Nationalist liberals should use their imagination when responding to American policies, instead of complaining about being excluded from talks on Ukraine.
By Ivan KRASTEV
Listening to US Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich and watching the results of the parliamentary elections in Germany, I was reminded of East Berlin in 1989 and the fall of communist regimes across Eastern Europe. It was the final weeks of the Soviet empire in Europe when Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader, told his hard-liners in East Germany that they risked being on the wrong side of history and that “a danger awaits those who do not react to reality.” Vance gave a similar speech, telling Europeans that they were on the wrong side of President Donald Trump. But this message did not have the desired effect.
It turned out that the main beneficiary of Elon Musk’s social media posts and Vance’s warning was not the far-right Alternative for Germany party, but the radical left-wing Die Linke. Another unexpected result was that Friedrich Merz, Germany’s likely next chancellor, transformed overnight from an old Atlanticist into a European Gaullist. Immediately after the vote, Merz declared his readiness to fight for Europe’s independence from the US.
The Trumpian revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months into the new term in the White House, the European political scene has become a clash between the revolutionaries of the Trump alliance and the nationalist liberals of the resistance, who say “don’t blackmail us.”
It is now up to the far right to justify Trump’s expected tariffs on Europe, which this week threatened to be 25 percent, and to demand that Europeans follow Washington’s lead on foreign policy. Meanwhile, the mainstream parties act as defenders of national sovereignty, hoping to mobilize support by appealing to national interest and dignity.
The Munich conference also put an end to the heated debate about whether Trump should be taken seriously (i.e., not literally) or literally (i.e., not seriously). We now know that he should be taken both seriously and literally. As Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has rightly observed, Trump “not only says what he thinks, he says what he wants.” His comments about taking control of Greenland or the Panama Canal are not signals, but clear objectives. The American president is convinced that America’s strategic interest is to make Canada the 51st state of the United States. He firmly believes that he can separate Russia from China and blames the American “deep state” for preventing him from doing so in his first term.
In this context, Europeans are wasting precious time guessing what Trump’s plan for Ukraine will be, as well as complaining about their exclusion from the negotiating table.
To properly understand Trump, it is necessary first of all to recognize that a revolutionary government is in power in Washington, albeit one organized like an imperial court. Revolutions do not have detailed plans. They are guided by time plans: seize the moment; do not project steps forward. It is not clear what exactly Trump wants to achieve in his negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something very big and to achieve it very quickly. What Trump is offering Putin is not simply the opportunity to end the war in Ukraine on terms generally favorable to Moscow, but a grand bargain to rebuild the world order. This bargain includes America’s presence in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and the Arctic. Trump promises Putin that Russia will be rapidly reintegrated into the global economy and that Moscow will regain the great power status it lost in the humiliating 1990s.
Trump hopes this will persuade Russia to break its alliance with China. The US refusal to vote on a UN resolution condemning Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shocked even some of the president’s most devoted admirers. But the act was intended to convince the Kremlin that the American leader is willing to do the unthinkable – and reconfigure the world shaped by Reagan and Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
What will happen to Trump’s revolutionary dreams is a separate issue. It is one of the ironies of history that Russians are awaiting Trump’s determination to reshape the world with a measured enthusiasm, an enthusiasm reminiscent of the measured US response to Gorbachev nearly 40 years ago. What Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, is saying today is not much different from what Dick Cheney, the US secretary of defence, said in 1989: “We must be careful not to hang our nation’s security on what may be a temporary deviation in the behaviour of our main enemy.”
George Orwell once observed that “all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failures.” What kind of failure the Trumpian revolution will be, we do not yet know. But history teaches us that the best strategy is not to resist revolutionaries, but to steal their revolution. In this regard, Europe’s success will depend largely not on its ability to resist but on its talent for surprise. Can Europe find a way to benefit from its exclusion from the US-Russia negotiating table? Should Trump be given the exclusive right to his grand peace plan for Ukraine, and its implementation?
In a moment of existential crisis like the one we are experiencing, one precious resource for the weaker party stands out above all others: the political imagination. (Financial Times)
