Democratic Socialist Futures
Donald Trump is upending the world order that has existed since the end of the Second World War. This critique of the US administration’s National Security Strategy and Defence policy is the first of a series of long reads intended to stimulate deeper discussion on key policy issues and challenges facing the left today. We urge readers to respond on the website or to print Chartist. Future topics will include: building deeper democratic societies; a future for local government; immigration and borders; the future of social democracy; combating fascism and the far right; state capitalism yesterday and today.
Patrick Costello and Glyn Ford warn that Trump’s new plan spells out an intention to break up the post-war rules-based order and the EU with it while fostering ultra-right populism. Labour and Europe need to build an alternative together.
As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos in January, we are facing the deliberate destruction of the International Order, rupture, not transition, by Trump and the coterie around him. It’s time to get real. For Washington, it’s divide and conquer. The UK is Europe’s Judas goat. Its cut-price extortion – 10% tariffs compared to the EU’s 15% – was designed by Washington to undermine European solidarity. If we fail to stand together, Europe will not be sat at the table, but on the menu. Nostalgically trying to resurrect the old, rather than building a common house, is the recipe for disaster.
International law was long a lie. Trade rules were asymmetric, and enforcement was always more dependent on the accused than the crime. The lie started white, and we lived unhappily within it. Yet it darkened. Trump’s first term saw him sabotage the WTO’s dispute mechanism on the grounds that it threatened US interests. Biden chose not to repair the tear. With Trump’s second coming, those lies have turned black, malicious and at times evil. This is now all clear to all with eyes to see with the publication of the US National Security Strategy (NSS) in December. In it, Trump’s attempt to expropriate Greenland and the ongoing subversion of the UN with his martial “Board of Peace” could be foreseen. Yet initial public reactions in the EU and UK have been denial, not defiance, sycophancy not strength, flattery not fight. It’s time the worms turned!
George Bush used his NSS to define Islamic terrorism as the US’s biggest threat. Trump first swapped out climate change for China. His second, the 29-page document that dropped in December, and followed a month later by the National Defence Strategy (NDS), together represent a brutal tearing apart of the world we have all lived in since the end of World War II. The global shockwaves are continuing to reverberate.
In summary, these short documents see the US bulldozing the foundations of the post-World War 2 order under which America saw itself, and acted, as the global policeman for a set of international rules and institutions intended to govern the ways and means by which states related to each other. Now the NSS states, “We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereign-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organisations”, and argues that the US cannot allow any nation to become powerful enough to threaten its interests. The NDS goes back a century to abrogate the Geneva Protocol (1925) so as to “clear away any restrictions on all types of weapons”, thus presumably ripping up all the nuclear arms deals with Moscow and the Treaties banning Chemical and Biological Weapons, plus landmines.
The dead multilateral system is to be replaced by a nineteenth century “Back to the Future” world of great powers, US, China and Russia, gunboat diplomacy with the US announcing its dominance over the entire Western hemisphere (the Trump corollary or “Donroe Doctrine”) and the bullying of the rest of its allies to subordinate their own interests to those of the US. Washington knows the real threat to American hegemony lies with Beijing, even if they are a little coy about naming names. The Indo-Pacific will see priority US access, a close containment of China with defence of the first island chain – Taiwan as the critical link – with Washington front and centre in a balance of power relationship with Beijing. The rest of the world is essentially abandoned to the prime responsibility of Washington’s allies, leading some to classify the approach as a kind of “corporate downsizing” exercise: an attempt to protect US global dominance by reducing its footprint to what it sees as its core interests and pressing its allies to do its bidding elsewhere.
Thus, Europe will defend Ukraine, South Korea and Japan will deter Pyongyang, while Israel and the Abraham Accords” nations will cover the Middle East. The US will offer limited support when it serves its interests, provided those under threat have a core military spending of 3.5% of GDP with an additional 1.5% devoted to security. Beijing and the rest are on a warning. Opponents must keep demands reasonable while neighbours and allies respect and do their part to defend shared interests. Adversaries and friends who fail to follow the new rules will face focussed decisive action. In NE Asia, Trump is offering a de facto recognition of North Korea as a nuclear power and has not so implicitly encouraged both Seoul and Tokyo to abandon the NPT and go nuclear.
Among the many disquieting elements, one is “flexible realism”: the selective end of hectoring countries into abandoning repressive and regressive traditions and historic forms of government. Iran and, one presumes, China remain fair game, but Saudi Arabia, Israel and Russia all get a bye, along with the Taliban. European “Allies” are the exception. The strategy, after all, explicitly announces Washington’s intention to intervene in European domestic politics in order to promote their far-right friends, weaken the EU, and compel their compliance. Trump has lost no time in demonstrating he means business. The kidnapping and abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro and his continuing offensive to colonise Greenland are indications that the new strategy is already in action.
