PLUS: a short postscript – just few comments on the election itself
4 November 2024 (Brussels, Belgium) — Let’s start with a brutal fact. Right now Europe is basically a client state of the U.S. We take their lead politically, militarily, economically and culturally. It’s always popular to bash America in Europe, but that doesn’t change the reality that Europe marches to the beat of the U.S. drum. This has allowed Europe to continue with the luxury of being 27 separate states squabbling over petty differences without paying the cost that normally comes with such political incohesion.
And Europeans seem to love to hate on Americans without acknowledging that a lot of the social benefits many European countries enjoy are because Europe is able to spend tax dollars on social programs instead of military protection because the U.S. provides it. It is tough for Americans to see Europeans talk about how they live better than many Americans with their social safety net – and then tell America it needs to pay for their security.
But U.S. interest in the Continent has been in decline since the end of the Cold War. And I think we’re reaching the point where it’s “So long, America! It’s been real!”
So as U.S. voters choose a new president tomorrow, too many Europeans are anxiously waiting to see if the victor will be Donald Trump – a nightmare for many – or Kamala Harris, who’s seen as much better for the transatlantic relationship.
Here’s a tip from a lifelong Euro-American: worry less about the U.S. presidency and more about how Europe can hack it alone on a dangerous global stage. The uncomfortable truth is that American interest in Europe has been dwindling for the past 30 years. And neither candidate is likely to bring back the transatlantic heyday of the early 1990s. And Europe has been slowly disintegrating.
That’s not to say this election won’t affect Europe. One candidate is an admirer of Vladimir Putin who wants to impose 100% tariffs on European goods and vows to end the Ukraine war the day after his election. His reported threats to pull Washington out of NATO should be taken seriously because, this time around, Trump probably wouldn’t be surrounded by “Deep State” restrainers. He has surrounded himself with people who know how to do it.
Note to readers: whether he would pull out of NATO is an open question. Yes, NATO was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. But it gradually morphed to be a “stability protector” so U.S. business could comfortably expand its markets.
And Europe developing its own military force? Not going to happen. Because security is a “collective good,” states in an alliance will be tempted to “buck-pass” or free-ride on the efforts of others, in the hope that their partners will do enough to keep them safe and secure, even if they do less. This tendency helps explain why the strongest members of an alliance tend to contribute a disproportionate amount to the collective effort. And right now European states feelings about creating a “collective good” – on anything – is a shit show.
Harris, by contrast, pledges “continuity” in the U.S. global leadership role and she even has a Europhile adviser, Phil Gordon, in whom Europe places very high hopes.
But if you take a step back, and look at the “bigger picture” you get this.
Europe just isn’t as important to Washington as it once was. Aging and shrinking, allergic to power politics, fractious and risk-averse, Europe increasingly elicits not fondness in many Americans but sneering disdain — a place good for holidays and not much more. It doesn’t help that the performance gap between the American and European economies is widening inexorably, to America’s advantage.
Transatlantic boosters will point out, fairly, that the U.S.-EU relationship has been good under President Joe Biden. His support for Ukraine (including a $20 billion loan announced last week) has been steadfast, even if it falls short of hawkish hopes. The general feeling that Biden is giving “just enough” to keep Ukraine in the fight, but “not enough” to win the war.
And Biden has woven a tight relationship with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – mostly because of the Ukraine war.
But (here it comes), Biden is America’s last Cold War president. In his wake, le déluge — or more accurately a crop of policymakers who don’t feel Russia poses a core threat to U.S. interests, or have a vastly shrunken sense of Washington’s role in the world.
Even Biden, when push came to shove, let Washington’s prioritization of the Indo-Pacific area shine through. Remember the AUKUS debacle, when the U.S. snatched a major submarine-building contract out from under France’s nose? French President Emmanuel Macron was furious. Washington’s muffled reply was reminiscent of the famous Don Draper line: “I don’t think of you at all.”
Behind the scenes, the French are typically clear-eyed about how Europe is seen by Washington. It’s not hostility. It’s indifference. Sometimes that’s even worse.
