Between Russia and America

Europe’s security earthquake stems from Trump’s quest to be ‘king’

At the Munich Security Conference this week, Donald Trump’s administration delivered two set piece speeches. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, told Europe that it would have to take on the primary responsibility for European security. Then JD Vance, his vice-president, scolded the Europeans, telling them that they were failing to be properly democratic. These two speeches represent the two prongs of Trump’s approach to Europe, including the UK: one military, the other political; one exposing us to a threat from Russia, the other exposing us to a threat from America; one threat external in the form of tanks and warships, the other internal in the form of social media algorithms and ideology.

The meaning and significance of both interventions is contested. In his speech, Hegseth said plainly that he wants the US and Europe to go forward in Nato together, yet it has been widely interpreted as the US abandoning Europe. Vance talked of shared values and the importance of democracy, and yet his speech has been interpreted by many as an attack on democracy. One could say that what is being contested ultimately is the meaning of the words themselves, of “Nato” and “democracy”.

This is one of the defining characteristics of the politics that we now find ourselves in. Everything is contested, even unto the meaning of the words we use. And the central venue for this struggle, the struggle we need to understand in order to understand all others, is Washington.

Competitive authoritarianism

The most complete framework I have found for understanding the shift towards oligarchy in the US is “competitive authoritarianism” as set out in Foreign Affairs by two political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.

“The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed,” they wrote. “Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.”

“But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism – a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.”

The state will be weaponised, its vast bureaucracies used to reward allies and punish opponents. The law will be used to intimidate and silence critics, not so much by putting them behind bars but by swamping them with criminal accusations that carry terrifying punishments. It will also be used as a shield to protect allies, for example turning a blind eye to acts of pro-Trump political violence. Economic policy and regulatory decisions will be used to favour politically friendly individuals, firms, and organisations.

Looked at this way, the US has been sliding into competitive authoritarianism for a long time. More and more elections have been tilted through tactics such as making it harder for some people to vote and altering the boundaries of voting districts. There has been more and more political violence.

Ominous as all this is, the United States will be harder to bring to heel than Venezuela or Hungary. It has a federal structure, a well-established opposition and a huge and diverse economy. As Elon Musk wrecks department after department, the state’s capacity to impose itself both abroad and at home declines.

Further, the conceptual heart of competitive authoritarianism is the idea of an enduring political struggle over the basic elements of democracy. Thus it is a corrective to the impression of overwhelming power that the Trump administration has sought to convey in its first weeks. Indeed, it starts to show how weak Trump is in the most central dimension, his popularity among the American people.

Chávez, Fujimori, and Vladimir Putin all boasted approval ratings above 80 per cent when they launched their successful power grabs (also called a self-coup or autogolpe). Peru’s Pedro Castillo, South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro were all well below 50 per cent when they launched their unsuccessful power grabs. Trump is hovering around 50 per cent. After he was elected in November, his approval rating improved, but since he took office the net positive score (approve minus disapprove) has dropped from 8.2 per cent to 3.8 per cent. The balance of popular support will become crucial if Trump seeks to overturn the most basic limit on his power, the authority of the courts, for at that point we could see a trial of strength on the streets.

The person who seems most acutely aware of this vulnerability is Trump himself. He remains a performer rather than an administrator, the golf course the metaphorical green room in which he rehearses his lines. He is devoting himself to the struggle for hearts and minds. And his actions and words make the most sense when they are understood not only in terms of substantive power (e.g. seizing control of the machinery of the state) but also in terms of political capital (increasing his popularity, firing up the base, suppressing the opposition).

Trump’s approach to the future of Europe, including the UK, should be seen through this lens. What happens here has no direct impact on his central concern, solidifying his control of the US (the true meaning of “America first”); rather, it’s primary impact is via how events here are perceived there.

Since Trump’s prime interest is increasing his political capital, we should not be trying to orient ourselves to some supposed true geopolitical goal. Equally, his words are not to be understood as either sincere buttresses or cynical pretexts for such a goal. Rather, we should accept that any goals are secondary to the direction of travel. This direction is chosen for its domestic political implications, for the ability for example to remind Americans that the US spends far more on defence than the Europeans do. And we should expect it to be pursued for so long as it yields domestic political dividends. As Lenin said, “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push; if you find steel, you withdraw.” And the most important kind of steel now is American opinion.

This doesn’t make the pre-existing order in Europe irrelevant. Substantive American interests remain important because Americans themselves generally expect their president to pursue the best interests of the country. Equally, the idea forged through two World Wars among the American people of the US, Canada and Europe as fellow democracies with shared values that stand together, transatlanticism, can’t simply be obliterated.

