As fate would have it, I was recently at a conference exploring “black swan” events and how politics and policy makers can contend with developments which are highly unexpected, disruptive and hard to predict – or simply don’t get anticipated because we are not used to looking for them at all.
As finance, public services and security denizens debated their encounters with this disturbing breed, in the great financial crisis or the pandemic, another epoch-defining example of the phenomenon was unfolding at the UN in New York with reverberations across the Atlantic.
Marking the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US sided with Russia – twice – highlighting a volte-face in America’s position on the independence of Ukraine, recognised by Republican president George H W Bush on Christmas Day in 1991.
On Tuesday, the US has sided with Russia in key votes, in terms which signal a departure from cooperation with Europe. More than that, it has signalled a widening rift, highlighted by the outright opposing of a European-sponsored resolution condemning Moscow’s actions and backing the independence of Ukraine. And the US has joined forces with non-democracies, including North Korea and Belarus, at the UN General Assembly to do so.
As Keir Starmer follows Emmanuel Macron to Washington, the new presidency is intent on tearing up the post-Cold War order and replacing it with a mercantilist view of US self-interest and view of the world divided into raw spheres of influence. Essentially, Russia is to be courted to offset and disrupt the rise of China.
The tone of much of the response has reflected outrage at the abrasive message emanating from the West Wing and concern at the President’s regular resorting to untruths, which are of much greater succour to dictators and venal fellow-travellers than upholders of democracy.
At the same time, a comment by a black swan expert stuck in my mind. These unexpected developments, he argued, were really a sign that the existing model of understanding a situation or relationship had failed.
It’s not so much the problem that the black swan rarely occurs; it is that systemically, an organisation, or in this case international community, missed the possibility that it might and is therefore unprepared for the change. Cyber-security nerds think of this in terms of combating “zero-day” events, for which no plan is available, because a certain kind of attack was not anticipated.
We are living in the geo-political version of this sort of phenomenon. In terms of Europe’s lagging defence spending, we would not be arguing about large, wealthy countries like Germany only recently hitting the Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP in the wake of Russia’s all-out war and recent sabre-rattling towards the Baltics and Poland, had we not rested too serenely on the idea that the US, whatever its political shifts, would never desert the defence of Europe.
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s flinty Chancellor-elect, issued the most forthright description of the altered situation yet this week: “After Donald Trump’s remarks last week, it is clear that the Americans, in any case the Americans in this administration, do not care much about the fate of Europe.”
This is not language we would hear from Keir Starmer: the UK has chosen to strike a more diplomatic tone and deal in half truths, such as the PM asserting that “President Trump is right that European nations must now take greater responsibility for our security.”
It might shield us from some blowback, but it is a spoonful of sugar to help the bitter medicine go down. What President Trump means by “greater responsibility” is closer to what Merz divines, namely that in the wake of a pivot to foregrounding a bilateral relationship with Russia, Europe – and that includes the UK – is downgraded.
As uncomfortable as it is for many of us Atlanticists, there are precedents here, which mean we should not be so entirely baffled that a large black swan is ruffling feathers.
The US has a history of alternating between engagement and different forms of isolationism in its trading arrangements, tariff wars and foreign policy dealings. One school of thought says that William McKinley, lover of tariffs who disengaged the US from conflicts and whose valedictory speech in 1901 read “Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict, and that our eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war”, is the model for Trump-ism.
Add to that a “model failure” of our own era: namely that the period after the collapse of the Soviet empire, which saw the US emerge as a unipolar power, allied to an era of economic globalisation, lulled us into complacency about how changeable the world can be. The history of fraught dealings across the Atlantic is far longer than the epoch of cosy “special” relationships.
We can also hope that things will change for the better one day and keep options and other alliances open, which support that and give us more options. We may also have to acknowledge that reality has turned out differently to the run of the last decades and that diplomacy, however worthwhile, may not make much fundamental difference.
We will need to adjust to an era of greater responsibility for our own security and a relationship with Washington that is more cautious than “special”. The arrival, with much wing-flapping and hissing, of that unwelcome beast, the black swan, is a reminder of what we did not prepare ourselves for – and now need to face up to.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and host of the Power Play transatlantic interview podcast
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