To get a sense of how much things have already changed, it’s useful (or masochistic) to look back on the days when the golden standard of Pax Americana was at its highest and proudest position in the European sky — or the day when “Peak America” was reached. Stephen Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine, recently wrote:
The date was June 6, 1994. America’s allies had come together in northern France to celebrate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. A youthful, saxophone-playing president, Bill Clinton, was the star of the show. The U.S. had won the Cold War and now ranged across the western Eurasian landmass, militarily unopposed but still fielding more than 120,000 troops. A few years earlier, Washington had issued the call and — presto — 40 nations, including several European ones, joined Operation Desert Storm. On the diplomacy front, giants still roamed: Richard Holbrooke towered over Berlin from the U.S. Embassy.
Culturally speaking, it was also a different era. The Dream Team, featuring NBA stars Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Larry Bird, had leaped and dribbled their way, effortlessly, into a gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. EuroDisney — a sort of American colony, smack on the outskirts of Paris — had just opened, imposing Mickey-mania on a groaning French public. American media outlets, from the swashbuckling Herald Tribune to the Wall Street Journal Europe, were still big, brassy presences in European life, richly staffed and highly regarded.
Compare and contrast with the state of affairs today. The U.S. has withdrawn or downsized its European footprint in just about every department except one — the digital sphere, where U.S. tech companies like Facebook and X reign more or less supreme on our screens, but bring no glamor. Troop levels are way below 100,000, despite the hot war on NATO’s doorstep.
As European political analyst Nicholas Vincour recently wrote:
U.S. diplomats on the continent are, with the exceptions of David Pressman in Hungary or Bridget Brink in Ukraine, timid creatures who walk softly and carry no stick. The Herald Tribune is long gone, rolled back up into the body of its parent, The New York Times, while the Wall Street Journal has retreated back to its moorings in Lower Manhattan. Of the buzzy, digital-first media outlets that have popped up in recent years (POLITICO, Semafor, Axis) only POLITICO has put down roots in continental Europe. Even the tech giants are having second thoughts. Having developed next-generation artificial intelligence tools for consumers, they’ve largely decided against rolling them out for European users. The risk of falling afoul Europe’s AI Act is too great. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered.
For Jérémie Gallon, a Frenchman who worked in Washington and authored a biography of Henry Kissinger, the waning of U.S. interest in Europe isn’t a bad thing, per se. But it is, in his view, an incontrovertible fact linked to a turnover in Washington’s foreign policy elite. “There was an entire generation of senior officials who had organic links to Europe, either because their parents emigrated, or because they were refugees from Europe. Kissinger, [former national security adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski, [former Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright. They were all European on some level,” said Gallon.
The formal shift away from Europe started under former President Barack Obama, who drove the “Pivot to Asia” agenda, said Gallon. But Obama merely pushed along a process already in motion, which may well now accelerate. He said:
Now we have a new generation rising which reflects American demographics – and you really need to look at U.S. demographics. They [U.S. government officials or diplomats] are either linked to the Spanish-speaking world, or they look toward Asia. Those with links to Europe are simply less present.
The downgrading of Europe in the psyche of American elites is reflected in educational and career choices. Mastering Mandarin shows more ambition for an aspiring diplomat than, say, French or even Russian. Studying Europe as a geopolitical entity, by contrast, is a niche pursuit. Gallon took note: “At Harvard, the South Asian studies building is big, bright and modern, clearly a prestigious department. The Center for European Studies is just what you would imagine: small, kind of decrepit.
But note: The big irony of America’s yawn away from Europe is that it’s hard to pinpoint one specific reason why it’s happening. Per Ben Hodges, who once commanded America’s armies in Europe, the cost to America of fielding as many as 450,000 troops on the continent at the peak of the Cold War has been easily borne for the past 70 years, and delivers benefits for the United States that are far out of proportion with the investment. In an interview over the weekend he said:
It was always mystifying to me that people didn’t see what a huge advantage we have with our leadership inside NATO and our relationship with European countries. The idea that America is somehow unable to be present both in Europe and the Indo-Pacific is surprisingly uninformed.
What’s more, even now, the economic relationship between the U.S. and the European Union is bigger than it’s ever been in history. Volumes in transatlantic trade of goods and services are huge, and going up year after year.
Some Europeans have taken it on themselves to remind Washington of these facts. In a five-page paper delivered to European foreign ministers in July, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski urged his counterparts to speak up about the relationship’s mutual benefits, and dispel negative perceptions about the transatlantic relationship that have taken hold mainly on the Republican side.
But this is a lonely quest, and one that doesn’t seem to have much truck with MAGA isolationists. For Trump, who sees NATO as a burden, or his running mate JD Vance, who equates deterrence of Russia with “warmongering,” America’s overseas presence seems like an annoyance, a distraction from domestic priorities like deporting migrants or keeping prices low.
And so, November 5th has ominously arrived. Europeans are grappling with the prospect of further U.S. disengagement. If Harris wins, the thinking goes, the White House will keep backing Ukraine – but ultimately steer Kyiv toward a deal with Russia in the not-too-distant future. Investment in NATO would remain consistent – though the underlying trend would be further prioritization of the Indo-Pacific over Europe.
But of Trump wins, there is a growing sense that all bets are off. This morning, at my monthly breakfast with my journalist cohort, I heard:
Trump will behave rationally, or at least rationally by his standards, and not flip the table on NATO, and that he’ll pursue a deal on the Ukraine war that would allow both sides to claim victory (for example, by giving more weapons to Kyiv and threatening to lift all restrictions on their use, in exchange for Putin ending offensive operations and getting territory).
Nah. We want to believe Trump will be rational but nobody can be sure. The “adults in the room” he had last term ain’t coming back.
Caught off guard in 2016, EU officials now say they are getting ready for anything Trump could throw at them. Diplomats and trade officials promise they are ready to hit back “fast and hard” if Trump tries to start a trade war with the EU.
Yet this sort of trade tit-for-tat is, arguably, the easy part when it comes to envisioning Europe’s long-term relationship with the United States. Far more challenging is planning for a future in which the U.S. will be significantly and permanently less engaged in protecting Europe. On this front, France plays the role of Europe’s Cassandra, warning that the bloc needs to get its act together on defense no matter who is elected president.
That tune has been taken up by the European Commission in Brussels, which wants Europe to be more independent on tech, defense and raw materials. But the truth is that when it comes to envisioning a future with less America, the bloc is deeply divided. As enthusiastic as the proponents of European “strategic autonomy” may be, there is no momentum behind the creation of a European army or a European nuclear umbrella. It is dead at the starting gate.
And the bickering has already started – namely by the Nordics and some Central and Eastern nations – who see push from Paris as a ploy to bolster France’s companies. They regard proposals for a stronger Europe with unified strategic and military goals as a Trojan horse that would only deliver submission to the larger states, i.e. France and Germany. See? A shit show.
And the problem is deadly serious. Putin’s Russia is an existential threat. Losing America’s protective umbrella is simply unimaginable. It will expose them to the brunt of Russia’s nuclear – but more immediate, its conventional arsenals – with no credible counterweight.
Bottom line? As French analyst Nicolas Tenzer wrote last year in a most perceptive essay: “Without the United States, and without a plan, Europe is lost”.
Me? Far more dangerous is the risk that Europe won’t acknowledge that it’s already lost, and that it remains motionless and paralyzed as a result.
The United States is about to enter an abyss, and we may never crawl out of it. November 5, 2024, could very well mark America’s last legitimate presidential election.
We all knew it earlier this year when Trump announced that his horde of MAGA followers should come and vote for him on election day because they would never have to vote again. I assumed it was an act of absolute bravura, that our former president, with his fake orange coif and curious orange complexion, was crowing to his cronies. Now … well we know, and we fear.
Trump failed at his first coup attempt in 2021. He had a fake elector scheme that didn’t work because his vice president, Mike Pence, in an act of defying Trump, certified the actual count of each individual state.
Still, Trump persisted. He encouraged the Proud Boys and other white supremacists to raid the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to hang Mike Pence and bludgeon Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, so that he could continue to reside on Pennsylvania Avenue as the victim of a rigged election. Police officers were maimed in the assault and one would die from his wounds, but the Capitol held. It was Biden who won the presidency and was ratified that night as Congress returned to the Capitol, even though a number of Republicans, in danger of their lives a few hours before, still voted to ratify Trump.
But an aura of “illegitimacy” has surrounded Biden throughout his presidency, and still does. Trump has simply installed a virtual Oval Office at his Mar-a-Largo estate in Palm Beach, Florida. And to most of his followers, he remains the shadow president with orange hair and a brooding, petulant face. It doesn’t matter how many times he’s indicted, how many classified documents are scattered in the bathrooms and basement at Mar-a-Largo; Trump will never be tried for treason.
Trump and his enablers don’t really care what the election results are. They are not even looking for a victory. They are simply going through a dress rehearsal. That is one reason why Trump is so unfocused. He’s not deranged. He’s simply bored with the entire election process.
Trump has no shame. He plans to rip up the Constitution and rule as if the US were his own private corporation to play with and to wreck, as he’s done with his other enterprises. And the Republican Party has given him free rein. Some have called him the leader of a “cult.” Christian evangelists revere him as a holy creature. White supremacists adore him. The orange-haired Jesus will protect them as their numbers dwindle and they are on the verge of losing their hold on American politics to Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Native Americans.
Trump and his enablers will sew discord, to make a shambles of the election process, so that neither candidate will receive 270 electoral votes to claim victory, and the burden will fall on the House of Representatives. Neal Katyal, one of the nation’s preeminent lawyers, is fearful of Trump’s chicanery and bag of tricks. As a Constitutional scholar, Katyal realizes that if the election is very close, and one or two states fail to deliver their electoral votes in time, each state in the House of Representatives will have one vote to determine the next president; in the current Congress, we have 26 red states and 24 blue, which means that unless the “complexion” of Congress changes, Trump will return to the White House, and it will not matter whether he lost the election or not.
That’s why I said early on that that this election is not about politics; it’s much more basic — it’s about how the American determines what is real. Will the future of the country be based on evidence and law, or will government be twisted to reflect whatever Donald Trump tells us is true?
Trump is a sociopath. And people who are not sociopathic just can’t believe that pure sociopathy exists. They believe that somewhere inside the sociopath there is a human being like they are, perhaps a hurting soul gone astray. Psychologists, too, make this mistake, believing that sociopaths are not strategic but, rather, mentally ill, because they were traumatized in childhood. It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.
And they just can’t believe that someone could be so brazenly deceptive and selfish and get away with it. Over and over again. Politics has always been a tough game, Democrats think, but dear God – even Dick Cheney believes in the rules.
So we are now at the eleventh hour. The Republicans, under the brilliant tutelage of Donald Trump, have become the Party of Sociopaths, and their aim is to relegate the Democrats to a Party of Hapless Neurotics.
But in a way – no surprise. In MAGA, it is no longer about reason or even belief. It’s about faith. Freud had a word for this kind of primitive faith; he called it “illusion”. People crave a godlike father figure, Freud explained, especially when they feel threatened with the eruption of two dangers:
“the crushingly superior force of nature … and the shortcomings of society which have made themselves painfully felt.”
In the 21st century, facing severe social inequities just when nature seems most out of control, America is in exactly that vulnerable state. And so it shouldn’t actually surprise us that nearly half the country’s voters have rallied around a sociopathic strongman who promises protection in return for absolute fealty.
And oh, the stupidity. The Democrats and the mainstream press completely miss the big picture; they think they can combat this alternative reality by zeroing in on Trump’s lies. “Fact checking” has become the self-soothing fantasy of a neurotic press — useless because the real issue is that Trump and his followers live in a completely separate reality. There is no fact-checking exercise that could get us to a common ground because in Trump’s reality, and the reality of nearly half the country, whatever helps the sociopath score points against the Democrats is the truth.
Yes, we can laugh along with late-night TV and leading Democrats about Trump’s dancing, just as we can call how the press is normalizing Trump’s statements “sanewashing.”
But these responses are best understood as symptoms of our national neurotic delusion: the delusion that no one can really be that evil; the delusion that our system will prevent him from doing what he says he will do; the delusion that sociopaths don’t really exist.
But sociopaths do exist — and in American society they become billionaires.
Or they become president.
Or both.