In 2002, Stephen Peter Rosen, a professor of national security at Harvard, wrote in the Weekly Standard in New York about how to deal with tyrants. The headline was a pithy “kill them if you can; deter them if you must”. This was about the US as policeman of the world and the challenge of ousting Saddam Hussein and others then deemed to be threatening US national security. “Tyranny is not a word with which modern political scientists and government officials are comfortable,” he noted. “They prefer more neutral formulations such as ‘unitary rational actor’ or ‘state of concern’.”
Ironically, it is now about how the world might deal with a home-grown, elected American tyrant. The early days of Donald Trump’s presidency invite less ambivalent characterisations, as the president for Irrationality, Plastic Straws, Ethnic Cleansing Proposals, the Rape of Ukraine and “Great Television” parrots Putin and burns bridges to Europe.
Understandably, there is much focus on a new world order, but there are always echoes of history running through contemporary strains. The alliance between the US and Europe has often been fraught; historian Tony Judt in his 2005 book Postwar highlights how United States was frequently viewed negatively in western Europe as “economically carnivorous” and harbouring imperialist ambitions – suspicions now revived.
But this is also an era that will revive questions about the coherence of European purpose and leadership. “Going back to the 1880s, United States has had an ambivalent place in the European imagination,” noted Judt. But “the insidious threat to Europe for the past 10 or 15 years doesn’t come from United States – if it ever did – it comes from a lack of any clear sense of what European culture and identity is ... This has triggered all sorts of self-doubt and worries, but you can’t blame United States for this.”
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Trump’s presidency will generate a new focus on these questions of identity and doubt in Europe and its capacity to be a counterweight to the US. Scepticism about Europe’s capacity to defend itself is long-standing, and the American attitude to European integration was often seen through that lens. In 1952, US secretary of state Dean Acheson wrote of the potential for “the continuance in Europe of policies designed to create a community united politically and strong economically and militarily. Such a community we could and would support as a central point in our foreign policy. However, if the European effort should fall apart, the whole basis of our supporting effort would disintegrate”.
The overarching demand now is for all to be aboard the militarist train, but this will also witness contemporary EU leaders and post-Brexit Britain revisiting the dilemmas of the early 1950s and the idea of a European Defence Community. The plan for the creation of a European army was proposed by French premier René Pleven in 1950, involving an army of 100,000 men, combining battalions from various European countries, including Germany, under a European minister for defence, with a common budget and under the supreme command of Nato. British scepticism – “something we know in our bones we cannot do” according to British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin – was matched by French opposition to German rearmament, and Nato instead remained the safety blanket.
Now, a crumbling Nato, authoritarian US, expansionist Russia and hollow UN creates much fear and the rhetoric of crossroads. But what constitutes a new European leadership in these circumstances is complicated by ideological disarray, reflected among other things in resentment in France towards Macron’s presidency; a limping UK; Hungarian and Italian prime ministers with a benign view of Trump; and an indebted Germany with a rising far right and that country’s dark legacy. “Every time the end of the postwar period is announced in Germany, history overtakes us once again,” observed one of its most celebrated authors, Günter Grass, in 1999.
In 2017, German chancellor Angela Merkel stated that “the times in which we could completely depend on others are, to an extent, over. We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands”. History highlights the grave difficulty of that. In the late 1950s, French president Charles De Gaulle and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer made much of the importance of their shared mission, but it was presented as reconciliation rather than a militarist ambition.
In 2003, defending his championing of American foreign policy, British prime minister Tony Blair insisted “people who want to pull Europe and United States apart are playing the most dangerous game of international politics I know”. Now, the question of whether or not to pull away takes on a new gravity in the midst of a frightening reframing of the issue of how to deal with tyrants. Are we back to what Churchill at Yalta in 1945 hoped for – “mutually agreed percentage deals” and spheres of influence under “strong men”- or something completely new?
