Why are we their only target? Why does Donald Trump’s United States believe, in its presentation of its National Security Strategy, that it must ‘cultivate resistance’ to ‘Europe’s current trajectory’ even though it says it wants to repudiate all American ‘interventionism’ from the Cold War and post-communism?
Donald Trump no longer wants America to make reproaches or suggestions to states that ignore freedoms and social fairness, but to us, the European democracies, he announces that he wants to counter our ‘civilisational decline’, ‘manage (our) relations with Russia’ and rely for this on ‘the growing influence of European patriotic parties’.
In his view, dictatorships are free to respect their ‘traditions and history’, while we Europeans are being called upon to abandon our ‘unrealistic expectations’ regarding the outcome of the war in Ukraine and to open our ‘markets to US goods and services’.
This has now been said and written, but how can we explain why this old world, which is supposedly on the way out, obsesses Donald Trump and his friends so much, and why they are so eager to put us back on the right path, their path, when we now count for so little?
They themselves provide the first answer. ‘Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States,’ they write on page 26 of the document, noting that ‘transatlantic trade remains one of the pillars of the global economy and American prosperity’; that Europe is home to ‘cutting-edge scientific research’; and that our industrial, technological and energy sectors are “among the strongest in the world .‘ ’Not only can we not afford to write Europe off—doing so would be self-defeating‘ because, they conclude, we will need a ’strong Europe to help us successfully compete’ in the international arena.
We should make all those who claim that we are bankrupt, decadent and historically lost learn these lines by heart. Perhaps then these declinists would realise that not only does the European Union remain, neck and neck with China, among the world’s leading economic powers, but that with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, wealthy Norway and many others, it could one day rival the United States itself.
The Union has a lot of catching up to do, but it is now attracting democracies that want neither American nor Chinese domination. A new political pole is emerging in the defence of Ukraine, and the huge paradox is that it is Donald Trump and his friends, the very people who fear this political change in Europe the most, who are precipitating it through their brutal behaviour.
This is the second reason for their hostility towards us, and the third is that if Ukraine were to defeat Vladimir Putin with European support, the Union’s influence would be considerably increased. For Donald Trump, Russia must prevail in order to prevent Europe from asserting itself, and the fourth reason for his desire to subjugate the Europeans is that the EU is the only economic power that has remained faithful to social protection and the social market economy, the social model that Western democracies defined after the war.
One may argue that this solidarity is eroding, but nowhere else in the world are healthcare, pensions and even higher education as dependent on fiscal redistribution and therefore social fairness as they are in Europe. The European Union is a counter-example to the law of the strongest and the law of the jungle that prevail everywhere – a counter-model that Donald Trump and his friends would like to destroy because its appeal is so odious to them.
