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Your Guide to Washington and the World's 2024 US Election Means
The author is a contributing editor for FT, chair of the Liberal Strategy Centre, Sofia, and a fellow at IWM Vienna.
Hearing the speech of US Vice President JD Vance in Munich and seeing the results of Germany's subsequent parliamentary elections, I remembered the collapse of the communist regime in East Berlin and Eastern Europe in 1989. During the final weeks of the European Soviet Empire, Reformed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told his hard-hitting East German comrades that they were on the wrong side of history, “The danger awaits people who do not respond to the real world.” Vance gave a similar speech, telling Europeans he was on the wrong side of President Donald Trump. However, this message had no expected effect.
Rather than a German far-right alternative, the radical leftist Dai Linke party in Germany has been found to be the main beneficiary of Elon Musk's social media posts and Vance's warnings. Another unexpected result was that Germany's next prime minister, Friedrich Merz, was converted overnight from the old-fashioned Atlanticist to the European Garist. Shortly after the vote, Meltz declared he was ready to fight for Europe's independence from the United States.
The Trump Revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months into the new White House administration's term, the European political scene has turned into a clash between revolutionaries who allied with Trump and liberal nationalists who “don't bully us” who resist. Now, it's justifying Trump's expected tariffs in Europe that threatened at 25% this week, asking Europeans to follow Washington's leadership in foreign policy. In contrast, mainstream parties act as defenders of national sovereignty who want to mobilize support by appealing to national interests and the dignity of the people.
The Munich Conference also ended a heated debate on whether Trump was seriously (not literal), or literal (not meaning). Now we know that he should be taken seriously and literally. As Russian President Vladimir Putin properly observed, Trump “doesn't just say what he's thinking, he says what he wants.” His comments about Greenland or the Panama Canal control represent intentions rather than signals. The US President believes that America's strategic interest lies in making Canada the 51st US province. He strongly believes that Russia can be divided from China, and blames the “deep state” of America for preventing him from achieving this in his first term.
In this context, Europeans are wasting valuable time contemplating what will become Trump's Ukraine plan and complaining that they are not at the negotiation table.
Getting Trump right must first and foremost recognize that it is a revolutionary government in Washington's power, despite it being organized as an Imperial Court. The revolution has no detailed plans. They are run by timetables: meet in the instant. You can't go any further. It is unclear what Trump wants to achieve exactly in negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something very big and he wants to achieve it quickly, very quickly.
What Trump offers Putin is an epic bargain to sort the world, rather than the prospect of ending the war in Ukraine in broadly favorable terms for Moscow. This includes the presence of America in Europe and in the Middle East and the Arctic. Trump promises Putin that Russia will rapidly reintegrate into the global economy and that Moscow will regain the great power position lost in the humiliating 1990s. Trump hopes this will convince Russia to Thunder alliance with China. The US's refusal to voting for Russia's invasion of Ukraine shocked even some of the president's most devoted worshippers. However, it was intended to persuade the Kremlin that American leaders were ready to do things they could not think of, and reconstruct the world shaped by Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
What happens to Trump's revolutionary dream is another matter. It is one of the ironies of history that Russians greet Trump's resolve to reshape the world with protected enthusiasm reminiscent of a cautious US response to Gorbachev almost forty years ago. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that today, US Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, said in 1989: “We must stake our country's security on what could be a temporary abnormality in the actions of our primary enemy.”
George Orwell once observed that “every revolution is a failure, but not all of them are the same failure.” We don't know what a failure the Trump Revolution will be. But what history teaches us is that the best strategy is not to resist revolutionaries, but to hijack their revolution. By doing this, European success relies on displaying a talent of surprise, not a ability to resist. Can Europe find a way to benefit from not being at the US-Russia negotiation table? Should Trump own Ukraine and his great peace plan for its implementation?
In moments of existential crisis like the present, there is one valuable resource for a weaker party that stands out: the political imagination.
