Wednesday 17 July 2024

Europe needs to step up to the plate on defence, Trump isn't going to help

I'm a British baby boomer and I’ve often defended the United States from its critics on the left. Sometimes that's been difficult. It hasn’t always got things right. As an American of my acquaintance once put it: “We mean well, but we often screw up.” America has often screwed things up, but try to imagine a world without US superpower dominance. Where would we be in Europe? Under the Nazis or the Communists. In 1940 there was a lot of pressure on Franklin Roosevelt from the so-called isolationist who wanted nothing to do with the Second World War that was just getting underway.

Nobody should be in any doubt that the war was finally won by US economic might, translated into an unstoppable military force. Without the protection of American military and economic power life in Europe and Asia could have been very different.

But all that is about to change. America under Trump and his Vice President JD Vance will become far more isolationist. For seventy years Washington could be trusted to oppose tyrants but now it’s on the verge of becoming a tyranny itself.  It looks increasingly likely that Americans are going for Trump in November, a man without a single redeeming virtue and almost uniquely unqualified to be president of the USA.

Someone on Twitter posted a reminder of Sir Edward Grey's remarks to a friend on the eve of the First World War in 1914: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."  He was Britain's Foreign Secretary at the time and feared the worst. I am starting to feel we are on another terrible downward spiral.

There are real fears Trump intends to withdraw from NATO and we know Vance has already publicly declared he has no interest in Ukraine 'either way' and wants to stop military aid altogether. It's not that the US is starting on an expansionist, empire-building, agenda but rather that they intend to let Russia have a free hand in Europe to do whatever Putin wants.

"For evil to succeed it is only necessary for good men to do nothing" is a quotation by philosopher John Stuart Mill (often wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke) but it's very apt right now. America has the power to restrain Putin but under a Trump administration, they won't do it. 

The European Council on Foreign Relations, an international think-tank, has published a paper outlining six potential scenarios for what might happen if the Trump/Vance ticket succeeds in November, all derived from open source Republican thinking.

They cover Ukraine, the South China Sea, strategic industrial policy, NATO, the Middle East, and an illiberal international outlook. They are all negative for the UK and the world. On NATO Republican senators want to reduce US contributions to supporting NATO headquarters’ operations and scaling back the number of US personnel involved in running it, to cut US involvement in the alliance even as the country remained a member. It's not impossible that the famously capricious Trump could pull out altogether.

Europe has been free-riding on US taxpayers and this must be a wake-up call for Europe to rapidly begin preparations for a new hot-war and develop real capabilities to defend what may soon become the last bastion of democracy around the world. This tweet says it all:

And a Twitter thread by Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University, gives the EU 2-3 years at most to get ready. Ukraine has essentially bought time by eroding Russia's armed forces to such an extent that it cannot embark on anything serious against a weakened NATO for some time.

I hope EU leaders are addressing this urgently.

You can see how bad things are when a possible US Vice President suggests that Britain under Labour is "the world's first truly Islamist state" to have nuclear weapons:

We also learned yesterday that Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter and also the world's richest man is contributing $45 million a month to the Trump campaign. 

This is all apart from Project 2025, a terrifying prospect for Americans, aimed at promoting a collection of extremely conservative and far right-wing policies to reshape the US federal government and consolidate executive power under Donald Trump, which you can read about HERE.

Brexit is looking dafter by the day. Now it's not just trade that's been harmed but our security as well, as Brendan May points out:


Donald Trump will not ‘make America great again’ by turning away from what made it great in the first place, defending freedom and democracy around the world. But that is what he's going to do if elected.
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