Europe’s panicked response to the shift in Washington’s priorities raises a number of intriguing questions, not least why its leadership was so ill-prepared for the second coming of Donald Trump.

One of the most circulated images from his first term showed a peeved but defiant US president, arms crossed, seemingly being berated by European leaders led by Angela Merkel at a G7 summit in Canada. The body language was not dissimilar to that of Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his discomfiture in the Oval Office at the end of February.

Ukraine is by no means the only bone of contention between the Trump administration and Europe, but it is currently the biggest one. It’s easy to forget that the Biden administration leapt to Ukraine’s defence three years ago with considerably greater alacrity than much of Europe, with Germany restricting its initial offer of assistance to a shipment of helmets. The biggest exception was Britain under Boris Johnson, who became something of a mascot for the Ukrainian resistance – and has been accused of helping to thwart an early Kyiv-Moscow peace initiative.

Keir Starmer has lately stepped into Johnson’s boots, warmly receiving Zelenskyy in London after his hostile reception in Washington, promising to marginally increase Britain’s defence budget by reducing the UK’s already meagre foreign aid, and offering troops for an eventual peacekeeping mission in Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing” — a toxic term, given it was first deployed in the context of the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 — provided the US offers a “backstop”.

Other European nations offering unstinting support to Ukraine’s military effort place almost equal reliance on American backing. Hardly any leader has dared to directly challenge Trump or any of his consiglieri, despite the strongly Atlanticist incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, acknowledging the need for European independence from the US, and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, claiming that the “free world” needs a new leader.

The frequent repetition of illusory notions such as the “free world” and the “rules-based order” reflect a long-standing disconnect with reality. The carve-up of Europe by the “big three” 80 years ago last month at the Yalta summit in Crimea was indeed a travesty. It wasn’t only a case, though, of acquiescing to Josef Stalin’s insistence on Moscow-friendly regimes across Eastern Europe, given that much of the remainder of the continent was effectively transformed into an American dominion.

The generous Marshall Plan came with strings attached. Moscow’s intervention in Czechoslovakia’s 1948 elections is often cited as evidence of Soviet perfidy. The incipient CIA’s role in ensuring that very year the relegation of Italy’s Communist and Socialist parties to the opposition, notwithstanding their popularity as the leading components of the resistance against the Mussolini regime, is less commonly acknowledged. Then there was Greece in the aftermath of its “liberation”, where Nazi collaborators triumphed in the 1946-49 civil war against veterans of the socialist and communist resistance, with British and American assistance. Stalin stayed out, abiding by the Yalta rules just as he had previously done in the context of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, dismissing overwhelming evidence of Germany’s intent to invade the USSR.

Even in the grip of the Cold War, the Soviet zone of influence had its outliers – initially Yugoslavia and Albania, and later Romania. In Western Europe, Charles de Gaulle was, perhaps, the only prominent leader who was somewhat sceptical of the American embrace and its potentially dire implications. West Germany was an unequivocally devoted acolyte of the emerging American empire, and used the cover of its alliance to rehabilitate any number of Nazi cadres and collaborators.

As Europe evolved into an economic community (in order to “screw America”, Trump suspects) and subsequently hinted at political union, Eastern Europe and the USSR were not part of the picture. Until the mid-1980s, the “free” half of the continent could almost convincingly have serenaded Uncle Sam with the assurance: “everything I do, I do it for you”. Then came Mikhail Gorbachev with his package of glasnost and perestroika. Filling up the blank pages of Soviet history, and telling each of the Soviet satellites to go its own way, was a dream come true for the cold warriors.

Reconstruction was a different matter. The Western fans who had hailed Gorbachev as a Soviet messiah turned their backs on his project when he requested financial assistance. By the end of 1991, they had found a new dupe in Boris Yeltsin – who, between swigs of vodka, couldn’t say nyet to his eager sponsors in western Europe and the US. Shock therapy? Bring it on. A dysfunctional economy was pummelled into a basket case, and thrown open to the voracious appetites of Western corporations and local would-be oligarchs.

Europe and the US looked on with a smirk and, contrary to the promises made to Gorbachev, spurred an eastwards expansion of NATO. The military alliance’s intent became clearer with its intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Yeltsin’s mild protests could easily be ignored – after all, hadn’t the west intervened to ensure his re-election? His unexpected successor proved to be less compliant.

Vladimir Putin was initially viewed as a potential saviour domestically after the chaos of the Yeltsin years, and a Western ally in the post-9/11 “war on terror”. The West looked away as he used the opportunity to devastate Chechnya, while Israel’s Ariel Sharon sent his tanks into the West Bank. More than two decades later, there is a perverse logic to America’s volte-face over the Ukraine war. The discrepancy between backing the aggressor in the Middle East and coddling the victim of aggression in Europe has been resolved in favour of the guilty parties. Is there really a huge difference between blaming Hamas for inviting the genocide in Gaza and designating Kyiv as the culprit in instigating the wrath of Putin?

Western liberal commentators in the mainstream media have lately been filling their columns with lamentations about how the US has suddenly pivoted from sponsoring democracy to supporting authoritarianism. That’s arrant nonsense. Even a cursory glance at post-war history throws up a plethora of instances where Washington unequivocally favoured military dictatorships or civilian authoritarians over the votaries of democracy across the world. Even today, the repressive Gulf monarchies are among the US and Israel’s favourite Middle Eastern allies.

At a 2018 G20 summit in Buenos Aires shortly after the Saudi crown prince’s minions had asphyxiated a mildly critical journalist before chopping up his remains, Western leaders were mildly wary of being photographed with Mohammed bin Salman. Putin, all too familiar with the pleasure of murdering inconvenient journalists, greeted MBS with a high five and a knowing smile. Just four years later, the killer prince was being fist-bumped by Joe Biden, who had previously designated him as a pariah.

The usual suspects, from Thomas Friedman to Nicholas Kristof, are reluctant to recognise that Trump’s predilections are merely a continuation of American politics by other means. Their reporter colleagues frequently fail to acknowledge that while the US voted with Russia, Belarus and North Korea in rejecting a European-sponsored UN General Assembly resolution on Ukraine, Israel too was on the same side. Might that persuade Zelenskyy to reverse his pro-Zionist stance? Dream on.

Most of Europe has disgraced itself by refusing to recognise the Zionist manifestation of the Nazism it rejected in the 1940s with Soviet and American assistance. The far-right forces on the rise from France and Germany to the Russian border — and within Russia and Ukraine — are merely a consequence of Western insouciance, a repetition in some ways of all that went wrong in the aftermath of World War II and in the 1980s-90s, after the Soviet Union imploded.

Even 80 years ago, Europe ought to have had some strategy for eventually disentangling itself from America’s toxic embrace. It didn’t. The opportunities presented in 1989-91, which led to the reunification of Germany, were also squandered. It’s hardly a surprise that the economically neglected former East Germany provides the most fertile grounds for the far-right AfD – just one of many movements across Europe that look upon both Trump and Putin as potential messiahs.

The resentful centre-right forces in Europe that go by various names, but share a similar ideology, have dismally failed to confront this challenge. It could be years if not decades before the European powers come up with a formula for standing on their own feet, without American props. It may take them even longer to acknowledge that peaceful co-existence with Russia is a sine qua non for a thriving Europe. Until then, hoist with their own petard, they will keep wondering where they went wrong – ignoring yet again the plethora of missed opportunities.

If the West as a post-imperial concept has been lost in the past few weeks, that may be partial cause for celebration. Posterity might look back upon the mid-2020s as the period when the leading global hegemon discarded its kid gloves to display its claws – and all too many of its vassals, from the UK to Australia and beyond, continued to latch on to its coattails. Until they inevitably suffered the consequences of their idiocy.

https://johnmenadue.com/how-the-west-was-lost/

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

TO THE LIST OF "SUCCESSES" IN THE CARTOON WE ADD PANAMA IS AMERICAN AGAIN, GREENLAND IS BEING WHEELED IN LIKE A SWORDFISH, AUSTRALIA DROPPED ITS TROUSERS....