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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 Orbán expressed delight at Trump’s re-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 the return of Trump 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 their neighbours.
This ‘liberal democratic’ positioning 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 its general effectiveness in terms 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 had immediate and grave international consequences.
One example was 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 his domestic actions, 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 it even laughable – is deadly serious.
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‘The Strong Do What They Like’
Trump 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 boost.
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) – 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 American 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 Vladimir Putin’s military takeover of neighbouring territories begins to look like an assembling of approved precedents for the US to do the same. Doing it would, after all, simply be history as normal, a Trumpeter would say.
The post-Second World War 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 – that ‘the strong do what they like, the weak suffer what they must’, to paraphrase.
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Keeping Hope Alive
The world has changed, and vastly for the worse.
The spat between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has made this definite. Our ship is in a vicious Bay of Biscay storm.
When you reflect on how the US is allowing a convicted felon to flush the world order 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 my forthcoming book, For the People.
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 come together further in the interests of defence. Brexit might be reversed when UK politicians – currently against the majority of people who wish to see the UK back in Europe – finally concede that it is unsustainable 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 all people, and maintaining what we have requires vigilance and engagement. But it is eminently worth remembering that under authoritarian regimes such as those run by Putin, Orbán, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Burmese generals, and others – now including Trump – these are not even aspirations. There, no one has the right even to claim rights.
The recent 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.
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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 shame the Republican politicians who are letting this happen. 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 tell Trump’s voters: look what you have done, put it right, clean it up, 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.
AC Grayling’s new book ‘For the People’ will be published in November