Childbirth can often be painful, a breach-delivery especially, and what the world is witnessing now is the agonising birth of an entirely reconfigured US foreign policy. Since this is completely new, and the obstetricians are equally inexperienced, mistakes will inevitably be made, while the poor world will suffer something close to torture. But that is the price we must pay for Europe’s refusal, over decades, to guard its own borders and mind its own seas. Though that price might now appear to be heavy, it is nothing compared to the price of Europe being encompassed by an existential disaster. That latter outcome would be inevitable if the EU continues to preach meaningless and unprincipled pieties in the European Parliament and at the UN in New York, while its lawyers talked sanctimonious mumbo jumbo in the various “rights” courts of Strasbourg and the Hague.
No sensible, decent person can have watched the US in the UN voting with Russia on the Ukrainian issue with anything less than horror. But then that’s what breach births look like, ruptured flesh and torn orifices. Trump likes spectacles: bulls in china shops, apple-carts, et cetera. Was it necessary? Probably not. Abstentions might have worked – but would they have woken the world to the birth of a dramatic new entity, a foreign policy that is solely based on the interests of the US? Perhaps a scathingly-worded statement from US deputy representative to the UN, the impressively down-to-earth Dorothy Camille Shea, might have done the trick. She certainly got to the heart of the matter when she declared that all those previous UN resolutions on Ukraine “have failed to stop the war,” adding that the US policy statement “looks forward, not backward, focused on one simple idea of ending the war.”
Quite right, too. The UN should not be a students’ debating society, though that of course is precisely what it has become over the decades. Moreover, Trump doesn’t go in for half-measures, and he loves distressing the Wishy-Washy Wombles of Washington, the well-meaning, hand-wringing feelers for whom emotions are everything whereas facts remain wholly negotiable. Anyway, how could the US possibly have voted for a resolution that called for the impossible, namely the return of captured Ukrainian territory? This was childish. The Russians have lost maybe 200,000 men fighting for Donbas and Donetsk, and for the US to demand the return of those territories to Ukraine would be as useful as Russia calling for the US to return the Alamo to Mexico.
Naïve observers say that Trump is pro-Putin. He is not. But when he throws his weight against the Atlantic alliance that has so comforted Europe for decades, it appears that he is backing Putin. Too many pampered Europeans are seemingly incapable of understanding the many policies that become available to the US once it is free of the corrupting and damnable dependency-expectations of European countries. Just because the US is leaning away from Europe does not mean it is leaning closer to Russia. The options available are not binary but both manifold and multidirectional. To be sure, emotionally, the US will always favour the countries that supplied it with most of its population, but its policies are a different matter.
For the US is a Pacific continent also, and on the far side of that ocean lies thousands of miles of Russian coastline. Russia is as much a Pacific country as the USA is an Atlantic one. Moreover, Russia and the USA are separated merely by the 50 miles/80 kilometres between the Seward and Chukotka peninsulas. The closest points between the USA and mainland Europe are between Boston and Porto in Portugal, or roughly 3000 miles/5000 kilometres. Go latitudinally eastward from most of the USA’s Atlantic coast and you end up in Africa. The closeness of the US and Europe is primarily mythic and emotional. Geography tells another story. So too do Trump and Putin.
The latter is a truly detestable creature. So were Lenin and Stalin, and the various creatures who ruled “Russia” up until Gorbachev were veterans of the KGB or implementers of various murderous purges. To rule Russia is usually to immerse one’s hands in buckets of other people’s puckering blood. Even to do business with Russia is to take lethal risks. Did not Merkel do a near-fatal energy deal with Russia, from the consequences of which Germany was rescued by the USA? Why is she to be exonerated and Trump blamed for dealing with what both perceived to be “reality”? And why is Russia to be singled out for its (admittedly irrefutable) barbarisms? Saudi Arabia executed 170 people in 2023, Iran 853 and China (probably) around 8,000. Have you absolutely nothing that is Chinese-made in your home or car? I very much doubt it. Are states to be more principled than individuals? They are? And what bus did you just arrive on?
