The West is not over
America's youthful hard power is converting to the flabby gravitas of middle age
Like others, I was surprised at the muted response to Donald Trump winning a second term as president last November. His first victory was seen as an extinction-level event by some American liberals, who continued hyperventilating until the attack on the US Capitol Building four years later. By contrast, the last presidential election was met with resignation, a quiet broken only by politicians removing their pronouns from Twitter.
Perhaps they were merely taking a break to recharge their batteries ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January. Since then the torrent of executive orders, lawfare and, um, Nazi salutes has been met with suitable hyperbole. It’s now an accepted fact that America is turning into an oligarchy – turning, indeed! – such claims being garnished with allegations of fascism, to suit the taste of the pundit. It’s the end of the West as we know it.
This has largely failed to ruffle the British, we being a people so uninterested in tariffs that we voted for Brexit. Yes, you get those odd sorts who take more of an interest in Yankee politics than that of their homeland. But even as a blogger who vaguely follows this stuff, I’ve yet to muster the enthusiasm to examine the decimation of USAID or the Department of Government Efficiency’s wider programme of cuts, and I’ve no doubt the average Brit is even less interested. To the extent we have a reaction to when a government wants to stop chucking cash at foreigners, we are all for it, but in principle rather than detail.
By contrast, Trump’s encounter with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy last Friday was like a bomb landing in the front garden of an old man doing the Sunday crossword. With Trump holding a grudge against Zelenskyy for his role in the Biden-Ukraine debacle, the US president and his personal assistant JD Vance started a barney live on television with the Ukrainian president. Zelenskyy’s war strategy was picked apart, rather stupidly, with both Trump and Vance claiming that Zelenskyy hadn’t been grateful enough for their liking.
The conflict then veered into a curious group therapy session (many such cases), with Trump telling Zelenskyy: “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.” Two civil servants I know have called it the craziest press conference they’ve ever seen, though neither have been fighting off jet lag while a Silicon Valley exec high on his own farts extols the virtues of SaaS between acrobatics and a three-song performance from what’s left of the Beach Boys.
Even so, not a few pundits agree with the civil servants. The self-described ‘liberal extremist’ Ian Dunt captures the most violent reactions to the Zelenskyy-Trump bust-up: “What we saw yesterday was the single most appalling diplomatic spectacle of our lifetime. […] A monstrous grotesque, motivated entirely by greed, power and self-pity, trying to humiliate a man who has risked everything for the survival of his country.”
This goes on at some length, and not just from Dunt, who wants it on the record that Zelenksyy is a “hero”. The Times’ Matthew Syed “felt sick to the stomach” about the Oval Office meeting. Over in the Guardian, the Parisian writer Alexander Hurst – who is careful to mention on his website that he grew up in “ a quirky, pre-gentrification” neighbourhood in Vance’s state of Ohio – declares that the West, “in any coherent sense, is over”.
Sacré bleu, as the French no longer say. And to be fair to the pundits, the Trump-Zelenskyy dust-up has achieved what the spads term ‘cut through’ with the general public. While the average Brit takes little interest in public affairs, we have rather a penchant for handing NLAWs to Ukrainians so they can fire them at the Russians. Our hostility to Russia runs so deep it escapes even the attention of progs who are otherwise capable of finding bigotry in a game of tiddlywinks. When war in Ukraine broke out a Conservative MP called for all Russian citizens to be expelled from the UK. Not only did Tom Tugendhat keep his job, but he repeated the comments while running to be prime minister. Nobody cared.
It’s a mutual hostility, to be fair. As the Economist’s Duncan Robinson has noted, the Russians see the British hand behind every misfortune their political or military class suffers. “Russians always believe in Britain, even if Britain does not,” he writes. Our ego has not been so flattered since the Iranians started calling us ‘little Satan’, the Mini-Me to America’s Dr Evil.
For Britain, this is the real significance of a Trump government. For the first time since the Second World War, the British may have to fight the bear without the pretence of being Greece to America’s Rome. For all that our prime minister Keir Starmer has demonstrated his talent for brown-nosing in Washington, signs are that his second strategy of assembling a coalition of the willing to wave guns in Russia’s face is going rather better.
As I wrote for The Critic earlier this week, in many respects it’s in the great British tradition of spoiling any one European country’s bid to dominate the continent. The downside, of course, is that having free ridden off the American military-industrial complex for so many years, we will now have to cut our welfare state back to pay for our own army. Ultimately this should prove a good thing, delivering the kind of strategic autonomy Brexiteers genuinely wanted, albeit under a European military hierarchy.
But as for the death of the West, this is a nonsense. Neither America nor its allies are being overrun by fascists, despite various bed-wetters shrieking about it for a decade. Fascist was a tired insult back when George Orwell was still alive, amid genuine historical fascists. The value of the accusation has been debased many times over since then. And given Vance’s wife is ethnically Indian and one Alternative für Deutschland leader is a lesbian, you must at least concede that fascism’s leaders have been as enthusiastic in their embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as everyone Elon Musk is currently trying to sack.
What is correct is that Nato is looking pretty shaky these days, much like that memorandum Britain, America and Russia signed giving ‘security assurances’ to Ukraine in exchange for it giving up the nukes that the Soviets had carelessly left behind when their union collapsed. To cite the 1930s, that period beloved of Match of the Day presenters, do not accept promises from great powers that they will defend you from the current owners of Königsberg.
It is now conceivable that after nibbling away at Ukraine, Russia will chomp down on the Baltic states without the Americans fighting back. Given that the thrust of Nato’s military strategy has always been to wait for the Americans to arrive, this presents a problem for Europe, which is now scrambling to rearm, again in a very 1930s fashion. I could not swear to you that this isn’t all going to end in blood, toil, tears and sweat.
But what this underlies is that the West is a civilisation, not a security pact. America, as a European country set up on another continent, will continue to be Top Nation despite the uppityness of Russia and the manufacturing output of China. The now inevitable American drawdown across the globe will not alter the fact that in cultural, political and legal terms the world is disproportionately European – the rest of you are just visiting.
Trump has prematurely confirmed a shift to a multipolar world, where great powers have their spheres of influence, rather than one great power bestraddling the globe. The hard power of America’s youth is converting to the soft power of middle-age, at least in relative terms. But we will continue to watch American television, play American video games and listen to American music. We will type on our American computers inside American food chains, sitting in American trousers (sorry, pants).
When asked what the most important fact of modern times was, the 19th century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously pointed to “the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English”. That fact, like American hegemony, doesn’t look so permanent today amid demographic and geopolitical change. But whatever language Americans speak, we will still be obliged to listen.