It’s Time for an Apology From the Trump Apologists

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It’s been clear for a very long time who Donald Trump really is, whose interests he really serves and why nobody should believe that he is a reliable friend of either the UK, or Europe.

Keir Starmer continues to be reluctant to face up to these realities. In a Downing Street press conference on Monday the Prime Minister insisted that he was “determined to keep that relationship [with Trump] strong, constructive and focused on results”.

Such prevarication is understandable. The UK remains hugely reliant upon the United States for its security, with Trump also able to pile huge economic pain on this country, should he choose to do so.

Yet at best Starmer’s strategy can only hope to dampen, or delay, what is a growing threat to our continent posed by the US President.

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So far it is a strategy that has yielded few tangible results. While the US has not yet completely abandoned Ukraine in its fight against foreign invasion, the President has now switched to threatening his own incursion into European territory, in Greenland.

This threat is in some ways even graver than the threat posed by Russia in Ukraine. If Putin were to take Kyiv then it would be a catastrophic development that would seriously raise the threat posed by Moscow to neighbouring countries, but it would not in itself lead to a wider collapse in pan-European security.

The threat to Greenland is of a different order. Denmark is a member of both the European Union and NATO. Were Trump to follow through on his threats then it would risk destroying the very bedrock of post-war European security. As EU defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius put it, seizure of Greenland would herald the “end of NATO”.

Not everyone would be unhappy with such an outcome.

The end of Europe’s main security alliance has long been the Russian President’s number one geopolitical aim. 

So far he has failed to achieve his aim, thanks in part to the resilience of the Ukranian people and the resolve of other European nations and the United States. Yet where Putin has failed, Trump now looks poised to succeed. An alliance that has saved Europe, and the wider world, from outright war for the best part of a century risks being torn apart due to the imperial dreams of an increasingly unhinged US President.

Of course under previous presidents, such a catastrophic threat to global peace would have prevented disaster. However, when you have a US administration which openly portrays European nations as a group of weak and contemptible “random countries” that scrounge off of America, and when you have a man in the Oval office who says he is willing to start a war with those same nations, in retaliation for not being given a peace prize, then we can no longer be sure that sanity will prevail.

A ‘Global Peacemaker’

It’s worth remembering that none of this is what we were told was likely to happen. When Trump last ran for office, there was no shortage of senior UK politicians and commentators who predicted that his re-election would lead to a new era of peace and prosperity for the world.

Nigel Farage, who is currently the favourite to form the next UK Government, claimed that Trump would be a “global peacemaker” who would make the world a “better, safer place”.

Others, like former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said that Trump’s return would make the world much more “safe and stable” and accused those who warned otherwise of engaging in a “whinge-a-rama”.

In the UK media, Trump’s British cheerleaders also loudly encouraged and then celebrated his return, with one presenter on GB News quite literally saluting the President during his second state visit.

Such voices have been harder to find over recent days. Commentators who previously suggested that Trump would “save the West” are now imploring him not to destroy the West’s central security alliance. Even the normally Trump-supporting Daily Telegraph, which previously mocked those warning about the President as being “hysterical”, is suddenly full of panicky pieces about the threat he now poses.

Such self-professed “patriots” will soon have a choice to make. As things stand, Trump insists that he plans to impose economic sanctions on the UK in an attempt to blackmail us into acquiescing to his demands for Greenland. Should that fail, then he suggests that he would be equally willing to take the island by force.

It should go without saying that these are not the actions of an ally, even less of a friend. At best they are the actions of a mob boss, at worst of a tyrant. Either way, they should be loudly condemned, including by those same British Trump apologists who have spent many years telling us all about why his re-election would be such a triumph for Britain and the world.

And once they have done so, they should then apologise for their own part in helping to put him into the White House in the first place, and to all of us who warned about the danger he really posed.