“The first victim of Donald Trump’s second term as US president is likely to be Ukraine. The only people who can avert that disaster are us Europeans, yet our continent is in disarray”, is the bitter verdict of Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. “Unless Europe can somehow rise to the challenge, not just Ukraine but the whole continent will be left weak, divided and angry as we enter a new and dangerous period of European history.”
As a fervent supporter of Ukraine’s struggle for independence, “TGA” reports that inside Ukraine “people have been trying to find a silver lining in that orange cloud rapidly approaching Washington”. Indeed, he even estimates that “there’s a five to 10% chance that the ‘surprise-man’ 47th US president will threaten to increase support for Ukraine in order to strong-arm Vladimir Putin into a peace deal”, as demanded by some of his more prominent pro-Ukraine supporters. But caution is advisable:
“[E]ven in the ‘peace through strength’ scenarios envisaged by Trump’s few Ukrainian hawks, Europe would have to do much more. […] Intellectually, many Europeans recognise that, sandwiched between an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America, Europe needs to do more for its own defence.”
The problem, as ever, is the political and economic predicament of Europe, “deeply divided in its response to Trump”.
In the British magazine Prospect, Italian political scientist Nathalie Tocci looks at the – rare – areas where Donald Trump’s return to the White House could be a “blessing in disguise” for Europe. The first is trade, where Europe is equipped to resist any new American protectionism, even if “the EU is now more dependent on the United States when it comes to defence and energy, both of which could be weaponized against us”.
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Tocci, who heads the Italian Institute of International Affairs, also points to the military question:
“For months there has been talk of a significant increase in European defence spending, possibly through a multi-billion-euro defence fund financed by the issue of a common debt. A constellation of European countries is already ready to move in this direction, spanning from northern and eastern [EU] members that feel particularly threatened by Russia, to western and southern ones.”
But “that’s where the glimmer of hope ends”, she warns. “Trump 2.0 represents a far greater challenge for Europe than his first incarnation. [If Trump] is determined to wage economic war, abandon Ukraine, disengage from the continent’s security and play divide and rule in Europe, he is far better equipped to do so today than he was during his first term.”
Andrés Ortega, an editorialist at elDiario.es, agrees that “Trump’s resounding victory could, and should, be an opportunity for Europe – the EU – to respond with more economic dynamism and […] strategic autonomy”. But he concurs that this scenario looks unlikely due to Europe’s divisions. Indeed, while noting that the EU Commission is bracing to respond to Trumpian protectionism, Ortega’s outlook is gloomy:
“Trump is not so much a unilateralist as a transactionalist, meaning that he will seek to conclude agreements from which the United States will benefit. This includes [selling] American weapons […]. Europe plans to pursue its own military-industrial policy, but it is still a long way from doing so, and Trump will do his best to prevent it. This is not news. He will also […] fight the regulatory power of Brussels. We can expect the development of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, to be much more freewheeling […] with less human control, and responding to greater commercial pressures. And, yes, compared to Europe, with greater innovation.”
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In Deník Referendum, Jakub Patočka writes that “[i]t may well be that the causes that are now bringing Trump to power for a second time will manifest themselves in a more devastating way in the long run”. For the editor of the independent Czech outlet, Trump’s victory heralds dark times ahead.
“[It] exposes the depth of the [West’s] crisis of civilization. Western liberal politics, from Germany’s Greens to France’s Macronists, from America’s Democrats or Spain’s Socialists to Britain’s Conservatives, is built on the tenet that our current democratic institutions, with their strategic priorities determined by globalised capitalism, are still competent. [And yet] such a notion appears ever more clearly to be an illusion. The fundamental trends show that industrial civilisation is rapidly heading towards a catastrophic end. The patriarchal club of ageing bullies and political thugs – Putin, Netanyahu, Orbán, Fico, Babiš, Milei, Modi, [Mohammed] bin Salman, Xi Jinping – they’re all rejoicing. They know that the nature of the US government will now approximate the regimes that they are trying to build in their own countries. Trump is one of them.”
For Alain Frachon, a columnist for France’s Le Monde, Donald Trump’s victory “isolates the Europeans”:
“It places them before a historic responsibility: to be able to defend themselves, alone, from Russian expansionism. A strategic upheaval is underway. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it has been accelerated by the American election. General de Gaulle’s prophecy is coming true: one day, the United States will leave the Old Continent. [Europe] must come of age, unless it is to give in on what it holds dear – inviolability of borders, non-use of force, support for fledgling liberal democracies. An America is leaving, a strategic Europe must be born. If the European Union fails to heed this call, it will face a world dominated by power blocs that follow only one rule in relations between states: the balance of power.”
The former-new American president, writes Frachon, “underestimates, or fails to understand, Putin’s real war aims: […] to have a government under his thumb in Kyiv and to use any means necessary to destabilise Ukraine as well as Georgia and Moldova […]. In Tbilisi as in Chisinau, people are rightly wondering: can the EU be counted on to stand up to Putin’s Russia?”
As for Germany’s Die Zeit, Nele Pollatschek’s leading article (published when Donald Trump’s victory became almost certain) speaks for itself.
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This round-up would not be complete without a mention of the situation in Georgia. The opposition there is contesting the result of the 26 October parliamentary election in the courts, pointing to widespread fraud. The election’s official winner was the populist-conservative Georgian Dream party, which has been in power since 2012. Georgia’s opposition continues to demonstrate every day in Tbilisi.
From the Georgian capital, the researcher Hans Gutbrod has produced a detailed report that, he claims, shows how this election concealed “a meticulously orchestrated assault on the country’s democracy”. Civil.ge has published a summary. For Gutbrod, a professor at Ilia Public University, “to achieve the result announced by the Central Electoral Commission, Georgian Dream’s strategy relied on a multi-pronged approach, exploiting a range of tactics to manipulate the outcome. Unprecedented levels of vote buying […] were coupled with widespread intimidation of voters, opposition party representatives and observers”, particularly in the provinces. In addition, the secrecy of the ballot box was violated through the use of semi-transparent ballot papers that did not guarantee confidentiality, and the practice of multiple voting was widespread. In short, he says, “there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the official results of the parliamentary elections do not reflect the will of the Georgian people”.
From the columns of The Guardian, the Georgian journalist Natalia Antelava, cofounder of the outlet Coda Story, observes for her part that the claimed victory of Georgia’s pro-Russian government is part of a global slide for liberal democracy:
“The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians, but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology and selective violence has eaten away at the foundations of all societies. The losers are not just the Georgian opposition and its supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom. The real winners are not Georgian politicians, or even the oligarch [Bidzina Ivanishvili] who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above common values. In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, which has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy. The Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention.”
In partnership with Display Europe, cofunded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