The Russian threat

Putin has expressed the ambition for a Russian sphere of influence in Europe that extends across all the former Soviet republics and members of the Warsaw Pact, excluding the eastern part of Germany. This is the Russian threat to the UK, a continental power looming over western Europe, its own economic and technological failure made good by the strength today of eastern European countries such as Poland.

The core of Hegseth’s speech is the same demand that the US has been making of Europe for decades – that it needs to shoulder more of the burden of defending Europe. He wants spending on defence to rise from less than 2 per cent of GDP to 5 per cent, which is where it was in the UK until the Berlin Wall came down (it’s currently at 2.3 per cent here). This demand is part of Trump’s direction of travel and, even given Europe’s difficult fiscal position, and even to me, one of those who’d have to pick up the bill, seems fair; I’m sure it plays well in the US.

The real issue is whether Trump is in fact prepared to allow Russia to take possession of Ukraine if the Europeans don’t stump up. This in turn resolves into the question of how Americans would perceive such a turn of events. And for that, the ground is being prepared. As well as calling out European defence spending, Trump has been diligently undermining Ukraine in American eyes. He has: accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia; said that the most determined defender of Ukrainian sovereignty, President Volodymyr Zelensky, is an illegitimate dictator who should face a new election; and suggested that Ukraine is cheating the US by not paying for the military support it has received, in part by declining to yield control of valuable mineral deposits to the US.

Today, Americans tell pollsters they think the amount of support being given to Ukraine is about right with the figures severely skewed between Republicans (who say support is too much) and Democrats (who say it’s not enough). How that will change with Trump’s attacks, we don’t know. How even Republican voters would respond to Russian tanks in Kiev, we don’t know.

Eight out of ten Americans say Putin can’t be trusted, including seven out of ten Republicans. One implication of this is that any deal Trump strikes with Putin is liable to look worse to Americans the more it comes under scrutiny. And this speaks to what we are seeing, a strategy of speed. The intention seems to be to present Americans, and incidentally Ukraine and Europe, with a fait accompli in order to minimise the political fallout.

On this side of the pond, we are preoccupied not with American attitudes but the Russian military, including the Northern Fleet based in Murmansk, just round the corner from Norway.

A frigate from Russia’s Northern Fleet

Hegseth appeared to concede two of Russia’s core demands before talks even got under way, saying that Ukraine’s ambition to reclaim territory and join Nato was not realistic, and Neil Melvin, the director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute, wrote that Europe’s leaders were reeling.

“The Trump–Putin telephone call and … Hegseth’s comments on how the US will approach negotiations to end the Ukraine war and European security more generally have caused widespread alarm,” he wrote. “This has only been deepened by the news over the weekend that the US is pressing ahead with direct negotiations with Russia in Saudia Arabia – without the Europeans, and only in loose contact with Ukraine. The tectonic plates of European security have shifted, and European countries appear to have little influence on developments.”

The confusion inherent in the current situation has been neatly captured by The Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, who wrote this week about Russian drone attacks on Kiev. “Good men & women in EUCOM [the US European command] are—as they've done every month since Feb 2022—actively helping track & repel this aerial assault. Meanwhile their commander-in-chief at home is actively attacking Ukraine's president, while handing concession after concession to the state firing the missiles.”

The overall effect of remarks from Hegseth, Vance and Trump in recent days has been to leave Europeans wondering whether the US would stand by Article 5 of the Nato treaty, the one in which signatories pledge to come to the aid of each other in the event of an attack. Can Europe count on US support in resisting Russia, or is Trump abandoning Ukraine and America’s longstanding allies in Europe, including withdrawing the 100,000 troops on the eastern flank? We can no longer be sure.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was there and then it was gone. This is not the same. We have been catapulted into the geostrategic equivalent of every abuser’s favourite place, the grey zone.

The American threat

Trump should be seen as much as an oligarch as an ideologue, his administration as much oligarchic as ideological. However, within the administration different individuals have different roles, and Vance’s seems to be that of ideological warrior. In his Munich speech, he brought that war to Europe.

Part of his speech aimed at opening up lines of invasion. He wants the social media platforms run by his fellow oligarchs to be unregulated. He wants to demolish the firewall that has kept far-right parties out of governing coalitions across Europe for decades. He wants to make abortion clinics the site of political demonstrations. He wants to discredit decisive action, such as the recent deferring of elections in Romania, that prevents countries sinking into competitive authoritarianism.

