Treating friends as enemies, and enemies as friends, seems a very strange way to go about your business. But that really does seem to be the defining principle of US foreign policy right now.
Canada to the north – enemy. Mexico to the south – enemy. Little Denmark, because it owns big Greenland – enemy. The European Union, with its tedious commitment to rules and laws – enemy. Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine – enemy. Really big enemy. Not just an enemy, indeed, but a dictator to boot, good for nothing but a few precious metals.
As for Vladimir Putin, to whom you and I might think the E-word could be more appropriately applied, given his quarter century in power, his immense kleptocratic wealth, his total control of all Russian institutions, his propensity for organised “suicides” of opponents, and his invasion of Zelensky’s sovereign nation… now we’re talking. Friend. Fellow peace-maker. A man whose word can be trusted. No insults heading his way, oh no, none at all. No ordering of the Musk Twitter army into cyberbattle against cuddly Vlad, not when Trudeau, Sheinbaum, Frederiksen, Scholz, Macron and Starmer can be fired upon, and the hard right AfD can be given the full-blown backing of the MAGA machine.
This is mind-bending insanity, but whereas most bouts of insanity can find some kind of institutional cure, there appear to be no institutions, for now at least, capable of dealing with this particular outbreak. We cannot, however, say we weren’t warned.
Fiona Hill, the Bishop Auckland-born foreign policy expert who served as an adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, wrote about her experience for Foreign Affairs magazine four years ago, not long after Joe Biden had settled into the Oval Office and Trump had whipped up deadly riots rather than accept he lost the 2020 election. “The US has begun to move closer to Russia,” she wrote, “as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy. This is a development that few would have foreseen 20 years ago, but one that American leaders should be doing everything in their power to halt and reverse.”
America may have halted it in 2020, but it is back with a vengeance now, and far from being reversed, is accelerating fast. Read her piece today, and it becomes all too clear why Trump is so in thrall to Putin.
It is not complicated. It’s about power; it’s about money; it’s about a shared worldview that rules are for the weak, checks and balances should not apply to the strong, the world is ours, and we should do with it what we will.
The power bit… “If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favoured strongmen,” Hill recalls, “Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers.”
And the money… “Trump took at face value rumours that Putin was the richest man in the world and told close associates that he admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing.
“He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at its disposal. This was a troubling perspective for a US president, and indeed, over the course of his time in office, Trump came to more closely resemble Putin in political practice than he resembled any of his American predecessors.”
Think Tony Soprano with a huge standing army, or Don Corleone with nukes. With friends like these…
As for Canada, I spoke last week to both Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland, one of whom will next week become leader of the Liberal Party, and the new prime minister. Given that Carney is godfather to Freeland’s teenage daughter, anyone who wanted a leadership election bunfight has been disappointed.
In any event, Donald Trump’s existential threat that Canada should become the USA’s 51st state has given them a bigger and better target than each other. Neither held back.
Canadians booing the US national anthem ahead of US-Canada ice-hockey matches – both fine with it. Canadian players throwing their gloves to the ice and heading straight into brutal fist fights with their American opponents… what’s not to like?
We will be running both interviews back-to-back in a very long The Rest Is Politics episode next week. Both, with their different professional backgrounds and different styles, are hugely impressive.
They still face a big fight to overhaul the poll lead that Canada’s right wing populist Pierre Poilievre has had for some time. But whichever one the Liberals pick to take on Poilievre, he would be wise not to underestimate them when the general election comes. And Trump would be wise not to underestimate them either.
He already seems to have underestimated their country, if the sold Teslas, the cancelled US holidays and the 3-2 Canadian win in the ice hockey 4 Nations Face-Off are anything to go by.
My partner Fiona and I have been in Germany, where TV viewers had more than their share of TV debates and election specials ahead of the vote on Sunday. Fiona doesn’t speak German, but tolerated me watching more than my fair share in our hotel room.
Despite the language barrier, she ended up with a judgement not far from my own, as Friedrich Merz, Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck of the Greens, and finally the AfD’s Alice Weidel faced questions from the public.
Merz: confident, strong, quite reassuring, she said; Scholz: very calm, but he seems defensive, not enjoying it; Habeck: nice enough guy, but knows it’s not going to plan; Weidel: something very unpleasant about her, not authentic, really wouldn’t trust her. And that was before she learned that Weidel doesn’t even live in Germany, but Switzerland.
Back in London I went to the German Embassy on Sunday night, to be there as the results came in, and get the feel of UK-based Germans. What turned out to be a pretty accurate exit poll flashed up on the TV at 5pm London time… to gasps around the room.
Why? Because the SPD score of 16% having been announced then came the CDU, widely expected to be in the 30% bracket. So when the graphic stopped at 22.5%, hands went to mouths as the possibility of an AfD win became all too real. Then suddenly, on top of the 22.5% came an extra 6.5%, the votes given to the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU. So by the time the AfD’s 19.5% was announced (slightly lower than their actual vote), it came almost as a relief.
A quaint tradition of German elections is that even before all the final results are announced, the party leaders take part in a round table live on TV. That was where soon-to-be chancellor Friedrich Merz made his remarkable statement that Europe needed to become independent of the US, that Donald Trump was indifferent to Europe’s fate and that the interference by JD Vance and Elon Musk was on a par with Vladimir Putin’s.
Incredible, and all the more so given that Merz was once the head of the Atlantik-Brücke, dedicated to good US-German relations. Brücke means bridge. Trump has blown it up.
