The Trump Administration has completely upended European-American relations, perhaps permanently rupturing the world order as it has existed for eight decades. Last week, in Munich, Vice-President J. D. Vance stunned European diplomats by telling them that the greatest threat to their societies came from immigration and their own attempts to quarantine far-right political parties, not from Vladimir Putin. Then, a few days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and American negotiators met with Russian representatives in Saudi Arabia to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. (Ukraine was not invited.) This week, Trump himself blamed Ukraine for the war, before relaying some falsehoods about Zelensky’s popularity, and calling him a dictator. (Trump also voiced support for a Russian proposal that Ukraine hold elections before being granted a role in peace talks.)
The response in Europe to this whirlwind has been a combination of panic and confusion, as European parties from the left to the center right come to grips with the fact that the Atlantic alliance could be in the process of disintegrating. To understand what this means, I recently spoke by phone with Ivan Krastev, an expert on European politics, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Trump’s moves could affect the European far right, why the European mainstream was so feckless in preparing for Trump, and whether Trump has a grand ideological vision for how the U.S. should operate in the world.
I’ve been thinking that we might look back on this month as one of incredible significance for the European continent, akin to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, or even the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. Have you had that thought?
Listen, like you, I see this as a major political rupture, and very much on the level of the change that we saw in 1989 and 1990. It’s in a way the end of a part of European history that started with the end of the Second World War. Many people have been comparing the Munich conference to 1938, saying Putin was being appeased, because Munich was also the site of appeasement of Hitler. I see the American government as a revolutionary government. They’re not simply trying to remake the United States—they’re going to remake the world. They’re coming in with a totally different instinct about what is to be valued and what is to be feared. From this point of view, we are in a different world.
What has been the response in Europe so far?
Trump has been signalling for a long time how he views Europe, and how he views European governments. The problem is that Europe was denying this and rejecting it and trying to hide from itself that this was going to be a revolutionary government. They were trying to remember how Europe had dealt with Trump during his first term, not recognizing the difference between Trump I and Trump II.
After Munich, the European response was predictable, and not particularly convincing. The meeting in Paris [of European leaders, called by Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, in response to the Trump Administration] on Monday didn’t go over particularly well. It is quite doubtful that Europe on its own can give the security guarantees that Ukraine needs. This meeting was meant to be kind of a gesture of strength. It was much more seen as a gesture of weakness. In general, European politicians are very predictable. And predictability is a very strong trait in a normal situation. But in a situation of turmoil and crisis, like the one we have now, predictability is self-defeating.
The nature of European politics is changing. Before, people talked about liberals, anti-liberals, globalists, nationalists. Now we’re going to end up with a clash between two different types of nationalists. On the far right, you’re going to see a Trumpian right. They see Trump as a model, and they’re very much anti-liberal, anti-woke, with vague talk about a Christian legacy in Europe. On the other side, as a result of Munich, you will see the emergence of a kind of a don’t-bully-us European mainstream, which basically is trying to make its legitimacy with the voters by resisting American policies. We know this very well in other parts of the world. But now we are seeing this in Canada, and we are seeing this in Denmark. You have even been seeing this in Germany, during the last debate before the German elections. All the mainstream politicians were sounding tougher and more aggressive toward America. Yesterday’s American allies in the center—be it center left or center right—are going to use the language of national dignity and national interest much more, and look for legitimacy by fighting American policies.
Do you think that at least for a while Trump’s behavior will create political problems for the far right in Europe?
Yes, totally. There are also tensions between parts of the European far right. Nationalism has a history in Europe, so for [the French far-right leader] Marine Le Pen to listen to Vance praising the [German far-right] AfD could not have been easy. She didn’t allow the AfD to become part of the far-right grouping in the European Parliament, because much of French nationalism, even when antisemitic, is anti-German.
The far right in general is going to be pushed in different directions because of Trump. On Ukraine, of course, the far right is supporting Trump in his peace effort. But one of the results of a deal like the one Trump is pursuing would be a major wave of Ukrainian immigrants into the rest of Europe. If Ukrainians decide that their country is done and Americans are not going to give guarantees and the Russians are going to dominate, you can expect many of them going into Europe, many of them trying to join their families who are already there, and many of the new migrants are going to be men—ex-soldiers. The far right doesn’t want immigrants coming, even when they are from Eastern Europe. So, from this point of view, it’s going to be very difficult for them to explain to their own voters what is good about Trump’s policies. And this is why I believe we are going to see a major restructuring of European politics.
The mainstream parties, which yesterday were very internationalist, very much tried to bet that the status quo was not really dead. They were talking as if nothing had happened. After Munich, nobody can do this. Even before it. But now to pretend that nothing has happened makes you simply too ridiculous. This is going to change a lot of domestic politics.
It seems like essentially you believe that this will create problems for the far right. And now the left and the center can’t deny that politics has changed. But it does seem that the mainstream parties really are just too weak in some fundamental sense to respond in a cohesive, coherent way. How concerned are you about that?
I’m very concerned. The European élites are under pressure because economically Europe is a problem. Geopolitically, Europe suddenly finds itself quite irrelevant and marginalized, and people are going to blame the mainstream parties for this. Another very important question is, what will Trumpian nationalism look like here? Is it going to be about the nation state? Is it going to be about Europe? To what extent? There is also the fact that he is very unpopular in Western Europe, but in some of the Eastern European countries there is more sympathy for Trump, and there is much more sympathy for his policies. So we may see more fragmentation of the continent.
In terms of the mainstream reaction, American security guarantees not only for Ukraine but also for Europe now cannot be taken for granted. And, of course, Europe is going to talk about larger defense budgets. But you cannot change the situation in the course of months or even in two or three years. And the military incapability of Europe is not simply a problem of defense budgets. It’s very much a cultural issue. In a paradoxical way, Europe is threatened not by its failures but by its successes. The European Union managed to convince Europeans that a major war was not possible in Europe anymore. And now, when basically there is a risk of such a war, there is a need for cultural change in Europe. And as you know cultural change takes time. I expect the period of confusion to continue and for different places, different countries, and different governments to react differently. Europe is going to be reduced to a kind of outraged paralysis, because to be outraged is not a policy.
Even before Trump II, Emmanuel Macron was pushing and talking about the need for Europeans to take more responsibility for their own defense separately from the United States. Do you think he’s been proven right in some way? And was his failure to get much support before now a matter of a lack of will among Europeans, or did people just not agree with him?
Macron was right, and this is his problem: He was right on many issues, but he was not politically skillful enough to make a coalition. So, strangely enough, I do believe that if he were in the early days of his term, or even in the early days of his second term, or if his support in polls were higher, it would be a real moment for him and his ideas. But, unfortunately, he’s quite weak at home. That is not allowing him to use the moment. But, in his intellectual analysis of the situation, I do believe he was much more right than most of his opponents, who were pretending that everything was business as usual and taking the U.S.-European alliance for granted. He was a visionary, but he was a visionary with limited support.
The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has now said that the U.K. would be willing to send troops to secure a Ukrainian peace deal. It seems like Starmer is being brought into these conversations about Europe, even though Britain is obviously not a member of the E.U. anymore. Do you think the current dynamic will bring Britain closer to Europe?
For sure. If the United Kingdom were part of the European Union, the European Union would be in a much stronger position today, because Britain is one of the few European countries that has military capabilities that should be taken seriously. But the biggest problem of Europe is not the difference between the states. And, of course, there is a major difference between some states. The real problem in Europe is the division within European states.
So one of the strange things that is happening in modern politics is not only happening in Europe. I see it in the United States. Before, we used to believe that an external threat produced some national unity. Not anymore. And this is even true in countries which have a genuinely existential threat, like what is happening in Ukraine. Look at a country like Poland. Both the government and the opposition shared a kind of a real fear of how the relations with Russia could develop. But it does not help them to coöperate better than before.
Poland, presumably because of its specific history of being invaded and dominated by Russia over centuries, has a far-right party that is anti-Russia. But, despite the agreement about the Russian threat, the cleavages within the society still are incredibly sharp?
Yeah, the external threat is not producing national unity. This kind of a consolidation around the flag that everybody likes to talk about historically is not there anymore. Only countries with a much stronger social cohesion—Denmark, Sweden, Finland, to some extent the Baltic republics—demonstrated this. In contemporary Europe, division within the states, in my view, is more threatening than division between the states.
What do you think the European mainstream is going to push for on Ukraine specifically?
