As they say: "Trump acts, Europe reacts." But this time, Europe didn’t have time to react. U.S. President Donald Trump not only threw Zelenskyy under Putin's bus but also provided unmistakable proof of what my favorite geopolitical analyst has been prophesying for the last two decades: the New World would have a multipolar order without U.S. hegemony. My not-so-favorite Russian analyst, Alexander Dugin, even shoots overall marks predicting that Trump might take the United States out of the United Nations.
One of my so-very-favorite analysts, professor Jeffrey Sachs, spoke at the European Parliament and forewarned: if they don’t have a foreign policy on their own, their brains to remember the legacy of French statesman and diplomat Talleyrand, the inventor of “crafty and cynical diplomacy,” British diplomatic magician Sir Webster (the author of the U.N. Charter), Germans' von Ribbentrop, von Papen, von Metternich and many others (one doesn’t have to mention Machiavelli, Bismarck, Churchill and de Gaulle to be reminded the greatness of European history).
Trump simply plays a joke on the Europeans and Russians. He personally has a grudge against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy because he was impeached for the first time in 2019 over Ukraine and Zelenskyy for improperly “interfering with the 2020 election” by pressuring Zelenskyy to probe the details of former U.S. President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s financial entanglements with the Ukrainian government.
Apparently, Zelenskyy sided with the Bidens, and Trump believed for all those years that Zelenskyy and Ukraine caused him to lose the second term. Jeffrey Blehar, a National Review staff writer, thinks Zelenskyy has “become a totem for all the forces that tormented Trump for years” until now. So, Trump, in his first opportunity, expressed his ferocious hostility toward Zelenskyy, firing off angry messages on social media and labeling Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections.” Blehar also says, “historically ‘strong’ Russians ... dominated Trump’s imagination as a youth.”
The Europeans, following Deana Carter’s example who, in her 1996 song, had said, instead of romance, “the TV and beer” wouldn’t be worth her troubles (what were they?), should ask themselves: Why have they been freezing without Russian gas and oil all those years, if the author of NATO’s “Open Door Policy,” the Good Old U.S. would, humiliatingly, undercut Europe (and Ukraine), in the name of cold-eyed realism? Professor Jeffrey Sachs has an answer for Europeans: “Because you didn’t have a real foreign policy.”
He also proposed that Europeans ask him who cut the Northern Gas Pipeline.
Well, historically speaking, it is never too late in international relations. Trump has not shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy “in four short weeks,” as the Wall Street Journal wants us to believe. Nobody could do it; not even a vengeful, mercurial, impulsive and erratic Trump, after four years of gnashing his teeth, could dare to change the direction of the U.S. foreign policy.
If “Europe felt so naked and exposed,” as the New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman observes, that is because Europe did not read the writing on the wall: The global order has overstretched U.S. interests and capabilities, and Washington is less interested now in trying to govern the global system than it once was. George Friedman, a geopolitical author on international relations, former chairperson of Stratfor, and several other geopolitical analysts, kept saying that the U.S. is still a strong, great power, but it is giving away its global hegemony.
We should not jump to the wrong conclusion, such as “American hegemony buried under Ukrainian rubble,” or assume that the decline of U.S. hegemony is the fall of the U.S. Even Trump cannot do it! But the playing field is now wide-open for the Europeans in case they are willing to try their hands as the Talleyrands and Churchills did.
Trump’s election is not the cause of the changes happening; it is the result of the changing world order. Simply put, neither corporate America nor the people have the same urgency to run global affairs. G. Friedman summarizes it as such: “The new Trump era will thus be characterized by probative economic, martial and political forays into global affairs to see what makes sense, and what doesn’t, in the new world order.”
Last week, the Munich Security Conference provided a good opportunity for European leaders to express their willingness (and readiness) to take over the portfolio of (at least) intra-European affairs. Perhaps they were not reading the writings on the wall (on the internet) that a shrinking United States means Europe should stand up to its responsibilities. They simply stood to listen to the scoldings of Vice President JD Vance.
So, for the Europeans, it is time to wake up and “stay woke.” They need to be aware of international issues, starting with a fair and just peace in Ukraine. They may start listening to professor Sachs’ speech in the European Parliament.
