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Your guide to what the 2024 American elections mean for Washington and the world
The writer is a contributing editor of FT, head of the Liberal Strategy, Sofia and Fellow Strategy on IWM Vienna
Listening to the address of US Vice President JD Vance in Munich and seeing the results of Germany’s later parliamentary elections, I remembered East Berlin in 1989 and the fall of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. It was during the last weeks of the Soviet Empire in Europe that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet reformist leader, told his fierce East Germany friends who risked being on the wrong side of history and “the danger awaits those who do not respond to the real world.” Vance made a similar speech, telling Europeans that they were on the wrong side of President Donald Trump. But this message did not have the expected effect.
It turned out that Germany’s radical left Link Party, and not the far -right alternative to Germany, was the main beneficiary of Elon Musk’s social media posts and Vance’s warning. The other unexpected result was that Friedrich Merz, Germany’s other potential chancellor, has been transformed overnight by an old -fashioned Atlantic into a European Gaulist. Shortly after the vote, Merz announced his willingness to fight for Europe’s independence by the US
The Trumpian Revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months in the new mandate of the White House administration, the European political scene has become a clash between Trump’s allies revolutionaries and “don’t harass” Liberal Nationalists of Trump’s resistance. It is now for the far right to justify Trump’s projected tariffs in Europe, threatened this week to 25 percent, and to ask Europeans to pursue Washington’s leadership in foreign policy. In contrast, the main parties are acting as defenders of national sovereignty who hope to mobilize support by appealing to national interest and national dignity.
The Munich Conference also ended the lit debate if Trump has to be taken seriously (meaning, literally) or literally (meaning, not serious). Now we know that he has to be taken both seriously and literally. While Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has appropriate, Trump “does not just say what he thinks, but he says what he wants.” His comments on receiving Greenland control or Panama channel represent not signaling but purpose. The US president is convinced that America’s strategic interest lies in making Canada the 51st US state. He strongly believes that he can separate Russia from China, and he blames America’s “deep state” for its prevention to achieve this in its first mandate.
In this context, Europeans are wasting precious time by meditating on what Trump’s plan will be for Ukraine and complaining of not being at the negotiation table.
Trump’s proper intake requires primarily to admit that it is a revolutionary government in power in Washington, though an organized as an imperial court. Revolutions never have detailed plans. They run with schedules: meet the moment; Do not project steps forward. It is unclear what exactly he wants to reach Trump in his negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something great, and he wants to reach it quickly, very quickly.
What Trump offers Putin is not just the prospect of ending the war in Ukraine with widely favorable terms for Moscow, but a great bargain to reorganize the world. This includes the presence of America in Europe, and also in the Middle East and the Arctic. Trump promises Putin that Russia will quickly reintegrate into the global economy and that Moscow will regain the status of a great power that lost in the 1990s humiliation. Trump hopes this will persuade Russia to destroy its alliance with China. US refusal to a UN vote to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shocked even some of the president’s most devout admirers. But it was intended to convince the Kremlin that the American leader is ready to make unimaginable – and reconfigure the world as formed by Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
What will happen to Trump’s revolutionary dreams is a separate question. It is one of those irony of the history that the Russians are greeting Trump’s determination to recover the world with a preserved enthusiasm reminiscent of the careful US response to Gorbachev almost 40 years ago. What Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, is saying today is not as different from what Dick Cheney, then the US Defense Secretary, said in 1989: “We must preserve against the fate of our nation’s security on what may be a temporary deviation in the behavior of our main opponent.”
George Orwell once observed that “all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.” What kind of failure will be the Trumpian revolution, we do not know. But what history teaches us is that the best strategy is not to resist the revolutionaries, but to grab their revolution. Doing this, Europe’s success will mainly not depend on its ability to resist, but on the appearance of a talent to surprise. Can Europe find a way to take advantage of not being at the American-Russian negotiation table? Should Trump be left to own his great peace plan for Ukraine and its implementation?
At one point in the existential crisis like the present, there is a valuable source for the weakest party that distinguishes: political imagination.