Part of his speech aimed at normalising the far-right parties that are his natural ideological allies. With a general election in Germany next week, this applies especially to the Alternative für Deutschland, which has been relentlessly boosted by Musk recently. The AfD is at about 20 per cent in the polls, which would make it the second largest party in the new Bundestag. Yet it will likely continue to be excluded from power as the CDU (30 per cent) maintains the firewall and strikes a deal with the SPD (15 per cent) and one or two others.

Part of the speech engaged in the struggle to impose a Trumpish interpretation on basic ideas such as democracy, free speech and the West’s shared values.

This playbook is so familiar from Russian influence operations (including against Europe and the UK) that a good guide to it comes from Pekka Kallioniemi, a longtime critic. He summarises the Election Interference Machine as:

1) get rid of “traditional media” with lawsuits and threats

2) remove all guardrails & safety measures

3) promote and fund Elon's allies, silence enemies

4) play the algorithm

5) blame resistance as censorship.

The Election Interference Machine is a threat from the inside. If it is allowed a free run at European elections, there can be little doubt that Trump and Putin will be able to shepherd more countries down the road to MAGA-style competitive authoritarianism.

The threat of a good example

Aristotle saw that oligarchs share more in common with each other than they do with their own people. And one thing Putin and Trump share is an interest in destroying Europe as we know it. For Europe, including the UK, poses the threat of a good example to both of them.

It is obvious to everyone in Russia that those living in the former Soviet republics in the Baltics have a standard of living and way of life that is far more attractive than what they have in Russia. But those can be dismissed as small territories close to the heart of western Europe. Ukraine is far bigger and far more like Russia in its geographic location. Every step forward that Ukraine takes is a step that demonstrates the failure of Putin’s regime.

Equally, the further the United States descends into competitive authoritarianism, the more Europe will shine by contrast. It may not have the economic or military strength of the US, but it has a way of life that is free and democratic. All the soaring rhetoric of the 1789 Constitution will fit Europe far better than it fits the US. It will stand as an ever more potent rebuke to Trump.

The shared interest in destroying Europe is not straightforwardly geopolitical but arises from Trump and Putin’s position as oligarchs, always at risk of losing popular support. Thus, for all the symbolism of a US-Russia summit on Ukraine that excludes both Ukraine and the rest of Europe, and for all the rhetoric coming out of both Moscow and Washington, this isn’t a return to the kind of Great Power politics we have known in the past, a new Yalta, because Trump isn’t straightforwardly pursuing America’s interests and Putin is not straightforwardly pursuing Russia’s interests. Rather, as is natural for oligarchs, they are pursuing their own interests.

Still, in this pursuit, they are obliged to make the case that their interests are America’s interests and Russia’s interests. And this takes me back to 1988 when I went walking in the Tatra mountains on the border of Poland and then Czechoslovakia. We went up above the clouds into a heaven of peaks and sunshine with a young Polish hiker, Mariusz. Later, we got into a long conversation about Poland and Britain. Churchill, he politely explained to us, was remembered affectionately for 1939 and bitterly for 1945.

Today my reply would be that it was Roosevelt who made the deal with Stalin at Yalta in 1945. He used the war to break the British Empire but imposed no similar conditions on the huge support he gave to the Soviet Union. Stalin was left free to take control of Poland and the rest of eastern Europe. And in this way Europe was crippled, divided and left dependent on and dominated by the superpowers.

In other words, I would accept that the bitter Polish understanding of the Second World War and its aftermath is far more accurate than the rosy British one I offered at the time.

The best-case scenario a week ago was for Trump to negotiate a peace deal with Putin that extends the existing US security guarantee to Ukraine. But even that now-vanished hope would only deal with the external, Russian threat. The internal, American threat channelled by Vance would remain. We would be dependent on an ally that has sunk into competitive authoritarianism and is intent on exporting its MAGA version of that to us.

The issue is not simply what might happen now but what might happen in future if Trump’s position becomes more secure, if, figuratively, he manages to put that crown on his head. Then, for example, instead of the CIA working to keep Soviet-backed parties out of power as during the Cold War, it could be working to get MAGA-backed parties such as the AfD into power.

Today, thanks to the expansion of the EU, Europe has the potential to stand on its own two feet. Its GDP is about 15 times and its population about 4 times the size of Russia’s. It has advanced technological capabilities that Russia cannot match. If it commits itself to re-arming, it has nothing to fear from Russia and in due course could rid itself of the need for an American security guarantee. Indeed, if Europe did get to spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence, its budget would be larger than the Pentagon’s.

Melvin argues that, if its armed forces are energetically rebuilt, Ukraine is capable of defending itself, and hence Europe’s southern border with Russia. It is about the size of Texas and, if Europe wants to preserve its freedoms, an important element in establishing the critical mass needed to deter interference from Russia and the US.

