In January 2018, when Donald Trump was in the second year of his first term as US president, Angela Merkel, in her 13th year as German chancellor, gave a gloomy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She opened her remarks with a warning from Europe’s past. Politicians had “sleep-walked” into the first world war. As the number of surviving eyewitnesses to the second world war dwindled, she added, subsequent generations would have to prove they understood the fragility of peace. “We need to ask ourselves if we have really learned from history or not.”
Fast forward eight years. Vladimir Putin’s territorial aggression harries Europe’s eastern flank. To the west, Trump, now in his second term and guest of honour at Davos, threatens to annex Greenland. This is not a world that has internalised the lessons of the 20th century.
Merkel’s reputation has not improved since leaving office. She is criticised – often harshly, sometimes fairly – for presiding over stagnation and calling it stability. Hindsight condemns her for failing to prepare Germany’s economy, defence and energy infrastructure for the coming age of turbulence. But she had the measure of Trump from the start.
On the morning after his first election victory in 2016, Merkel’s congratulations contained a chilly caveat. Her statement noted that Germany and the US had built a relationship based on shared respect for democracy, the rule of law, political pluralism, non-discrimination on the basis of race, creed and sexual orientation. Ongoing cooperation was offered “on the basis of these values”.
Like every Nato leader, Merkel was forced to indulge the tantrums of a capricious US president to prevent, or rather to forestall, betrayal of Europe’s indispensable military alliance. No head of a democratic government has been able to restrain Trump’s vandalism for long. Flattery, bargaining and occasional flashes of assertiveness have been tried with limited success. No formula dissolves the carapace of venal self-interest.
Merkel advocated “strategic patience”. Trump’s relentless intemperance outlasted her. Earlier this week, Keir Starmer, facing the threat of new tariffs as punishment for declaring solidarity with Denmark over Greenland, called for calm diplomacy. He was repaid with an unhinged social media rant lambasting the UK’s decision to relinquish sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. Trump, who previously approved of that deal, now calls it an act of “great stupidity” that somehow validates US territorial demands in the North Atlantic.
No argument rooted in liberal principle and no appeal to US national advantage from multilateral collaboration can be more compelling to the president than his instinctive affinity with despots who would carve the world into fiefdoms. And of all the devices for influencing Trump, none is surer to fail than the invocation of history.
He wants Greenland because it is real estate, and he is the world’s property developer-in-chief. It is made desirable by mineral deposits and a north-facing aspect that promises increasing strategic value as Arctic ice melts. Also, it is really big. If acquired, it would beat Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 purchase of Louisiana, giving Trump the record as the president who most expanded US territory. Measured simply in terms of square mileage, the US would overnight become larger than Canada.
The benefits of upholding a rules-based international order cannot compete with such gratifications of monarchial vanity. The spectre of global lawlessness holds no menace to a ruler who is confident of supremacy, or at least a monopoly over the western hemisphere, in a world where might makes right. Such a man is unmoved by the risk that the demise of economic cooperation and escalating trade rivalries will provoke dashes for resource domination, aggravate territorial disputes and generate wars.
Merkel’s appeal to European history as a case study in the perils of “national egoisms” has no meaning for Trump. He sees no boundary between his ego and the nation. He declares that neither will submit to any external authority or moral code.
That ethos, the Führerprinzip as it was once known, applies equally in foreign and domestic realms. In the eyes of the US Department of Homeland Security, defiance of the president’s will is as despicable as terrorism. Resistance leads to forfeiture of constitutional rights. Someone who impedes the work of immigration and customs enforcement, as Renee Nicole Good did by driving her car too close to an ICE officer’s legs in Minneapolis earlier this month, can be shot.
European history tells us where this leads. Security forces, empowered to enforce the leader’s decrees with impunity, expand their remit. New categories of offence are created to keep up with proliferating dissent. The apparatus of democracy is gripped by coercive arms of the state. Opposition is equated with treason. The polling station becomes a theatre for mandatory performance of loyalty to the regime.
Obedient citizens are free to go about their business, and businesses that pay tribute to the party in power can flourish. The continuation of ordinary life for the majority allows a critical mass of collaborators to deny there is tyranny. Cowards and crooks with political ambition argue that firm leadership is the necessary bulwark against disorder fomented by the nation’s internal foes and their foreign helpers.
This is not predestined – or even the most likely outcome. US democracy has deep roots. Trump is unpopular and old; visibly declining. He also looks irreplaceable as a figurehead for an ideologically incoherent Maga movement. He embodies a mess of protectionist, free market, interventionist, isolationist, chauvinist and libertarian impulses that none of his mooted successors could contain.
But in the meantime he can drive the US hard towards the abyss, past all of history’s signposts, before a stiffening of democratic spines in Congress or the grim reaper stops him. And while European leaders understandably play for time, they must not underestimate the cost of complicity with the fiction that Trump is amenable to reason, or that his America is the same one they used to call a friend.
It is not stupidity or arrogance that prevent the current White House honouring the transatlantic partnership, or not those traits alone. The parables of history that teach Europeans to see multilateral governance as a brake on ultranationalism are direct rebukes to the doctrine that now guides US power. There is no misunderstanding. Trump is not neglecting the old alliance. He despises it as antithetical to his politics and his character.
If Europeans are right about the values they want the US to uphold, it follows that the country also needs regime change. If they have history on their side, the current president must fail, and he knows it. Sycophancy doesn’t bridge the gap. European leaders flatter only themselves if they think it can. Trump is not ignoring the lessons that European democracies have learned from their past. He chooses to fight for the other side.
Curated by Shiv Shakti Mishra
