America the Horrible
Our response? Incredulity. Disgust. Anger. Determination.
History of the Present (week ending 9 March 2025)
Four stages of grief for a lifelong America-lover and Euro-Atlanticist: incredulity, disgust, anger, determination.
Incredulity. Yes, we knew it would be bad. We had been warned. But I still find it hard to believe how weak the checks and balances, both constitutional and habitual, of what was once the world’s greatest democracy are so far proving to be.
How can once self-respecting Republicans leap to their feet again and again, to applaud a Fidel Castro-length speech to Congress full of outrageous whopping lies and Mussoliniesque bombast?
How can the once great Washington Post roll over like a sick poodle when its oligarch owner, Jeff Bezos, dictates a Trumpian editorial line of promoting freedom for plutocrats? (Its journalists are apparently to be ‘All The President’s Men’ in a different sense now.)
How can Congress, which is meant to have the power of the purse and sole right to create government agencies, allow a so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to rampage across the whole of the administrative state?
So is Washington already Budapest on the Potomac? Already halfway to what political scientists call ‘competitive authoritarianism’, as seen in countries like Hungary? I wouldn't have believed it possible. And if I'm honest, I still hope against hope to wake up tomorrow and find that the United States has after all, or rather once again, ‘a government of laws, not of men’.
And this is before we even get to the betrayal of Ukraine and breaking a 76-year-old compact with Europe.
Disgust. For me, the greatest puzzle of American politics over the last few years has not been why decent American men and women can vote for the populist policies espoused by Trump. That's happening everywhere, and it can be understood. The aquifers of anger at what has been done to so many people in the name of liberalism (aka neoliberalism) are still overflowing. But how could decent men and women – women, especially – vote for and still support such a bullying, mendacious, misogynistic, narcissistic human being? That I find much harder to understand.
In the last few weeks, however, Trump’s behaviour has been so disgusting that a plane load of sick bags would not suffice.
Anger. You can say what you like about us Brits. We can take it. We will respond, as we always do, with humour (see this wonderful Marsh Family video). The EU and Canada, too, can stand up for themselves.
But for the President of the United States to bully a people fighting for their independence, their freedom, their very life; to call Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and say Ukraine started the war; to cut off all military support, intelligence and satellite feeds, thus certainly causing more brave Ukrainians at the front line to die; and then, when Vladimir Putin takes the opportunity to escalate his nightly aerial bombardment of men, women and children in Ukrainian towns and cities, to say the Russian president is only doing ‘what anybody else would do’ … the only just response to all that is anger.
I feel that anger spreading across what we once used to call the free world. From Canada to Europe to Japan to Australia – from sea to shining sea.
And enough of ‘sanewashing’, please. Enough of pretending, or kidding ourselves, that behind Trump’s chaotic, ludicrously self-praising, Putin-hugging bullshit there is some brilliant Kissingerian masterplan for bringing peace to Ukraine and the Middle East. What you see is what you get. Trump First. America second. (Russia a close third.)
Determination. The bigger the crisis, the bigger the opportunity. We Europeans should long ago have done much more to look after ourselves. (Rereading Robert Kagan’s 2003 book Paradise and Power, in advance of a lecture he'll be giving at Oxford in early May, I'm reminded that he quotes me, among others, saying exactly that more than 20 years ago.)
Now it's on us. Starting with Ukraine, we Europeans must defend our own democracies and freedoms.
I hope and pray that you, my dear American friends, will defend yours. How much I would love to be able to join you again in singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ with those great lines that capture the essence of true liberalism:
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
But for now, all we see is America the Horrible.
I'll be writing more about the European response to the Trumpian challenge next time. I discussed it this week with Norbert Röttgen, an outstanding foreign policy voice of Germany’s soon-to-be-governing Christian Democrats, in a short, pithy conversation with Nick Robinson on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme (from about 2.16), and at greater length with María Ramírez of El Diario (practice your Spanish).
Has the US become an ‘adversary’ of Europe?
You might also be interested in these responses to a questionnaire from the leading French geopolitical review Le Grand Continent. The written answers are in French, with the distribution given in the graphic below. I answered 3/5 on the first question and 5/5 on the second. What would you say?
Thank you, Timothy, for expressing the feelings of what I guess is now the "other" US. As a member of Pussy Riot said during the first Trump administration, now we Americans have to learn what the Soviet system was like in so many ways. Actually, the enabling conditions for these shocking developments have been a long time coming, but it's still almost impossible to orient oneself. Terrible grief, especially for our relations with so many countries and peoples--and the betrayal of Ukraine is unbearable. Already difficult to get through each day--how do we say "sorry" to everyone who is being betrayed?
I am amazed that this has happened so quickly. Even Hitler and Stalin took years to reveal their true totalitarianism. Trump must be Putin’s poodle. However, we are in no position to respond quickly enough to influence events so, like Ukraine, we will have to take the time available to do what we can. What absolute despicable behaviour to remove the intelligence from Ukraine that enabled them to defend themselves. In 1938 when Chamberlain signed off the borders of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he returned home and doubled aircraft production in one year. In 2025 there is no such opportunity except to increase production of what arms and munitions we could use if able to put boots on the ground. No spy satellites are possible, nor RN Ships to blockade the harbours of Russia and prevent the export of oil. That warm blanket, NATO, under which we sheltered for nearly 80 years is taken away with two months. It is difficult to imagine how Western Europe is going to respond to the obvious threat.