EU trumped – The final countdown
Ford, G. (2024) EU trumped – The final countdown, Chartist. Available at: https://www.chartist.org.uk/eu-trumped-the-final-countdown/ (Accessed: 14 November 2024).
The perils of prediction. Vindicated, but desperate to be confounded is the ultimate paradox. Only made all the worse when that warning was ignored. Four years ago I wrote, “Biden’s victory over Trump’s nativist xenophobia, blithe racism and shiftless authoritarianism is pause – not cause – for celebration”. “All the more so with Trump threatening to emulate Grover Cleveland, the only President (1885-89, 1893-97) to recapture the White House after a defeat. Trump’s mob of devotees – unless beaten by biology – give him a lock on the 2024 Republican nomination”. (Chartist, January/February 2021) The chickens have duly come home to roost.
Why did Kamala Harris lose? There will be endless excuses and explanations, but the writing was long on the wall. Trump is more the product of American politics than its driver. He was a long awaited accident waiting to happen, ushered centre-stage by US misogyny in 2016 that doubled up with racism in 2024 to make his first narrow victory comprehensive at the second time of asking. The interim was when Joe Biden and America liberalism come up for the third time before being drowned in rural and “left behind” reaction. Things will likely get worse, JD Vance in 2029 – or earlier – will consolidate an authoritarian deformed democracy minus the erratic political helter-skelter of his mentor.
The EU – and UK – badly misdirected themselves in 2020 when they denied direction of travel and lent on deep faith that it was normal service restored and not history’s speed-bump. Rather Biden was the aberration and Trump the new normal. Yet “be prepared” was not to darken the European agenda, instead unctuous assent ruled the day. As Biden looked to US interests at home and abroad, the only question – whether it was China threat or Iranian backsliding, US tariffs on EU steel and aluminium or Washington’s purposeful sabotage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – Europe had when asked to jump in line was “how high”?
Four wasted years leave only as many months – and worse. At exactly the wrong time the EU will engage with “leaderless resistance”, much practised by threatened insurgent and resistance groups, but rarely by governments. Both wheels have fallen-off the Franco-German axis. Macron self-harming with July’s National Assembly elections and their aftermath, where he proved partial to populist affront over Popular Front, while Scholz in Berlin has crashed his coalition with an inevitable early German election, maybe as soon as January and likely leaving no two parties commanding a majority leaving the minnows, marginalised and mad squabbling over the helm.
Trump 1 threatened both EU trade and security with WTO incompatible tariffs and blackmailing demands for sharp increases in defence spending to the benefit of America’s Military-Industrial Complex and pocket. Trump redux will play the same hand on steroids. To Make America Great Again US jobs are to be preserved, restored and re-shored, contained behind an all encompassing high tariff wall. If Trump is foolish enough – and few are arguing against – there will be a virtual trade embargo against Beijing and crippling tariffs against Europe. Pushed by Biden, the EU is already alienating Beijing its biggest trading partner. The EU car industry is in crisis as a consequence of the internal retreat from its climate goals led by the EU’s own resurgent right and external reaction from Beijing in response to crippling tariffs imposed by Brussels on Chinese electric vehicles. An across the board 20% tariff on EU exports to the US would turn crisis into catastrophe.
Medieval criminals were expected to pay the costs of their own torture and death. Next NATO Member States will be given a shopping list of equipment to buy – preferably from the US – to fight America’s war. Europe’s masochist tendency was at the fore last time around, but this time it’s no financial punishment beating on trade and security, but serious and prolonged self-flagellation that’s forecast. The EU – and UK – need to break the chains that bind and look to their own economic and security interests apart from absent friends. A balanced relationship with Washington and Beijing whose respected distance serves our interests not theirs. A European security framework that prioritised the Russian threat in Ukraine and the EU borderlands over the Straits of Singapore and a European Defence industry geared to supply the needs of the EU market to the maximum. If the dawning of Trump 2 is not a wakeup call the continent may well sleep for a thousand years.