For the EU, there is the promise of electoral interference and attempts to degrade and break up the Union. The NSS gives a clear warning that there will be sustained attempts to destroy the EU’s regulatory soft power in the interests of America’s industrial behemoths, while the NDS demands that Europe reduce its defence industry trade barriers. Thus, the US will develop the world’s premier defence arsenal with allies and partners told to prop up the US Military Industrial Complex at the cost of Europe’s domestic industry.
Trump, in addition, wants to supplant the UN. He has withdrawn from 31 UN agencies and bodies and, in that audacious bid to replace the UN peace and security system altogether, has launched a Board for Peace to be chaired by himself. Its objectives include securing “enduring peace in areas threatened by conflict”. If the American Enterprise Institute’s Project 2025 was the blueprint for Trump 2’s domestic policy, the triad of NSS, NDS and the Board of Peace is the blueprint for an attempt to restore unilateral American power through bullying and brute force. As one senior European official said privately of the NSS: “It’s a horror read, especially since we now know we have to take everything in it literally.
The Threat
No one on the left should mourn the loss of Pax Americana. In some ways, the end of dressing US imperialism in the language of international norms and rules has provided a refreshing honesty. Trump talks straight, whether it is on Venezuelan oil or on Greenland’s land and minerals. The problem is that the cure is worse than the disease. For Europeans, it means real and imminent threats to the peace and stability we have largely enjoyed since the end of World War 2. Trump is desperately playing catch-up with Beijing, whose economy is threatening to drive that of the US into a poor second place. But in the longer term, as the Soviet Union found in its demise, you can only counter economic failure with military might for so long.
The Strategy sees the EU as among its biggest threats to successful implementation. The attack lines are straight out of the US far-right playbook, accusing Brussels of activities that “undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” The US claims all this threatens Europe’s “civilisational erasure”, just barely managing not to accuse Brussels of collusion in the Great Replacement.
Washington’s real problem is the EU’s current and potential strength, not its weakness. In economic terms, the EU GDP still runs ahead of China and is two-thirds that of the US. The size and nature of the EU Single Market give it the ability to set the global regulation and standards that Washington hates so much, while the euro poses a long-term threat to the continued dollar dominance that allows the US to run the enormous deficit the rest of the world pays to maintain US living standards.
Trump’s main objective is to contain and crippling China, but to achieve that, he needs to requisition Europe’s economy and military to serve his ends. To ensure that requires simultaneously coercing and controlling Europe, sabotaging the EU and subverting its internal politics to break up Europe back into weak nation states controlled by his creatures; right-wing populists such as Farage in the UK, Italy’s Brothers, Germany’s AfD and France’s Rassemblement National. Trump wants – like with Venezuela – to take back control of Europe.
Trump successfully blackmailed the EU over trade, with the “unequal treaty” deal agreed at Turnberry golf course last summer that tilts the economic playing field heavily in the US’s favour. The only real pushback here has come from the European Parliament, which slowed ratification following Trump’s threats to Greenland, to the fury of the Administration. Simultaneously, he is demanding that the EU pick up the slack and more from the slashing of the US military spending in Europe to move from burden sharing to burden shifting, while resetting both the strategy and the order of battle to march in lockstep with Washington’s geopolitics.
The Opportunity
Ever since J D Vance shocked his European audience at last February’s Munich Security Conference, European policymakers have known that they were facing a very different US administration. But each time that the US has since made clear that it means what it says about Europe, the response has been a mixture of kowtowing flattery (“Daddy”), submitting to US demands (on trade and defence) while clinging to a kind of blind hope that this will not last and that the transatlantic relationship will shortly return to normal. A rubbing of Trump’s ego, hoping the genie will appear to grant redemption. In other words denial and distress. This misses the point. While cast as a realignment and reorientation, in reality, what we have seen develop over 12 short months is a crystal clear betrayal of trust by Washington of the Post-war Transatlantic settlement. The threat is real, but so too are the opportunities absent for a lifetime to reshape our continent, to serve our interests, not theirs, as John Palmer was arguing almost forty years ago in his Europe Without America (1987).
The clarity of the threats mercifully means that it is becoming increasingly impossible to avoid developing policies accordingly. This will be backed by Europe’s voters: recent polling is showing that less than one in five European citizens (averaging polls in 10 EU countries) and only one in four Britons now see the US as an ally. Earlier, they submitted to blackmail because of the fear that the US would pull the plug on Ukraine. Now the juice is no longer worth the squeeze; the bath’s empty. Nobody believes that the US cutting off the use of its military capabilities for the Ukraine war, in the short term, is welcome, but the US sells the pass in the NSS in a little-noticed sentence in the Security Strategy: “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” Paradoxically, threatening its own leverage.
The new Strategies also betray their own weaknesses: there is a contradiction between wanting to suborn the interests of European states to US ones and the aim of achieving this by encouraging like-minded far-right populist parties in Europe. These are nationalists to the core, and some of Trump’s threats and actions do not fit well with them or their voters. This can be seen in Marine Le Pen’s refusal to join the chorus in celebrating Trump’s actions in Venezuela and his Greenland threats. Even Georgia Meloni, until now a big cheerleader, called Trump’s threats of tariffs over Greenland a mistake. The far-right and populists will find it harder and harder to support an America working against their own national interests in the face of their voters’ scepticism.
What is to be Done
To survive the onslaught, the EU needs to be both independent and self-reliant, and the UK – even more vulnerable after Brexit – needs to urgently move to be more closely linked to the EU’s economy and defence structures. Both need to revamp their network of allies and partners to make common cause with the middle powers seeking safer havens. There are four policy areas where the EU needs to move further and faster.
First, on defence, we have written previously in Chartist about the need for joint European efforts to develop the military capabilities currently provided by the US, and the need for a single market for defence goods to put an end to the wasteful duplication of European efforts and ensure that defence autonomy is not achieved at the expense of the welfare state. Weaning Europe off purchases from US defence companies is now a matter of existential survival. Trump cannot be trusted either to remain onside with Ukraine, even if Europe gives him Greenland, or to face down Moscow in any future battle of wills with the EU. That is evidenced by the return to the delusional nonsense of the NSS’s version of Reagan’s “Star Wars” in the form of an Israeli-style – yet not as prosaic as named – “Golden Dome” over the people that matter to Washington. This allows him to abandon any extended commitment to defending Europe. NATO is now a dead deal walking, and the sooner the EU puts it out of its misery, the better, salvaging the best parts to strengthen a new European pillar at the core of a wider alliance
In Brussels, defence Commissioner Kubilius has already set the ball rolling, proposing a European Security Council with permanent and rotating members to reflect the differing military contributions of members, even suggesting it incorporates the UK. For him, it’s clear, Europe must be ready to put together a European army to replace the 100,000 American troops currently stationed in Europe.
For Britain, this brings us to Trident. Britain’s supposed independent nuclear deterrent is no such thing. The missiles are manufactured, owned and serviced in the US with a target list approved by US Strategic Command HQ. The US even has a lock on the targeting software. Any alternative British proposals need Washington’s approval. The British Trident fleet is an entirely US franchise, a British taxpayer-sponsored adjunct to the US Navy. It’s no deterrent to Russia with its inbuilt US veto, and Moscow knows it.
More in hope than expectation, April’s Non-Proliferation Treaty 5-year Review Conference should act to constrain further proliferation of nuclear weapon technologies, in particular in NE Asia, and see steps towards nuclear disarmament. In the current climate, post the Trump reset of global security, that would in the present climate be miraculous. In the circumstances, the Labour government needs to rapidly abandon Trident’s tithe to Washington and instead look to invest in a genuinely independent Anglo-French alternative that acts as a real deterrent to Moscow.
Second, on the economy, Europe must show itself willing to use the significant economic power and leverage it has to retaliate proportionately to US unfair trade practices, not least to bring into play the anti-coercion instrument, the so-called trade “bazooka”. In addition, we must resist and fightback against American attempts to undermine the EU’s regulatory regime under the guise of “abandoning regulatory suffocation’. Europe must re-shore, where possible, high-tech industry, and where it isn’t, friend-shore, conscious that America is no longer a friend. We should buy European where we can, and pay in euros where we can’t.
Third, we need to defend ourselves from the explicit intent of the US to interfere and intervene in domestic politics, building on the laws already in place to defend European democracy from Russian interference. One example, political donations from outside the EU, as well as cryptocurrency donations, should be banned.
Last, but not least, we need to develop our network of friends and allies, especially with the so-called middle powers, including not just the likes of Canada but also those of the Global South such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia. These are countries who, like the Europeans, do not share the Trump/Putin/Xi vision of a world divided up into superpower spheres of influence. Like the EU, they have an interest in retaining a multilateral rules-based system that both protects them from imperial aggressions and is the only way in which pressing global security issues such as climate change can be addressed successfully. Together as Europe, and together with the Global South, we are in a position to successfully stand up against the dystopian world order proposed by Washington and take an unexpected opportunity to remake Europe in the image we always wanted. What is there to lose?