This piece is for paying subscribers, and so I need to say that, if you sign up for an annual subscription, you receive access to all articles, archives, and debates at a cost of £1.15 ($1.40) a week.
This piece is for paying subscribers, and so I need to say that, if you sign up for an annual subscription, you receive access to all articles, archives, and debates at a cost of £1.15 ($1.40) a week.
While I am on my summer travels, I am updating pieces that have a fresh relevance today.
Here’s how it went this morning for people in my home of the UK, and across Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Gulf and the rest of the planet look to our old friend and ally, the United States of America.
Surely you remember it?
“The leader of the free world.”
“The arsenal of democracy.”
Whatever happened to all of that?
Well, so far this week Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. would “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, saying in effect that deterring an attack from communist North Korea was no longer a priority.
He did not want to antagonise North Korea’s tyrant Kim Jong Un, who presides over one of the worst regimes in the world. Military exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile,” Trump said.
He so preferred totalitarian North Korea to democratic South Korea that Trump called Kim his “good friend”.
Then it was Oman’s turn to become the latest US ally menaced by its own protector. After threatening to invade Greenland, annex Canada, and support far-right parties across Europe, Trump said he would “bomb the shit” out of Oman if it got in the way of attempts to end his disastrous war with Iran.
It’s like watching the fall of the Soviet Union all over again. A superpower is destroying itself, not because its enemies are forcing destruction upon it, but because its leaders have decided to unravel their own country.
When Andy Burnham became prime minister and made Ed Miliband his foreign secretary, Conservatives and the military establishment told them that they must retain Trump’s friendship.
But as countries from South Korea to Canada are finding, that is an impossible task.
Trump prefers dictators to democrats because his real enemy is liberal democracy.
Its rules and judges threaten his ability to enrich himself, while its protection of minorities infuriates the radical right.
I have been saying from the moment he returned to power that it is pointless imagining that he will defend “the West” by standing up to China, Russia or any other dictatorship.
They aren’t the enemy.
You are.
(February 2025)
Americans looking with some desperation for a reputable rationale behind the betrayal of Ukraine have reached for the comfort of realpolitik.
America’s superpower rival is China, they say. Geopolitical reality dictates that Europe must fend for itself while the US turns to face east.
MAGA loyalists repeat the party line – one would expect no less. But intelligent American writers, who are by no means members of the Trump personality cult, still want to believe that the US radical right is upholding a broader American national interest that transcends the vicious idiocies of its culture war.
Writing in The Atlantic, a journal that I think it is fair to say detests every atom of Trump’s being, Eliot A. Cohen took seriously the administration’s claim that it was focusing on securing its own borders and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”.
Noah Smith, another journalist who is worth reading, added, “America does not have the resources to defend both Europe and Asia at the same time anymore”. Europe has vastly superior resources to Russia, and must learn to defend its own frontiers.
However reasonable these explanations sound, they fail miserably to capture the danger we face.
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