If Europe is to stand on its own feet, its nations need to build up their armed forces and develop their indigenous defence industry, both for military purposes and as a form of re-industrialisation. This will require higher defence spending. If that is not to impose the kind of pain on working people that fuels Vance’s allies over here, then Europe’s economy needs to grow. That implies structural changes. Germany could remove its debt brake. The EU could remove the non-tariff barriers to free trade within its borders that Mario Draghi has identified and which are far more damaging than any US tariffs. It could relax the trading rules that make it hard for the UK to prosper economically and contribute more to Europe’s defence. Once peace is established in Ukraine, the Nord Stream gas pipes could be re-opened as part of a general move to diversify energy sources.

Moves of this ilk would deal with the external, Russian threat. Dealing with the internal, American threat is easier and can mostly be achieved with a stroke of the pen. The social media oligarchs need to be stripped of the editorial power to determine who sees what via their algorithms. Influence operations using bots, AI and personalised advertising need to be outlawed and aggressively eradicated. Traditional media needs to be insulated from oligarchic ownership. Political donations from wealthy foreigners need to be eliminated. Constitutional safeguards to prevent a country slipping into the abyss of competitive authoritarianism on the basis of a single election need to be strengthened.

No insulating

One effect of the uncertainty Trump has created is that Europe is already starting to lean on the nuclear deterrent provided by France and the UK, mainly provided by submarines out in the Atlantic. Such seismic shifts in European security shake everything else. No insulation is effective, everything is affected.

One of the Trident submarines that provide the UK’s nuclear deterrent

Take, for example, AI. The true fear of those creating AI is not that the AI will dominate humanity in the manner of Skynet in the Terminator movies. Rather, it is that some other guy will harness the power of AI and use it as a wonder-weapon to dominate them, a domination that may be by another company or another country. This “asymmetric bet” is the basic rationale for investment in sovereign AI articulated recently in the UK’s AI Action Plan.

This recalls the history of the true wonder-weapon, the nuclear bomb. So it is no surprise that in Washington they continue to discuss a Manhattan Project for AI. Or that at the AI Action Summit in Paris a lifetime ago (10 days), the Europeans talked of a CERN for AI. The nuclear history holds lessons for us

The project to build a nuclear bomb started in Liverpool. It was only determined British/Canadian/Australian research and diplomatic efforts that persuaded the Americans that a bomb was viable. But once the Manhattan Project was concluded, the US passed the McMahon Act in 1946 that forbade the sharing of the technology with the allies.

The risks inherent in being dependent on the US led to the intergovernmental treaty that created CERN in Geneva in 1954. If nuclear physicists could create the nuclear bomb with what they knew in 1941, what might they do with deeper knowledge? The US was building ever bigger accelerators and the European powers did not want to risk being blindsided.

So the idea that the UK might on AI go with the Americans rather than the Europeans (and, as at CERN now, other powers), the picture that seemed to emerge from Paris, already seems out of date. If AI is so fundamental, and the US now so antagonistic, how can we leave ourselves open to being stranded by a new McMahon?

A more general indication of what might lie in store has been sketched by Phil Tinline in the New Statesman. What he calls “emergency realism”, including the need to re-arm, could be used to justify tax rises and allow for re-industrialisation in the de-industrialised parts of the country. He could have added that it could also be used to justify a new settlement with the EU; it is noticeable that the flurry of diplomatic activity now taking place is mainly outside the structures of the EU.

To sum up, we are in a situation in which basic parameters of the modern nation state are in question, including democracy and the rule of law. There is a real possibility that states across the West could descend through competitive authoritarianism into subservient oligarchies dominated by authoritarian and continental powers in the US, Russia and China. The twin threats that emerged in Munich, the external Russian one and the internal American one, are the immediate means by which this transformation may be effected in Europe.

This darkness is a fear that both liberals and social democrats share. However, it is only the social democrats who have the capacity to reach out to the force likely to ultimately tip the balance in this contest – the working class. Thus the basic political arrangement that friends of freedom and democracy should adopt is a broad front led by social democrats. This is not far off what we already have in England with the sympathies established between Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats.

This broad front needs to be international in character, embracing at least the US itself and all its longstanding allies such as Canada and South Korea. It also needs to extend beyond the parties, which are set up to fight elections with retail politics rather than engage in the deep ideological warfare that we find in MAGA.

Someone should write a manifesto that claims words like “democracy” and “freedom” for our side and which a wide variety of parties would find it easy to sign up to. Or, better, start creating the network that could draft it.