The Turning Point

Trump's alliance with Putin

Like cleaves to like, as the saying has it; and Donald Trump’s sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s take on international affairs is a ghastly example of its truth. When Hungary’s Viktor Orban expressed delight at Trump’s election last November the message was clear: authoritarian opponents of the ‘world order’ of the ‘West’ could see its imminent demise, and with it a suite of opportunities for themselves. Until Trump 2 that world order, imposed and maintained by the US as the West’s leader, and the West’s ‘liberal democratic’ self-positioning, restricted oxygen to authoritarian ambitions within Western countries, and gave no permission to existing authoritarian regimes elsewhere to impose themselves on neighbours. The West’s self-positioning as ‘liberal democracies’ contains (contained?) a mixture of actuality and cosmetics, it is true – in which, however, the actuality has happily been the major ingredient, as demonstrated by the general effectiveness in them of civil liberties and the rule of law, the jewels of the democratic ideal.

The wrecking-ball Trump is swinging around his own country has caused immediate international negatives; one example is the effect on millions around the world of the shutting-down of US aid programmes. But even as the world has looked on aghast at what he is doing domestically, the real moment of horror was yet to come: Trump turning on Ukraine. This is the turning point.

Suddenly a number of things become dangerously more possible; suddenly what seemed improbable, some of them even laughable, are deadly serious. He has endorsed Russia’s irredentist invasion of Ukraine, and put the seal on its earlier theft of sovereign territories in Georgia and Ukraine’s Crimea. Countries neighbouring Ukraine to its south are in Russia’s sights, and Putin’s ambitions with regard to them have been given a huge filip. The traffic lights on China’s ambitions for Taiwan have now turned amber, its arrogation of islands in the Spratley chain confirmed, its aims for hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region (and beyond) closer to realisation.

Bigger and deeper cracks are running through the NATO structure. Europe, under US protection conceiving of itself as a soft power entity trying to change the world for the better through trade (yes, good intentions feel all the better if they make a profit – I know, I know) is suddenly having to boost defence spending and rethink its self-image, because the return of war to Europe and the prospect of limiting it under US protection is evaporating that image. The spread of war in Europe is now a greater possibility than it has been since the height of the Cold War – indeed, greater even than then.

What until this moment have been regarded as mere bloviations and stupidities, characteristic of the Trump persona, on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and even Canada now have an ugly cast. Approving Putin’s military take-over of neighbouring territories begins to look like an assembling of approved precedents for the US to do the same. Doing it would after all just be history as normal, a Trumpeter would say. The post-World War II affirmation of the Westphalian Settlement – the autonomy of states and all that this implies about aggression and military appropriations of the Nazi and Soviet types – has been ripped apart. (Not that it had stopped colonisation in the centuries between Westphalia and Hitler, the then ‘Powers’ disdaining to apply the concept of statehood to territories occupied by Australian Aboriginals and Africans, Chinese, Indians, Native Americans, Malayans and Filipinos). What is now back on centre-table is the principle asserted by the Athenians on the day before they destroyed Melos in the Peloponnesian War: ‘the strong do what they like, the weak suffer what they must’, to paraphrase.

The world has changed, and vastly for the worse. The spat between Trump and Zelensky has made this definite. Our ship is in a vicious Bay of Biscay storm. When you think how the US has allowed an arrogant and narcissistic convicted felon, ignoramus and idiot to flush the whole world down the toilet, courtesy of a handful of voters in a small number of small-population ‘swing states’, you despair. The factors that have allowed this to happen invite analysis; I discuss them in a forthcoming book For the People, London: Oneworld, due November 2025.

Can one see light anywhere? Well: if it survives, the US might take a long hard look at its political and governmental arrangements; Trump in the White House is living and final proof of those arrangements disastrous’ failure. Europe might (but alas: it so wished to be a peace and progress project) come even more together in the interests of defence. The stupidity of Brexit might be reversed when UK politicians, currently holding the entire country hostage against its majority wish to be back in Europe, finally concede that it is unsustainably idiotic to try going it alone, not just in economic terms but in terms of geopolitical realities, as a little island declining economically and marginalised in world affairs, inches from a threatened continent.

Most and best of all, it might make all ‘liberal democracies’ reform themselves so that those jewels of what democracy offers and to a large extent already embodies – human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law – can be achieved, sustained and protected. There will never be utopia, anywhere; even in ‘liberal democracies’ full social justice has yet to be achieved for women, people of colour, people of alternative sexualities and gender identities; and maintaining what we anyway so far have requires vigilance and engagement; but it is eminently worth remembering that under authoritarian regimes such as are run by Putin, Orban, Xi, Erdogan, the Burmese generals, and others – now including Trump – these are not even aspirations. There, no-one has the right even to claim rights.

This week’s trading of hard words between Zelensky and Trump, the former speaking the truth and the latter spewing insults and falsehoods as usual, marks the end of the world as we knew it. This is not hyperbole; I say it soberly and with profound regret, because in comparison with where we now find ourselves, the imperfect ‘world as we knew it’ was a lot better than where we are headed, for at least the reason that in the world we knew the hope that we could work to make it better was still alive. That hope now looks dead – unless we are vigorous, courageous and relentless in fighting back. We do that by opposing authoritarians and liars, by sticking with our principles, by refusing to ‘obey in advance’, by uniting with all who are like-minded, by being informed, by talking to anyone who will listen about these matters; by getting out of our chairs whenever there is a call to stand up and act.

For Americans, one essential is to call out and shame the spineless Republican politicians who are letting this happen – J. D Vance called Trump ‘Hitler’ in a rare moment of truth-speaking and is now his Vice-President: what a blaring example of the hypocrisy and lack of principle of the worst kinds of politicians! Challenging them is vital: just a few Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate could stop Trump’s dismantling of his own country and the world – make them do it.

For the rest of us, one essential is to call out and shame that half of the US that has defaecated Trump onto the world. Tell them: look what you have done; put it right, clean it up, stop being such utter assholes; wake up to the fact that you are yourselves now as much in the line of fire as you have put us in – even if it is entirely a matter of self-interest, it’s time for you to get real, because the new reality under Trump is grossly and emphatically unacceptable.