It’s really a tragic situation. It’s tragic for many reasons. First, Ukraine has been fighting for three years. Its lost a lot of people. There was a lot of destruction. A demographic crisis in Ukraine is a reality. And one of the reasons, honestly speaking, for the Russians to push for elections and to make the elections so critical as part of a peace deal, as Trump now wants, is that if you’re going to have an election you’re going to lift the martial law, which means that the men will have the right to travel, which also means to leave the country. It’s going to be much more difficult for Ukraine to remobilize if the fighting starts again, because many will leave.
But let’s also remember that the America-Russia rapprochement is about much more than Ukraine. This is about too many things. It’s about the Middle East; it’s about the Arctic. And I also think that Donald Trump believes he can split Russia from China. He believed he could have done it back in his first term but that the deep state prevented him from doing it, and now he’s going to try again. I happen to think that this is an illusion. Putin has a lot to do with the normalization with the United States. He’s really very keen to see the great-power status of Russia being regained. But, at the end of the day, Trump is for four years and Xi and the Communist Party of China is for a much longer time. To expect that Russia is going to distance dramatically from China as a result of the deal with the United States, in my view, could turn out to be one of the biggest miscalculations on the side of the current American Administration.
I think that perhaps Trump’s desires in pursuing this agenda are either much more mercenary or just personal. He may just want to do this because Putin says nice things about him and the Europeans clearly don’t like him, or because he has business opportunities he’s eyeing in Eastern Europe or Russia. I don’t want to pretend that there’s some grand ideological theory of foreign policy behind what Trump is doing.
That’s true, but I think there is also something that goes deeper. I remember reading interviews with Donald Trump from the period when he was not actively involved in politics, and he always had one kind of repeated refrain, and this is that Russia or the Soviet Union was not treated well. Why did a country like Japan or Germany, which lost the Second World War, live so well? And, in my view, this division between strong and weak, big and small, but also victor and loser, is very important to him.
I just think that if Putin started criticizing Trump constantly and European leaders started fawning over Trump and giving him business opportunities, his policies would change.
Of course, he’s very commercial, but there is something more to this. And when I said that it’s a revolutionary government, one that wants to reorder the world, we’re talking about an old man who wants to be remembered. And, from this point of view, I believe that part of the Western analysis of Putin was totally wrong. Many colleagues of mine were betting that the only thing that mattered for him was money, and corruption, and everything is about the bank account. This was before Ukraine. Listen, after twenty years being the leader of a nuclear power, obviously it’s not only money that is driving you. You’re driven by the idea of history with a capital “H.” And Trump seems much more missionary than he did four years ago.
That’s a fair point. A friend of mine told me that he heard you give a presentation on Macron and Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, and two visions of Europe’s future. What did you say about Orbán’s vision?
Orbán was supporting Trump when he decided to run for President, and he supported his candidacy before most of the Republican governors did. But if you listen to him Orbán is not betting on the United States—he’s betting on China. In this speech he gave recently, he basically made some points which for him are at the core of Hungary’s strategy. First, he said, as a result of the war in Ukraine, what we think is that the East is up and the West is losing. Secondly, he said, I like Donald Trump. They are on the same ideological line when it comes to immigration or when it comes to gay rights, but they’re also on the same page because Trump is not interested in Europe. And Orbán said that America is not the natural partner for Europe in the coming decades. Decoupling the United States and Europe is a kind of a joint agenda between Orbán and Trump. Orbán sees the grand strategy for Hungary as being the gate between China and the European Union, particularly as the place where Chinese investments are going to come. Hungary has more investments from China than it does Germany and France together.
So, strangely enough, what is interesting in this partnership is that Orbán likes Trump because Trump is basically ready to give up on American influence in Europe. But Orbán’s last point was that, while he doesn’t like the European Union, the common European space is going to exist, because if there is no common European space, why would China invest in Hungary? So you see how complicated this is. Much of the far right is not pro-American. And, from this point of view, we are totally misreading it.
But on the other side we are misreading the readiness of Trump to divorce from Europe. I believe that his turning his back on Europe is much more structural than simply his dislike of certain European leaders. I think that he genuinely believes in certain types of spheres of influence. He’s much more about geography than about ideology. It’s a nineteenth-century vision of politics where the big countries—like China, like Russia, like the United States—have spheres of influence. ♦
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