No matter how distasteful we find Trump and Vance over Europe, they speak a blunt truth
By Guardian-Simon Jenkins/ Simon Jenkins-Fri 21 Feb 2025 12.00 GMT
The US has chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it, but it is right to call for a realignment. It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard.
He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?
The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.
Yes, these men are mendacious and hypocritical. Trump claims that Zelenskyy “refuses to have elections” and that he is “very low in the polls” despite recent polling showing that he still has a majority of Ukrainian support. As for the threat to free speech “from within”, the Associated Press is banned from White House briefings for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, and Trump’s friend Elon Musk thinks CBS’s “lying” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence”.
Trump/Vance have cut through half a century of consensual waffle about the US’s God-given destiny to lead the world to goodness and freedom. Whether the issue is peace and war, immigration or tariffs, they claim to seek the US’s self-interest and nothing else. Why should Americans fork out billions each year to defend a Europe that fails to defend itself? Why should they arm distant nations to fight their neighbours, or tip staggering amounts of aid into Africa’s basket cases?
If the rest of the world has screwed up – while the US has stayed free and rich for two and a half centuries – that is the world’s problem. Americans have spent a fortune these past 50 years trying to improve life on Earth and, frankly, it has failed. To hell with diplomatic etiquette.
As for Ukraine, enough is enough. Putin is not going to invade the US, nor has he any intention of invading western Europe. If Europe wants to pretend otherwise, champion Vladimir Putin’s foes, sanction and enrage him, it can do so alone.
Nato was a Hitler/Stalin thing. It was just another device to make the US pay for Europe’s defence. Not any more. The US, says the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, “is no longer the primary guarantor of security in Europe”. Bang goes plausible nuclear deterrence.
In reality, these talking points are not new, though they have not previously been expressed so brutally by an administration. In various guises, they have lurked beneath the surface of US isolationism for more than a century. To win an election, Woodrow Wilson swore that the first world war was “one with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us”. Franklin Roosevelt promised the same of the second. He promised American mothers “again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”. Neither kept his word.
US public opinion can be patriotic when a war is on, as during Vietnam. But otherwise it has been persistently anti-interventionist. Kennedy might have pleaded global sacrifice and to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. But that was largely fine words for foreign consumption.
What Trump/Vance are now saying to western Europe is get serious. The cold war is over. You know Russia has no desire to occupy western Europe. This proclaimed threat is a fantasy got up by what a wise president, Dwight Eisenhower, called the US’s military-industrial complex, long practised at extracting profit from fear. If Keir Starmer really wants “to give priority to defence”, he can slash his own health and welfare budgets to pay for it. But is he really that threatened, or does it merely sound good?
Joe Biden was meticulous in the degree of help he extended to Kyiv. Now is the inevitable moment of extrication, but it will require a very difficult ceasefire to precede it. Without a substantial guarantee from Washington, it is hard to see anything other than eventual defeat for Kyiv. Ukraine could yet prove a rerun of the US in South Vietnam.
With a minimum of delicacy, Trump/Vance have decided to expose the mix of platitude, bluff and profiteering that underpinned much of the cold war. Nato’s victory in 1989 suggested the need for a shift to a more nuanced multipolar world, one that was never properly defined.
Trump/Vance are right that a realignment is badly needed. They have chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it. We can be as rude to them as we like, but they will have US democracy on their side.
Simon Jenkins
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Editor Comments.
ZELENSKY THE HIRED GUNMAN
The fact is US/NATO started the war in Ukraine by throwing out the previous pro-Russia President in exchange for their hand-picked jewish President Zelensky as their obedient gunman attacking the pro-Russia Eastern states of Ukraine with their Nazi Battaljon. These 3 states was begging Putin for help, and after an in-depth meeting of parliament, Putin entered Ukraine with military force with the intention to put a quick end to the confrontation. However, the US/NATO plan continued by supplying billions of dollars of support, weapons and ammunition to escallate the war into what we find today.