Among the hallmarks of Winston Churchill’s personality that didn’t endear him to his contemporaries was his inflated sense of self. When a volume of his six-volume magisterial study of the Great War of 1914-18 was published, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin — not exactly a friend of Churchill — is said to have remarked: “I believe Winston has written a book on himself. He has called it The World Crisis.”
The story may well be apocryphal, but there is a very long record of the West viewing the world in terms of its own parochial concerns, much like what the mandarins of the Middle Kingdom were accustomed to doing some centuries ago. In an essay in the most recent issue of the American journal, Foreign Affairs, Michael Kimmage, the director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, has proffered his views on ‘The World Trump Wants’, a subject that is of overwhelming global interest. Arguing that President Donald Trump is driven by a deep “dislike of universalistic internationalism” that aligns him with the present rulers of Russia, China, India and Turkey, Kimmage held that just as Narendra Modi “is not attempting to construct ersatz Indias abroad,” “Trump is likewise uninterested in Americanization as a foreign policy agenda. His sense of American exceptionalism separates the United States from an intrinsically un-American outside world.” If true, Trump 2.0 would signal the most dramatic shift in the American mentality since 1945.
It has been suggested that what has been quaintly described as Trump’s post-literacy is almost entirely free of ideological impulses, by which it is meant that it departs entirely from the post-War consensus. After a visit to Washington D.C. that included the Friday of Trump’s spat with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the former British Conservative Party leader, William Hague, concluded that the present US administration views the conflict in Ukraine “through the domestic lens of runaway expenditure rather than the moral perspective of a free people defending their land and democracy.” Although no one has said so, Trump-haters probably believe that the US president would have viewed the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a rubble-clearing, business opportunity.
Similar charges of transactional cretinism are not likely to be levelled against Russia’s president. Kremlin-watchers seem divided between those who insist that Vladmir Putin is obsessed with a historical mission to secure the restoration of Mother Russia to its full territorial expanse and others who think that he is just a nasty piece of work. If the likes of Kimmage are to be believed, Putin — like Trump — has blundered his way into the crossroads of history: “Russia’s 2022 invasion (of Ukraine) was a geopolitical turning point akin to those the world witnessed in 1914, 1939 and 1989… Putin has renormalised the idea of large-scale war as a means of territorial conquest. He has done so in Europe, which had once epitomised the rules-based international order.”
The last sentence is the giveaway. In the past, the US under President Kennedy was more than willing to deploy its full military might against Cuba because Fidel Castro had the gumption to invite the Soviet Union to station missiles targeting the American mainland. In 1967, the planned destruction of Israel by the Arab armies misfired horribly and began a new chapter of terrorism, sectarian conflict, and victimhood. The Six-Day War redefined the politics of the Middle East and still haunts the world. But because the theatre of conflict wasn’t Europe or North America, it is accorded lesser significance than the Ukraine war. The same can also be said of the post-9/11 wars that began nominally in New York but were played out in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There was a fallout in Europe but Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das (we will manage) came to define the grittiness of European neo-Enlightenment.
In 2015, images of long lines of migrants from conflict zones being greeted by kindly Germans with hot coffee and stuffed toys suggested that Europe had indeed entered a new era of post-national bliss. The horrible conflict in the Balkans that arose from the breakup of erstwhile Yugoslavia belonged to another century. The 21st century promised a new dawn of Green living, generous welfare entitlements, and borderless travel to those lucky enough to be in the European Union.
If the narrative that is being spun across western Europe and among the disoriented coastal elites of the US is any indication, this picture postcard bliss was ruined, first by President Putin in 2022 and, subsequently, by Trump acting in tandem with the Russian autocrat. As the leaders of Europe and Canada gather at the flurry of emergency meetings to consider ways of enhancing Europe’s defence spending by either raising taxes or cutting welfare spending, the smooth autobahn ride of the EU has been disrupted by the Trump-Putin duo.
Putin’s real fault lies in his complete unwillingness to accept the post-1992 borders thrust on a weak and vulnerable Russia as the last word on the subject. He is also being vilified for not allowing the creeping encroachment of the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation into Russia’s strategic space. For the Kremlin, Ukraine isn’t merely ground that has been lost to the West, Kyiv’s potential entry into the EU and NATO would also symbolise Russia’s exclusion from Europe.
It is not that Russia was insistent on reducing Ukraine to the status of a Warsaw Pact dependency. Putin’s real fear in 2022 lay in permitting the encroachment of the EU to the borders of Russia. As Moscow saw it, the EU was merely the thin end of the wedge, and it was only a matter of time before NATO forces were on the border with Russia. This became more and more apparent when the Minsk Agreement between Kyiv and the Donbas region that should, ideally, have led to a NATO-Russia agreement on the larger issue of the post-Soviet territorial division of Europe, was wilfully sabotaged by the US and the United Kingdom.
The systematic way in which the path was cleared for a Ukraine-Russia conflict has been described in detail by the Norwegian scholar, Glenn Diesen, in his The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order, published last year. His conclusion was stark: “Russia went to war in February 2022 once it became convinced that diplomatic efforts were futile and exhausted. There was a recognition that Russia may have been walking into a trap as the US and other NATO countries had prepared for a long proxy war… [The assumption in Moscow] was that if war was unavoidable then it was important to strike first.”
The calculation in the West was that the war of attrition would be permanently bankrolled by the US to the point that Russia would be reduced to a shell. The problem is that Trump is unconvinced that Europe’s muscle-flexing should be sponsored by the US. Nor does he think that Europe’s crisis is a world crisis.