Morality might govern our decisions and our purchasing, but surely in terms of preference rather than outright exclusions. Do we do any favours to the unfortunate people of North Korea by boycotting its exports and causing famine? Is a policy that starves children really a moral way of ending a regime? And anyway, does it work? The EU’s embargo on trade with Russia simply resulted in making Putinland self-sufficient in many previously-unexplored commercial areas as well as opening brand-new trade routes to India, China and North Korea. Why, the latter even sent an infantry brigade into Ukraine – so that all went well, didn’t it?
For apex alpha males, all personal decision are political, and all political decisions are personal, while Putin and Trump each see in the other a distorted reflection of himself. It is perhaps one of the great tragedies of world history that Hitler never eyeballed Stalin, Roosevelt or Churchill face-to-face before things got really nasty. Would the outcome have been different if they had got the chance to smell the raw male pheromones of homicide from one another? We shall never know. But Trump and Putin did meet, and as apex primates, they got on famously. Scruples are seldom an impediment when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth, and we cannot assess the long-term consequences of such meetings merely from the returns of their early encounters.
However, we all know that the unipolar era that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union is over. American taxpayers will no longer agree to subsidise US oceanic fleets around the world, as Europeans grow sleek and torpid from grooming their bottomless welfare states. Moreover, it is the Western powers generally, and not just the primary culprits, that are now the object of epochal contempt by China. The Sacking of the Imperial Summer Palace on Peking in 1860 by British and French troops, the destruction of its pleasure domes and the looting of their contents were not just cultural crimes against the Chinese people but, unquestionably, the greatest cultural crime in world history. Nothing compares with it in either scale or the dazzling quality of the art that was looted or burnt. Many thousands of incredibly beautiful artefacts were stolen by pillaging troops and taken back home to the UK and France. This was like the simultaneous destruction of the Louvre, the Uffizi, the British Museum, Notre Dame, St Peter’s and St Paul’s, but only more so. Seeking revenge on the West for that barbaric orgy is a primary reason why, 165 years later, an increasingly nationalistic (and culturally post-communist) China is shaping itself into a world power.
“Recovering” Taiwan (though it was never properly Chinese) is just the first step. China is psychologically on a historic mission to avenge the 19th century; Taiwan is merely the casus belli. Of course, only misery can result from such time-travelling war-mongering, because the result can never be a return of the stolen treasury, but instead The Sacking of the Imperial Summer Palace Mark II, this time worldwide. Deterrence and diplomacy are the necessary weapons to prevent such a catastrophe, but they are nothing without the apex of this isosceles, armed might, which is where the story gets truly melancholy.
The USA might possibly be prepared to take the brunt of Chinese revanchism, but not all of it, whereas Europe’s ability to project power in the region is represented by the tragi-comedy of the two British aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and the ominously-named HMS Prince of Wales, and France’s comparably preposterous Charles de Gaulle. It is impossible to write about these maritime absurdities without a profound sense of embarrassed amusement, along with an equally profound wish that they are not drawn into conflict with the Chinese defence-satellites. If they are, a rerun of the calamity near the Straits of Malacca and the loss of HMS Repulse and, yes, HMS The Prince of Wales of December 1941 is not just possible, but probable, and God help us, at a certain point, even unavoidable.
So there is a lot to play for in this bizarre diplomatic game between Trump and Putin. The Russian’s ever-questing psychopathy needs assuaging while the American’s appetite for indulging in his many deranged visions must be curbed. These two gifted, ruthlessly alpha-eccentrics seem almost to have been made for one another, a sabre-toothed Muscovy Ying and a fanged Yankee Yang that might just prevent a terrible war, not just between themselves, but also between China and the West.
No doubt as officials from Montenegro and Serbia met In in the Dinaric Alps in July 1914 to discuss the weirdly extravagant ultimatum that had just arrived from Vienna, the likelihood of a world war was about as far from their minds as the possibility of their hosting a mountaintop yachting regatta. But back then, nobody could even engage with the concept of a “world war”, whereas twenty-five years later, everybody could, yet were still unable to prevent it. Eighty years after the last war ended, there are now no Hitlers, Stalins, Molotovs, Churchills, Roosevelts at the board, while permanently sitting at its head is J. Robert Oppenheimer. The result of the present imbroglio will probably not deliver us from war with a single massive deal but more probably, peace by piece. We should always worry about these things, but there’s probably no call for sleepless fretting. After all, a new world-order is being born. Just watch. Yes, there’s its head.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Trump goes into Kremlin’s rat-infested sewer and makes a deal