Business, As Usual
Appeasement is the wrong word, indeed the wrong concept. This is something else, something more. Unless that is, that Chamberlain et al essentially felt that Hitler was right, that Versailles had been a dreadful mistake perpetrated by other, meaner men, and that Germany was due restitution.
Different US administrations may have had different foreign policy strategies and aims, but there has always been some continuity. Efforts may have been ramped up or scaled back or refocused or quietly abandoned, but they were presented as shifts rather than rejections. Trump, with his characteristic, abrasive conviction of the bar room blowhard that the world is run by fools and crooks, is having none of that. What he is proposing is a complete reversion to the status quo ante.
His suspicion that NATO enlargement just added more European countries sucking at the US military teat while paying no tribute in return aligns well with Putin’s claim that his invasion of Ukraine was a necessary response to the provocation of Western expansionism. The word ‘algins’ is important here. While not unique to Trump, opportunism is a prominent part of his behaviour — and again, ‘behaviour’ not ‘thinking’. It’s not necessary for him to agree with you, or approve, or have some common ideology; it is enough that your intentions complement his own.
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So, NATO needs to contract, sanctions lifted, trade resumed, Putin welcomed back into the G7. And Ukraine abandoned while America is “made whole”. It’s all been a terrible mistake, and best we just put it behind us and never mention it again. Let’s get back to business. Of course, if Putin feels the need to extend his influence in other former Soviet states, that is his prerogative; the primacy of proximity over ideology. All of this depends on, well I wouldn’t call it an assumption exactly as that implies some kind of thought process, and I don’t intend that as an insult, just an attempt to understand. Anyway, it just depends on Putin not being the megalomaniac bent on continental domination that the Hitler comparisons invoke, that he will be happy left in charge of what he deems his domain. We will see.
It is easy to cast this as a paradigm shift, but if so, it’s the European paradigm of the second half of the twentieth century which is the anomaly. In many ways it has been a pleasantly strange epoch. A time when politics moved away from territorial expansion, or defence against it, to focus on economic prosperity, while even ceding power and sovereignty to supranational organisations. This produced a different kind of politician, as administrators and technocrats tackled education policy and hospital waiting lists.
We are now on the verge of a return to the mean. This kind of politics has more in common with business, based as it is on growth, where populations, like employees, are seen as things to be quelled in the pursuit of expansion, be it by conquest or takeover. The talk is of the security architecture — an Orwellian coinage for something designed to serve the strong rather than protect the weak. Egalitarian notions of alliances are out, and smaller countries will once more be expected to pledge fealty to a liege lord. Trump may have the aversion to bloodshed of a draft dodger, but he is more than happy to join the fray by weaponising economic power.
If we can see past our conventional expectations, perhaps this is not so strange. There is, after all, little glory in spreadsheets and statistics, and domestic issues are becoming ever more intractable. Who can resist the temptation of a world stage on which to strut? However, it does represent a crumbling of many assumptions, assumptions that we took for settled facts and which have been revealed as merely contingent. There are other ways of doing things, we may not like them, but they exist.
It is an unpleasant mental process to have one’s certainties challenged and even dismantled, but it doesn’t necessarily have significance beyond that adjustment. Likewise, there is wounded pride from being outmaneuvered but the damage is only to your amour-propre. This is not to suggest that current developments aren’t troubling, but discounting the personal affront will enable our leaders to better counter the genuine threats. Europe will not rise to the occasion by grasping the smelling salts. Base urges are in play which may now seem alien to us (though more likely we only channel them in more sophisticated ways), but they have never really gone away, and are potent and in the ascendent.
