It’s not even two months since Trump was inaugurated and the whole western alliance has been upended. His vice president, J.D. Vance, insulted the entirety of the USA’s historic allies at the February 2025 Munich Security Conference, accusing them of being the real threat to democracy and destroying, in one short speech, eighty years of goodwill. The chair of the Munich event, a German, was reduced to tears in his end of conference speech and had to be comforted by the equally stunned and angry leaders Vance lambasted. A few days later, we witnessed the humiliation of Trump and Vance as they laced into President Zelensky in the Oval Office (yes, it was their humiliation not his). All of this, on top of a trade war unleashed by America with 25-50% tariffs, sabre rattling against their Canadian neighbours, a crass plan to turn the Gaza strip into a real estate riviera Trump-style, the threatened annexation of Greenland and Panama and the evisceration of the US civil service by Elon Musk’s chainsaw.
Everybody’s shocked. But we shouldn’t be.
I grew up under an umbrella of Cold War US protection. Whilst we had our own nuclear deterrent, everyone knew that it was America’s might that patrolled the skies 24/7 and kept the West safe and free from the Soviet menace nine hundred miles to the east. In deference to the hallowed ‘special relationship’, no one in polite society pointed out that bankrupt Britain, which had stood alone and kept alive the possibility of freedom from nazi tyranny, was paying the US $150m a year – including interest – in war loan repayments for fifty years. (We made the final payment in 2006.) Germany, which had unleashed the armageddon of WWII, paid not a cent back to the US for the Marshall Plan for the $1.4billion it received to reconstruct the country. What kind of friend demands payment with interest to an ally whilst offering largesse to an enemy? America, that’s who. And they’re doing it again, nakedly, with this mineral deal they’re touting with Ukraine.
America is the opposite of a not-for-profit enterprise. It is the beacon of international capitalism and its only motivation has always been to make a buck. It is mammon. So it’s probably not that surprising that they sought to profit from the war. (Wasn’t war profiteering a crime in Britain for companies and citizens alike?) Trump’s transactionalism, so reviled by the liberal commentariat, is actually just the continuation of American policy throughout the ages. America seeks to use its strength to make itself even richer. Looked at through this prism, all the fine rhetoric on freedom of JFK – “Ich bin ein Berliner” – and other presidents from 1945 to 2024, rings pretty hollow. It was racketeering disguised under the banner of a joint defence of liberty and freedom.
Should we blame the USA for this? No. The culpable are the British Prime Ministers and other European leaders who believed all this baloney and, worst, took both a seemingly free ride on American military hegemony and made our own military useless without American technology. In the UK, Attlee, Anthony Eden, Harold MacMillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, (we’ll skip Truss – she wasn’t in power long enough to notice her), Sunak. All progressively making us more and more reliant on America whilst they made deeper and deeper expedient cuts to the military in order to buy votes with tax cuts. Standing alone against American domination was Charles De Gaulle. He has been proved absolutely right to have maintained France’s military independence and it is to France’s credit that they have their own, nuclear strike capability which has nothing to do with the US.
Tanya describes waking up on the day in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. All the news readers, so familiar for so long, changed overnight. Citizens were informed that everything they’d been told for so long was a lie. That all they had been brought up to believe was delusion. That the Soviet Union, far from being the best country in the world, was broken, bankrupt and cripplingly backward. That they must start again and that it would be very, very painful – which it was. (This is how people learn; through crisis.) To their great credit, the ex-Soviet countries took on the challenge and built success from the ashes within a generation. Now Western Europe must look to emulate that speed. This is our own crisis.
Trump’s attack on the western alliance has had a similar – though not quite as catastrophic – effect on Europe and Europeans. We have lazily slept walked into a situation where our entire defence system is controlled by America. We have behaved like spoilt ‘trustafarian’ offspring of a ruthless magnate – entitled, sucking at the teat of America and never thinking there would be a price to pay ‘because we’re family’. But America has never believed in family. America is a bank. It is interested in money not sentiment or ties. Yes, its citizens enjoy visiting their ancestors’ home countries – Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Poland. These places are no different from Disneyland. Quaint. Cute. A diversion for a holiday. The alliance we all believed in was an illusion; when America called after 911, we went. A friend in need and all that. In America’s view nowadays, it seems, a friend in need is a pest.
Europe still hasn’t really woken up. There’s lots of grumbling in the media and hand-wringing by politicians. But Starmer clearly thinks he can whisper Trump and America into being back on side, reasonable and knit them back into the fold of NATO and the western alliance that worked for eighty years. Mertz in Germany and Ursula von der Leyen of the EU, I hope, are much less starry eyed. We need some realism now and if our values are to hold sway, Europe must come into its own power again at last. We must never again make ourselves so dependent on another power. Because, as we have had to relearn, things change. And when they do, the first thing you need to do is recognise they have changed.