon landing was faked, and 41 percent say 9/11 was an inside job.
Europe is rattled by Trump’s new doctrine, but the Kremlin is pleased, as you’d expect.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov approvingly pointed out the obvious, that the Trump administration is “fundamentally different” from previous U.S. governments. Russia welcomes the radical American departure from decades of U.S. policy because it is “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision, Peskov said. “We consider this a positive step.”
There are qute a few “positive” American steps in Moscow’s direction at the moment that aren’t getting sufficient attention.
Where the hell are we, and how did we get here?
In last weekend’s National Post I spent a full page exploring the geopolitical terrain where we’ve all found ourselves (China is a predator and détente should be out of the question, with more Real Story background in The hour is later than you think.) I began the Post piece by wondering out loud whether or when we’ll be able to definitively pinpoint the moment when everything started to finally fall apart.
Then Trump’s National Securty Strategy came out.
Here’s the indispensable Claire Berlinski to summarize the deal concluded by Witkoff and Putin envoy Kurill Dmitriev:
“It is obscene. It is a surrender instrument that punishes the victim of savage aggression and rewards the aggressor. It demands that Ukraine disarm itself at the moment when its enemy is wounded but not defeated. It asks a country that has buried tens of thousands of its citizens to accept, without resistance, its own mutilation, the abnegation of its security, and the certainty—yes, certainty—of renewed Russian attack once Moscow has rebuilt its forces. If a hostile power wished to design the optimal conditions for a second, more decisive invasion of Ukraine in several years’ time, it would draft this plan. If you’re seeking a path to global war—in the nuclear age—look no further.”
My focus in Thursday’s National Post was not so much the arrangement’s content but its function. The headline is Trump throws Ukraine under the bus, but the story is in the subhead: In exchange for betraying Kyiv, the U.S. would gain preferential access to Russia’s frozen sovereign wealth fund.
The new state of play
I get deeper into that in Thursday’s Real Story newsletter: We Live In A Time Of Monsters. The point: The Trump regime is not on Europe’s side, or Ukraine’s, or Canada’s. At least we don’t have to guess whose side the White House is on anymore.
The good news is below.