“Everything in moderation, including moderation”. The paradox is worthy of Oscar Wilde, even if he did not coin it. His radical ability to think outside the box is sorely needed in a Europe debating how to respond to theshocks coming from Trump’s America.
The transatlantic relationship, set within the Cold War and after it, has underwritten European politics for eight decades after the second World War. The terms to settle that conflict partitioned the Continent between the US-dominated western part, and the eastern one dominated by the Soviet Union. Associated liberal democrat and communist divisions penetrated both blocs, but overall they were insulated from one another by their respective security and intelligence regimes.
That changed profoundly after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. US and West European capitalism expanded to the east, becoming oligarchic and kleptocratic in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, which Vladimir Putin took over from 1998. The dissolution or limitation of Nato promised by various leaders did not happen.
The alliance instead expanded faster than membership of the European Union, as the US maintained strategic control of Europe after the initial unipolar period in the 1990s. European integration expanded its scope in a more globalised world through its single market and then enlarged towards continental scale.
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Yet the transatlantic relationship continued to suffuse the EU’s security, economic and political structures, even as the world became more fragmented and multipolar. It suited the US, by far the most dominant global military power, and meant European states could accommodate that dominance in their national, allied and EU settings.
Trump’s policies change most of these calculations. The great shocks attending the dramatic shifts of recent weeks should not surprise as much as they have done, since the changes could have been foreseen more clearly. The desire to restrict globalisation, assert imperial power, sideline the EU and contain China has been consistently expressed and is now much more coherently organised. This coincides with, harnesses and in ways expresses a wider dissatisfaction with liberal democracy in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
Liberals have been particularly bad at seeing this coming. They are the beneficiaries of the regime Trump challenges, have been complacent about its democratic weaknesses and in the EU took for granted the security guarantees contained in US domination of Nato. This crisis is above all a challenge to their world views and mindsets. The poor intellectual and political quality of contemporary social democracy deepens the crisis. It narrows geopolitical imaginations about Europe’s response, and how it should relate to the rest of the world.
Ukraine crystallises the issues at stake. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 is intended to restore its imperial power; that power is, however, objectively much weaker (perhaps by a ratio of 10:1) than the EU’s collective power in economic and political terms, even if militarily Russia is substantially stronger. Russia has legitimate security concerns in the face of Nato expansion, but they can be met without subjugating Ukraine.
It follows that a colossal expansion of EU military capacity is not the way to deal with the Ukraine crisis. Rather this moment of transition should be used to reconfigure security and military spending in co-ordination with green, social, productive and competitive resources, through more pooled resources, planning and investment at EU level.
This effort should be accompanied by a radical rethinking of the EU’s geopolitical position in a world with more centres of power and influence than inherited transatlantic complacencies assume or allow.
Outsiders can see this more clearly than Europeans. The Singapore diplomatic theorist Kishore Mahbubani says the EU is mistakenly “sacrificing its own strategic interests to serve American interests in the hope that geopolitical subservience would lead to rewards”.
[ The world is no longer multipolar - it is ‘multiplex’Opens in new window ]
It should instead do its own deal with Russia on security guarantees and political futures; co-operate fully with China’s investment role in Africa; and learn from southeast Asia’s ability to play both sides in the worldwide US-China competition Trump wants instead to polarise, exemplified by recent Malaysian and Vietnamese policies and expressed in Asean’s (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) regional approach.
Such thinking is badly needed in Europe as an alternative to the conventional liberal surge towards an ill-considered securitisation. It will certainly be a messy period in European politics. The cumbersome processes of European integration resist speedy change, even though historically many of them have actually been forged through crises.
From the Irish point of view, as a smaller EU member state, it will be essential to preserve political and institutional balances with larger ones in a period of rapid change.
