Switch the White House newsletter on free of charge
Your guide to what Trump’s second term for Washington, business and world means
The author is an FT -contributor editor, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies and Fellow at IWM Vienna
A century ago Mao Zedong asked Spitz: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.” Kevin Roberts, President of the Trump-oriented Heritage Foundation, argues today, a revolutionary of another ideological strip, argues today “We are in the second American revolution”. It is a upheaval that inspired a outbreak of political cross-dressing under cosmopolitan liberal and right-wing extremist nationalists on the old continent. Trump’s second coming has changed the understanding of America who should count in Europe as friends – and enemies. Top US politicians now consume European right-wing extremist leaders mutually, while they treat the supporters of the liberal democracy of the continent as enemies. In response to this, many Europeans consider America as a threat.
As the youngest European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) Opinion poll Unless the majority of Europeans believe that Trump is bad for America, for their own country and for world peace, most supporters of the far European rights of Trump’s revolution have fully registered. They claim that the US political system does its job while Europe is broken.
The relationship between right -wing exual parties and Trump can be similar to Western European Communist parties and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, whereby the extreme right is obliged to defend and imitate it. Enchanting of what is happening in the United States, European Trumpists dream of mass shifts from migrants, but they are mostly steamed when it comes to Trump’s trade war against Europe.
But what exactly can the right to achieve in Europe, Trump, and what do European liberals win from him? The Union between European nationalists and Trump’s Maga movement is hardly a marriage in heaven. While leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary seem to be enthusiastic about having the USA on its side, their respective nationalisms have little in common. In the offices of right -wing extremists on the old continent you can find antiquated cards and show their nations with the extensive limits of a past era; In Trump’s office you can find Airbrush family photos. European nationalists are devoted to history with a capital H; The US President is dedicated to Trump with a capital T.
Trump’s nationalism is nationalism without history. If he refers to his predecessors, he has to express that he is better than her. When he talks about making Gaza a five-star resort, he speaks like a real estate mogul for which nations are only tenants in their country. For the blood-old nationalists of Europe, God gave the white Europeans and their descendants every piece of the territory of the continent. Traditionally, the parties of European distant law have introduced themselves as defenders of national sovereignty and the national tradition against the citizens of nowhere in Brussels. Nowadays, they will be reorganized as part of a transnational revolutionary movement and are committed to the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity and the civilizational conflicts, which wins voices in America, but will not necessarily fly in Europe.
European liberals have also redesigned themselves. They are now trying not to fill themselves as a globalist in Davos style, but as a defender of national interest in the US interference. Mark Carney’s victory in Canada, who drives a wave of patriotic pike, has inspired the EU leaders to undergo an identity crisis, to believe that it is the best way to resist Trump to be re-elected. But it won’t work everywhere. Only when Trump plays the irritant map like in Canada can liberal leaders rely on mass mobilization. Today, Danes are now due to Trump’s fantastic threat of groaning Greenland, the anti-trumps become Europeans, but the Carney effect is not available elsewhere in the EU. Trump may be a double partner, but most Europeans are willing to live with him because they are skeptical about the EU’s skills to defend themselves. Like a couple who have been married for decades, you cannot imagine living alone.
The “Trump effect” on the EU policy is as unpredictable as Trump himself. After Brexit, the distance from the European Foreice to the right of the “Nationalism of Brexiters Back Control” was delighted. Many Euroceptics called for referenders to leave the EU. But the Brexit soon became liability and the paracting of the British was no longer fashionable. Anyone who wins and who loses the “second American revolution” depends not only on Trump’s failure and successes at home, but also on the ability of the European leader to use the Trumpian moment to create new political identities for themselves.
