Europe must kidnap Trump’s revolutionary plans for the world

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The writer is a FT editor, head of liberal strategies, Sofia, and his colleague at IWM Vienna

When listening to the speech of US Vice President JD Vance in Munich and looking at the results of subsequent parliamentary elections in Germany, I was reminded of East Berlin in 1989 and the collapse of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. During the last weeks of the Soviet Empire in Europe, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet reformist leader, told his east German comrades that they risk being on the wrong side of history and “danger is waiting for those who do not interact with the real world.” Vans gave a similar speech, and told the Europeans that they were on the wrong side of President Donald Trump. But this message did not have the expected influence.

It turned out that the extreme left Linke party in Germany, not the far -right alternative to Germany, was the main beneficiary of social media sites at Elon Musk and Vans Warning. The other unexpected result was that Friedrich Mirz, the next adviser to Germany, has turned overnight from the old Atlantic Ocean to a European boiling world. Immediately after the vote, Mirz announced his willingness to fight for the independence of Europe from the United States.

Trump’s revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months after the mandate of the new White House administration, the European political scene has turned into a clash between the revolutionaries who stand Trump and the liberal homeland who are leading Trump. Now, the most right to justify Trump’s expected tariff on Europe, threatened this week by 25 percent, and to ask Europeans to follow Washington’s leadership in foreign policy. In contrast, the main parties act as defenders of national sovereignty who hope to fill in support by attracting national interests and national dignity.

The Munich conference also put an end to the hot discussion on whether Trump should be taken seriously (meaning, not literally) or literally (meaning, not seriously). Now we know that it should be taken seriously and literally. As Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, also noted, Trump “does not simply say what he thinks, but he says what he wants.” His comments on control over Greenland or Panama channel do not represent the sign, but the intention. The US President is convinced that the strategic interest of America lies in making Canada the 51st American country. He strongly believes that he can divide Russia from China, and he blames the American “deep state” for preventing it from achieving this in his first term.

In this context, the Europeans are lost as a precious time thinking about Trump’s plan for Ukraine and complaining about its absence on the negotiating table.

Trump’s right first and foremost requires that it is a revolutionary government to power in Washington, although it is organizing it as an empire court. Revolutions do not have detailed plans. They run the time tables: meeting the moment; The steps do not emerge forward. It is not clear what Trump wants exactly in his negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something very big, and he wants to achieve it very quickly and quickly.

What Trump Putin does is not just the possibility of ending the war in Ukraine with widespread conditions for Moscow, but it is a big deal to rearrange the world. This includes the presence of America in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and the Northern Pole. Trump Putin promises that Russia is quickly reintegated into the global economy and that Moscow will re -set the great power that it lost in the degrading nineties. Trump hopes that this will convince Russia to form its alliance with China. The United States refused to vote by the United Nations to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, even shocked some of the most devoted fans of the president. But the Kremlin was supposed to be convinced that the American leader was ready to do what cannot be perceived – and reinstall the world as Ronald Reagan and Jourbachev formed in the late 1980s.

What will happen to Trump’s revolutionary dreams is a separate question. It is one of the paradoxes of history that the Russians live in Trump’s design by reshaping the world with enthusiasm, who remembers the US’s cautious response to Jourbachev about 40 years ago. What Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, said today is not completely different from what Dick Cheney, US Defense Minister, said in 1989: “We must maintain our nation’s security gamble about what may be a temporary deviation in our first opponent’s behavior.”

George Orwell once noted that “all revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure.” What kind of failure will be the Trump revolution, we do not know. But what history teaches us is that the best strategy is not to resist the revolutionaries, but rather to kidnap their revolution. In doing this, Europe’s success will often not depend on its ability to resist but to offer a surprise talent. Can Europe find a way to benefit from its lack of negotiation table between the United States and Russian? Should Trump be left to possess and implement the great peace plan for Ukraine?

In a moment of existential crisis like this current, there is one valuable resource for the weakest party that emerges: political imagination.