The second Trump administration is holding a gun to Europe’s head. In mid-February, Donald Trump’s deputy J D Vance cocked it with an acerbic address at the Munich Security Conference. At the month’s end, Trump pulled the trigger in the Oval Office by publicly badgering Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country has been resisting Russian aggression for a straight 36 months.
Done in front of TV cameras, it left the impression that it was a carefully choreographed ambush designed to send out a message that the new US regime cared little about either the transatlantic military alliance or the Anglo-Saxon construct that underpins the shared cultural mores of substantial parts of North America and Europe.
The encounter dishonoured and disregarded both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994—whereby the US, Russia and the UK had committed to protecting and preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia in exchange of Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons—and the Minsk accords of the past decade.
Beyond the abject revulsion the joust generated lie some hard new realities that should make other nations wary of the new philosophy underlining the Trump-Vance foreign policy disposition. It can be summed up with one word—transactionalism. Trump is moving the US from being a nation that prided itself of exceptionalism to one that embraces abject transactionalism.
The insistence that Ukraine give up half its mineral wealth to pay for the American military and diplomatic support, coupled with Elon Musk’s threat to shut off the Starlink terminals providing critical communication support to the Ukrainian war effort, are telling examples of arm-twisting a nation that’s fighting with its back to the wall. “You hold no cards,” as Trump kept repeatedly yelling at Zelenskyy.
At his first cabinet meeting on February 26, Trump disdainfully said, “The European Union was formed in order to screw the US. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.” Two days earlier, he had directed his mission to the United Nations to vote with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other nations against a General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian aggression.
Trump’s transactionalist worldview ignores the ideological crucible in which the modern US-Europe relation was forged. The First World War’s end saw the rise of fascism and nazism in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, characterised by the failure of the Peace of Versailles and the redundancy of the League of Nations’ four philosophical constructs came to hold the field: liberal democracy, nazism, fascism and communism.
When Adolf Hitler started gobbling up countries, commencing with the Austrian Anschluss in 1938, a quixotic alliance emerged between communism, nazism and fascism based on raison d’état and realpolitik.
However, it soon fell apart with Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Union in July 1941, codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Then an even more unrealistic compact emerged that put liberalism and communism on the same side. It was in this swirl of shifting alliances that the US was compelled to enter when an Asian imperial, militaristic and totalitarian power, Japan, attacked it in December 1941.
This unnatural alliance between liberalism and communism ended soon after the culmination of the Second World War when Winston Churchill announced the commencement of the Cold War at a public address in March 1946. The existential sociopolitical struggle between liberalism and communism had begun in right earnest.
The US and western Europe fought on the same side of the Cold War and won it with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR in December 1991.
Can Trump and Vance sweep aside this more-than-a-century of historical, strategic, conceptual and economic convergence between the US and Europe? Would all this be sacrificed at the altar of transactionalism? How long will it be before there is a pushback by the multi-spectrum US strategic and policy community that is invested in the transatlantic partnership that undergirded the emergence of the US as the most influential outside balancer of power across every geographical region in the world?
What does it also say about the reliability of the US as an ally, given its earlier history of unilateral withdrawals from Vietnam in the 1970s and Afghanistan in 2021?
Can the Trump administration’s back-flip on Ukraine mean that tomorrow there could be a US-Russia-China entente? Where would that leave countries like India and others in the Asia-Pacific who have been wrestling with the not-too-peaceful rise of China over the past decade or so?
After all, the story of the US-China tango dates all the way back to the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s that commenced with Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Joseph Stalin personality cult.
The US and China fought on the same side in the Second World War to defeat the Axis powers, particularly the Japanese rampaging through Asia. Therefore, the warming up that commenced in the late 1960s and culminated with US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s outreach to China through Pakistan in July 1971, was a process of rebuilding bridges with old-albeit-estranged fellow travellers.
It would be trite to add that the US ‘built’ today’s China from the 1980s by relocating large manufacturing facilities and getting invested in the continuation of that relationship across administrations. Even as late as 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, some influential American scholars seriously floated the balloon of a G2 grouping—an idea that was not actively discouraged by the Barack Obama administration.
All that may not stop Trump, given that the seeds were planted almost two decades ago. If his transactionalism turns it into a triple entente between the US, Russia and China—notwithstanding the current tactical play with tariffs—where would that leave India?
Those who decide to stay silent today should be aware that this is not about Zelenskyy or Ukraine. It is whether the rules of the real estate world would define international relations now.
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)
Manish Tewari | Lawyer, third-term MP and former Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting