As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost.
“The question of how this war is going to end is actually an existential question for Europe,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of this month’s Munich Security Conference. “It will determine – in more ways than one – the future of this continent.” But the war is proving definitive, too, for Trump and his blinkered, bigoted Maga ideologues. Glossing over Russian depredations (and the illegal Venezuela coup), Rubio chose in Munich to target globalisation, “climate cults” and multiculturalism. The US secretary of state urged a return to ultranationalism, protectionism, closed borders and Christian culture. “Yesterday is over,” he declared.
Little Marco (as Trump calls him) is confused. Trumpism is all about recreating yesterday, about fantasies of “the good old days”. Putin suffers similar delusions. The war is part of his revanchist project to make Russia great again, to rebuild the Soviet sphere. Likewise, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is attempting his own great leap backwards, by accumulating dictatorial powers to an extent unseen since Mao Zedong.
The open-minded, freedom-loving rainbow Europe of democracy and the rule of law is a living rebuke to these lumbering Frankenstein’s retro-monsters and their hard-right emulators. They revile and fear it. Like Ukraine, it stands in their way.
The US betrayal of Ukraine, foreshadowing its broader treachery, did not start with Trump. Bill Clinton’s post-independence 1994 security assurances for Kyiv proved meaningless. Barack Obama blinked when Putin seized Crimea in 2014. Joe Biden, haunted by cold war ghosts, reacted with fatal overcaution to the 2022 invasion.
What’s changed is that Trump’s betrayals are deliberate, and are happening now. Each dawn brings another day of infamy. Last year, Ukraine’s civilian casualties hit their highest annual level since the war began as Putin expanded a war that Trump pledged to end in 24 hours. Direct US weapons supplies have been cut to almost zero. Trump’s risible “peace process”, overseen by a business crony and his simpering son-in-law, indulges Putin’s maximalist demands while excluding Europe.