20 July 2024

Charles Moore on the prospects of Trump in Foreign Policy

 From the Daily Telegraph:

One of Mr Trump’s clearest messages, amplified by his choice of J D Vance, is that he does not want to help Ukraine defeat Vladimir Putin’s invasion. His strategic “realism”, advanced by policy advisers such as Elbridge Colby, looks at these issues through the “lens of pragmatism” and decides that America cannot deal with the Russia and China problems at the same time. Since the US and China are “the two heavyweight boxers”, that is where all the action should be, they say.

If this were just a military division-of-labour argument, it would make some sense. Mr Trump has always been right that America cannot help defend Europe if Europe will not defend itself. But he goes much further than this.

He seems not to accept that China and Russia see very clearly the link between grabbing Taiwan and grabbing Ukraine and wish to use it to break Western, especially American, power. His faith in the capacity of “one telephone call”, made by him, to calm it all down is astonishing. Despite his pugnacious character, his role model seems to be Neville Chamberlain, not Winston Churchill.

Trumpian neo-isolationism thinks as if the Second World War had never happened. Even then – an era of much slower communications and far fewer human and commercial links than today – the Western allies recognised that it was impossible to see the war in Europe and the war in the Far East as separate entities, except in operational terms. The threat was global: victory had to be global, too.

Mr Trump’s failure to acknowledge the globalisation of war threatens not only the Ukraine he proposes to neglect but also the Taiwan he says that he wants to help. He criticises that tiny island, up against opponents about 1.5 billion strong, for not doing enough for its own defence. He also recently complained, “They did take about 100 per cent of our chip business” (semi-conductors, not fried potatoes).

Compare this transactional carelessness with China’s long-term, implacable intent, and you can predict the likely winner.

I come back to the God stuff with which I began. As a believer myself, I welcome the signs of renewed interest in Christianity among the Western young. It is an awakening against nihilism, and against Islamist fanaticism.

But – more in the United States than in Britain – it contains a strand so disgusted with the degeneracy of Western liberalism that it falls for a charlatan like Putin when he says that he is doing the Lord’s work against our godless decadence.

It was much to the credit of the Leave campaign in Britain that – except for a few Faragiste/Ukip outliers – it never fell into this pit that Putin had tried to dig for it. But the Trump team has. Its effects could disable the free world.   

and no, Biden hasn't been stellar either, but if the US thinks it is expensive keeping a global order it used to care about, intact, like it has since 1945, wait till it sees the new multipolar, multi-nuclear weapons (and other WMD) states world isolationism would bring to it.

Particularly when it is patently clear Russia is largely full of bluster and could easily be defeated if the will was there.

No comments: