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The writer is a FT contribution publisher and writes the Chartbook newsletter
The ambuscade of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last week conducted a frantic research of historical orientation.
It was clearly more shocking than anything that happened during Donald Trump’s first term. But is it, in its consequences, worse than the push for the world war against terrorism under George W Bush? Worse than the disturbance by Richard Nixon of the Bretton Woods system? Or the American scandalous bombardment of Cambodia and Laos? More blatant than many strokes of the Cold War or the brutal negotiation which took place, certainly behind closed doors, during the Second World War?
There has been just over 100 years of American globalism and it was not a simple navigation. The first bump on the road was catastrophic. In 1919, a republican congress refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty and with the IT of President Woodrow Wilson for a League of Nations. In support of “red fear”, racial riots, Monkey Scopes trial and the Ku Klux Klan Renaissance, American diplomacy has withdrawn from the world.
In the 1930s, British and French governments on the right and left faced the threat of Mussolini, Hitler and Imperial Japan alone. They have placed their hopes in democratic procedures, long -term social balance, reasonable budgets, managed currencies and new technologies – the Maginot line and the radar. Meanwhile, appeasement was motivated by the hope that this would encourage reasonable conservatives in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo to remember men of violence. Were the United States ready to help? This was not the case. The best that Congress offered was money and transport. The European strategy to contain Hitler failed and, in despair, which followed the United States, exchanging a lot of used destroyers for the bases. America’s interest in Greenland dates back to this period.
The moment of American power which defines what we mean today by world hegemony was in fact very short – from 1941 to the early 1960s. This was supported by the enlightened technocracy and an American -oriented business community. In Washington, he was based on New Deal liberalism and control of the Democratic Party on the racist Jim Crow South. What broke out was the completion of American democracy with the civil rights law of 1964. This alienated the south of progressive democrats and sent the white vote to slide to the Republicans.
Trump is the legitimate heir to a national reactionary and populist strain which is deeply in American democracy. What is also clear, however, is that he is the most brutal holder, self-brought and unworthy of having honored the White House. What was wrong?
What is crucial is that elite controls and counterweights failed in the Republican Party. And without the strong left base movement, the result of an elite weakness in the United States is that democracy slips towards coarse populism. Much of the US electorate will vote for anyone other than a member of the liberal elite. A smaller, but still substantial segment, loves Trump positively. The added dynamism comes from the fact that, unlike his first mandate, Trump opens the door to a new goalkeeper of young men, represented by Vice-President JD Vance and Elon Musk.
Anyone who has followed the radicalization of the GOP since the 1990s remembers Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and felt the fragile grip of the self-satisfied meritocracy of America could see that it was a disaster waiting.
It has been clear for some time that the United States needed a new, much more limited formula for foreign policy. Bernie Sanders, in the idiom of the former American on the left, called at the end of American imperialism. Barack Obama recommended the restraint, although Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, favored a larger line.
Joe Biden supervised a deeply premature renewal of American claims to world leadership. The result was an administration that committed the United States to the defense of Ukraine, supported Israeli climbing in the Middle East and is committed to the edge of China. This has satisfied Washington’s “blob”, relaunched the minds of the Atlantists and fed on complacency in Europe. But despite the Biden administration’s pretension to pursue a foreign policy for the American middle class, popular support for its approach has been fragile.
Of course, Trump is a vandal. But by demolishing the status quo, it only confirms the evidence – that the elite coalition which favored American world leaders has lost its political grip. If Europe wants something that he likes to call an “order based on rules”, he will have to do it for himself.
At least in the compass of its own relations with the rest of the world, Europe has the means to do so and a political culture sufficiently robust to maintain it. In Berlin this week, we finally heard an adequate response, with Friedrich Merz, Chancellor, with a coalition program that would see a massive increase in defense expenses. It is not a matter concluded and it will not save Ukraine from horrible choices. But it offers perspective that Europe could finally go beyond its humiliating fear of Russia and dependence on America still unreliable.
