Glyn Ford says Trump’s love affair with Putin means Europe and UK must find a new way
In February 1972, a bemused, shell-shocked world saw Richard Nixon fly into Beijing to greet Mao Zedong. This ending of twenty-three years of hostile relations was the by-product of America’s covert military aid and assistance to the Dalai Lama inspired insurgency in Tibet. Until then, Washington had written off the Sino-Soviet split as inconsequential, but intelligence papers found on a high-ranking Chinese Officer killed in an ambush in the Province showed the depth of the division was both deeper and starker. Henry Kissinger – Nixon’s éminence grise – immediately saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. Nixon played his part to perfection. It was a triumph with Washington ending up, within scarcely eighteen months, offering to secretly supply China with ‘equipment and other services’ – including intelligence – in a Sino-Soviet war. Beijing’s signing-on bonus came on the eve of Nixon’s visit when Taiwan – the rump holdout from Beijing’s victory in the civil war – was unceremoniously bundled out of the UN in favour of Red China.
Now, Donald Trump is attempting to play the same gambit in reverse as his love affair with Putin aims to prise Moscow from Beijing for a second time. This time, Washington is looking for an added bonus in bringing Pyongyang along in Moscow’s wake. North Korea resents its over-dependence on its dominant neighbour. From the early nineties on, the Kim family has prioritised both the development of an independent security capacity and normalisation of relations with Washington, desperate to have someone onboard to play off against Beijing after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The cost of Trump’s guileless manoeuvring will be paid by Europe, much to the pleasure of Trump’s foreign policy cabal.
Yet, the game is far from lost. Today, its revival sees very different and less pliable pieces on the board. Compared to half a century ago, the Moscow-Beijing relationship is now driven by unity of interests rather than any ideological interest in unity. It is no longer bedevilled by exegesis over the impossibility in Marxist-Leninist theology of two suns in the communist heaven. A Trump-Putin close encounter is neither enough to break the economic ties that bind nor to rebuild the trust lost by America’s actions in Europe over the past decades. The long half-century has not been entirely kind to Washington. In the early seventies, there might have been a two-power stand-off, but in every metric, the US led the way and the Soviet Union followed desperately playing catch-up; industry and economy, social standards and wealth, defence and offence. The Cold War was won in the West, but not in the East. Today, the US economy has been hollowed out from below as Beijing has taken the lead in most industrial sectors and will overtake the US economy in short order. As for North Korea, the last Trump-Kim Summit in Hanoi in 2019 demonstrated to Pyongyang that, while Trump was willing to engage, he was incapable of consummating the deal. That message has gone wider. America’s moral authority, in parallel with the ‘shock and awe’ intimidatory nature of its military threat, has been put to the question by Afghanistan, Syria and Gaza, and found wanting.
Yet the death of the deal depends on the European Union (EU), the final misshapen piece of the jigsaw, which just might confound its knavish tricks. While Taiwan could only continue to kowtow to the agent of its humiliation, the EU is a vertebrate with the prospect of finding its backbone if it cares to look. Northern Italy’s thirteenth-century flagellant sect beat themselves to, in mortifying the flesh, demonstrate discipline and devotion. It didn’t really catch on as a viable political strategy then, nor should it now.
A Trump-Putin imposed peace in Ukraine, plus an attempt to bully Brussels to engage in a joint enterprise to punish Beijing for its successes and reward Washington for its failures, should in all conscience be several bridges too far. To continue to fantasise that a reset button for the transatlantic relationship will miraculously appear when the political clock in the US finally chimes Democrat, is to be in deep denial. With JD Vance favoured as the next President, like Humpty Dumpty, it can’t be put together again. When in an abusive relationship, the best advice is to leave, get a divorce. Europe – and the UK – is being offered the worst of both worlds. At best, left alone to take up the US burden in Ukraine or suffer an armistice and surcharge it had no part in planning, and in parallel pressed into a trade war with Beijing to suit Washington’s interests but not their own, are questions that answer themselves. If Europe realises just how much an enemy to its friends America has become, then equivocation and hesitation are no option. They can scuttle their future absent our help.