Europe must stand up to Trump if our freedoms are to be preserved

The prospect of Donald Trump remaining in a position to decide US foreign policy for the next 2¼ years is daunting. For Europe, the stakes have not been as high since 1939. At the heart of our collective prospects lies the conflict in Ukraine. Sometimes its strategic importance is lost in the chatter of pundits. If Russia succeeds in subjugating Ukraine and extends its reach as far as Odesa – reducing the remains of Ukraine to a landlocked political dependency similar to Belarus – the next target for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s imperial restoration may be Moldova, where Putin already has a potential foothold in the so-called Trans-Dnistrian republic. This would leave Putin’s Russia effectively abutting the Balkan states. If that were to happen, plans to admit the remaining western Balkan states to EU membership would have to be abandoned. Russia would be in a position to establish energy dependency across southeastern Europe. Some might ask, with justification, whether the EU’s current openness to expand into the Balkans was ever realistic. Whatever chance there might have been of pursuing both Balkan expansion and EU integration, hard questions were never answered. Perhaps they cannot be answered. Did the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Kosovo conflict not tell us something about the linguistic, religious and historical gulf that still lies between northern and central Europe on the one hand, and Balkan Europe on the other? READ MOREThe EU and Nato (for what it is worth) are fully committed on paper to the protection of democracy and freedom in the Baltic states. Whether Donald Trump would be willing to lift a finger to protect Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – from Russian aggression is doubtful. [ Balkans summit: EU must pick up pace of enlargement negotiations, says von der LeyenOpens in new window ]The fact that Trump and Elon Musk, acting as a foreign relations tag team, can turn on and off the defensive capacity of democratic Ukraine is both alarming and unprecedented. Whenever in the history of the United States could two individuals, one elected and the other unelected, exercise such enormous influence or project power on such a scale? The strange thing about the US midterm elections is how little the global implications of its outcome have featured in the domestic US political contest. Apart from the idiocy of Trump’s claims to be the man who ended eight or nine wars – coupled with his claim that Norway, a long-term US ally, was “a shithouse country” for denying him a Nobel Peace Prize – the international dimension of Trump’s period in office has faded into the electoral background, compared with issues such as inflation and gasoline prices. Disillusionment with Trump has centred on affordability and to a lesser but growing extent on perceived corruption. While unalloyed solidarity with Israel has receded politically across the United States, the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran has not been a central issue in voters’ minds. When the electoral and possibly military dust eventually settles, as it will, over Middle East policy, there is a good chance that the madness of aligning American foreign policy and military power with Binyamin Netanyahu’s expansionist Zionism will become clearer in American minds. If the outcome of the midterms turns out to be a hostile Congress, it may be tempting to apply the term “lame duck” to the remainder of Trump’s presidency. Psychologically, Trump is incapable of adopting the role of a passive, chastened lame duck; his mindset is more likely to be that of a vengeful wounded animal. [ The Maga push overturning US policy in the BalkansOpens in new window ]In the course of the draft dodger’s ludicrous claim that he would have won the Vietnam War in a week, he told a rally in Iowa that instead of using Agent Orange deforestation, he would have gone after “Ho Chi Minh City”. That certainly would have surprised the citizens of the then-Saigon and would indeed have ended the war within a week. Presumably he meant to say that the US should have obliterated the city of Hanoi. Now there is talk of a trilateral summit between Trump, Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping. Apart from the fact that Russia is increasingly a Chinese pawn, it is impossible to see how any interests of western democracy and the free world could be secured by any outcome at such a summit. So much now depends on the cohesion and effectiveness of US Democrats over the next two years. It is hard to believe that any serious political experts could envisage running Kamala Harris again against Vance or Rubio. But amazingly, some Democrats still entertain that possibility. Likewise, if Tuesday’s midterms have gone in their favour, the Democrats must use their increased political support wisely. While Trump has threatened to veto all legislation from a hostile Congress in order to bring about political “deals”, a Democrat onslaught on every front against Trump could easily earn them the label of wreckers. Europe must stand up to Trumpism if our freedoms are to be preserved.