There are decades when weeks happen and weeks when decades happen, goes an aphorism misattributed to Vladimir Lenin.
The fortnight between J. D. Vance’s broadside against Europe at the Munich Security Conference, and Vance and Donald Trump’s vicious upbraiding of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office feels more like the latter.
Washington threatens to light a bonfire under the postwar Western alliance, and rarely has an empire begun torching the structures that sustain its power with such glee.
But Trump’s theatrics are more a symptom than cause of the problem. While a transatlantic schism yawns open, there is more continuity between him and his rivals than it first appears. Many European leaders see an opportunity to finally step out of Washington’s shadow: but for all the spending plans, their bid for great-power status seems wholly unconvincing.
Liberals are currently decrying Trump’s destruction of a Western alliance that stood for freedom and democracy.
It’s tempting to sneer. The US-led postwar order has meant a reign of terror; from Latin American coups to the Indonesian genocide, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and through economic immiseration imposed on noncompliant countries via structural adjustment.
But the United States’ strategy, based on a moral claim to universal values, a military claim to apocalyptic power, and an economic claim to the capacity and will to underwrite global capitalism, required persuasion, too, not only force.
Washington traded on its ability to offer security for…
Auteur: Nathan Akehurst
