Trump’s Mob Rule: An Offer We Can Only Refuse

In this snapshot from outside the Elysée Palace, taken two months before the fateful confrontation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, the dynamics between the American, Ukrainian, and French Presidents were already clear.

Trump, even before his second inauguration, is in confrontational demanding mode – his hand thrust forward in a ‘take it or leave it’ gesture towards Zelensky who, despite his back being turned to us, looks browbeaten but defiant. 

On this occasion, there is no Vice President JD Vance to tag-team Trump’s bullying. Instead, Emmanuel Macron is attempting to patch over the differences, trying to reassure Zelensky but keep Trump onside: as it turns out, a futile gesture.

On show in this moment is not only a clash of different styles of strength and masculinity, but the growing and probably irreparable transatlantic rift: a rupture between hard and soft power; between demand and negotiation; between unilateralism and consent.

Trump, as many have noted, appears in the guise of the mafia don, trying to make an offer that Ukraine and Europe can’t refuse. But the obvious derogatory mobster reference fails to capture the glamour and appeal of American gangster movies. 

People are attracted to the ‘godfather’ figure because he is a mixture of god and father. Unlike the corrupt judges and police and the mundane world, the patriarch provides protection and permanence. If you show loyalty, you’re part of his extended family. If you don’t, you’re nothing.

Macron, by contrast, comes from a different world. His conciliatory gesture seems to confirm what historian Robert Kagan suggested: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”

The catchphrase, drawing on the title of a bestselling book of dubious pop psychology, was coined by Kagan in his 2002 essay ‘Power and Weakness’, which exposed the difference in martial spirit as many European leaders expressed doubts about US plans to invade Iraq. 

It was true then, and still remains the case, that the US has a stronger military culture than most of Europe. It has led more military interventions in the post-war period than any other country, and its $800 billion annual defence spending is bigger than the next 10 countries combined. 

But a lot has changed in the two decades since Kagan’s memorable essay. 

The US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan ended in fiasco and disaster. And the real military strongman in this photo is President Zelensky, who stayed in Kyiv to lead the successful resistance to Vladimir Putin’s attempt to take the Ukrainian capital and decapitate its leadership in 2022, against American advice to flee.

Meanwhile, it was European soft power – and specifically the prospect of EU membership – that provoked the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine. More than a hundred people were killed in Kyiv’s Maidan protests in 2014, during which Putin’s puppet regime was toppled and a decade of Russia’s war-like attempts to restore it ensued. 

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the EU’s soft power – its acquis or accords that insist on human rights, free speech and assembly, and democratic elections – have done more to change the face of Europe than America’s military might. 

NATO provided the shield to end the Cold War, but the EU provided the ‘big tent’ to promote trade, civil society, and reconstruction for a dozen new members. Since then, the US has provided a nuclear umbrella, but the EU supplied a social safety net. 

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And then there’s modern history. 

Though attacked during Pearl Harbour and 9/11, the US has not experienced any foreign invasion for more than 200 years. Though it suffered military casualties in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, American citizens have mainly benefited materially from America’s post-war dominance. It’s generally a story of optimism and success, unlike the trauma of 20th Century Europe.

If Europeans come from Venus, it’s only because they are aware (unlike Elon Musk) of the bleak devastation of Mars. 

The mother of the French exchange family I stayed with as a schoolboy in the 1970s had lost a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in three wars against Germany. There are people still alive who remember the destruction of Warsaw and Dresden, the occupation of Paris and Belgrade, starvation in Amsterdam and, of course, the London Blitz.

A plaque 10 metres from my front door commemorates 23 people killed when a bomb hit their shelter. 

Both physically and emotionally, Europeans are much closer than Americans to the muddy frontlines in Ukraine and the blasted cities of the Donbas. From that proximity, comes a tragic sense of life – which sees cooperation not as a capitulation but a guard against resurgent nationalism, which looks on social infrastructure not as a soft luxury but a bulwark against extremism.  

The problem for the US, especially in Europe, is that a resort to coercion undermines its real power of consent. Trump’s posture in this picture, the world’s policeman turning into a global gangster, extorting trade ‘deals’ in some kind of protection racket, is fundamentally weak. Europe is now looking for a future outside his ambit, re-arming and regrouping to protect itself. 

While a new form of American brutalism has shown its hand, it already looks like it has overplayed it.