Hi and welcome. Every week Common Sense and Whiskey takes a short, sharp look at the world out there. There is only one topic this week, Ukraine and the American led dismemberment of TransAtlanticism, served here in several sordid episodes. Historians search through decades looking for hinge moments; this week we may have found one. Please let me hear your thoughts.
Here we go:
THE SPECTACLE IN SAUDI
First, let’s be clear about this week’s US/Russia meeting in Saudi Arabia. It took place under the auspices of Mohammed bin Salman, a leader who sent agents to Istanbul armed with chemicals, electro-shock devices and a bone saw to cut up a dissident and dissolve his body parts in acid. It’s reported they brought the victim's fingers to Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh as proof.
This is where Donald Trump turns when he’s looking for a friend to host talks between himself and his other friend Vladimir Putin, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for stealing Ukrainian children.
There were no publicly known American positions at this week’s confab in Riyadh. We are left to wonder whether these might have been talks on the terms of American capitulation. Was it a Trump/Putin version of Molotov/Ribbertrop, Putin’s part the physical control of eastern Ukraine and political control of Eastern Europe, Trump’s part Ukraine’s mineral wealth?
(Speaking of which: the previous American Treasury Secretary visited Ukraine offering aid. Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary came clutching a starkly predatory, mafia-style protection scheme - nice mineral wealth you got there, shame if you lose it - that would shame a nineteenth century colonialist.)
Suddenly, all our screens are back to the bad old days, filled with the likes of MBS and Sergei Lavrov. Let us remember now and everyday that Trump let them back in. The Russians were shut out of the picture. The Europeans didn’t let them back in. Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t let them back in. Donald Trump let them back in.
AFTER MUNICH: It has (already) come to this. Gideon Rachman in Monday’s Financial Times: “It is clear that the US can no longer be regarded as a reliable ally for the Europeans. But the Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary.”
Wolfgang Munchau, himself a former FTer, wrote this the same day: “The death of the transatlantic relationship was foretold many times, but at the Munich Security Conference this weekend, it finally ended.”
Robert Habeck, current German Vice-Chancellor said that at Munich, the US government had “rhetorically and politically sided with the autocrats,” and that “this is not conservatism, or what conservatism used to mean. This is authoritarian-revolutionary.”
This week, the Europeans have been moving fast (unusual), and getting nowhere (less unusual). It’s not entirely their fault. People ought to have good reason to believe their best bud for the last eighty years won’t turn coat.
The Czech leader, Petr Pavel calls all this “a cold shower which helps us get some self awareness.” He claims that “we can do a lot on our own with or without our American allies.” That’s heartbreaking because as a military man, he has already done tireless and effective work to arm Ukraine.
Yet, as forever, Europe remains utterly unprepared, both in will and in leadership, to hurry up and do something. There was a scheme a few weeks ago under which they thought ‘we’ll buy arms from the US to placate Trump.’ That faded so quickly it’s almost quaint.
Europe is going to have to break with the US. Unthinkable? Sure. Crazy even. But has not the US already broken with Europe?
This really, really is the end of 80 years of a geostrategic structure lodged in granite, it really is true, and it really is sad. But because it is true, it has to be gotten on with by Europe and its leaders, for Europeans’ sake. That’s what politicians are there to do.
TO EUROPE’S LEADERS: You’ve been shoved into a corner. They have shaken you by the shoulders. You have been summarily beaten about the head and shoulders. Your wake up call has been placed again and again and now the new American administration is pounding on your door. It’s time to rise and throw back the drapes.
It is no longer “too early to talk of” … anything. Talk about it. Decide. Talk about troops. Recruit them. Talk about peacekeepers. Give them their mission.
What might a peacekeeping force could accomplish? Are there enough European peacekeepers to insert between Ukrainians and Russians who are prepared to fight? If not, should a smaller force act as a tripwire? If Russia tests that force, are you prepared to go to war? If not, do you have plans to get ready? If not, why not?
Some Euro pols have seen the future more clearly than others. About a year ago Poland’s PM Donald Tusk said: "We are in a pre-war era. I don't exaggerate.”
Nicolas Tenzer with the Center for European Policy Analysis, says
It is a question of Europe moving to a war economy, with all the consequences that this implies in terms of mobilizing a large part of the European population in this endeavor in favor of defense.
He’s right. He’s also right when he says
Rapidly moving to at least 4% of GDP in defense spending in all countries of Europe in the broad sense is a fairly brutal and radical undertaking.
But incremental decisions will not get there. Tenzer declares that Ukraine and Europe together must not only say that Donald Trump’s actions are unacceptable, but also show through its actions that they are.
Well, yeah.
Yet as you, and I, and everybody else can see, that is most unlikely.
So here we are.
Collectively, all Europe’s leaders are guilty of negligence. It’s no individual European leader’s fault, or responsibility. That’s built into trying to manage a group of 30-odd countries. But just because it comes with the territory doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be recognized, and dealt with.
It’s hard to believe this, but something else is also true: the American president and the men and women he has put in power want revolution in Europe. To put it plainly, the people behind Donald Trump, those who support his fight with Zelenskyy, are out to undermine the rule of law in Europe, because the MAGA idea of governance would flourish in an illiberal world.
The JD Vance speech in Munich was in the vanguard of these efforts. Let’s talk a little about this.
SECOND IN COMMAND, FIRST IN MALEVOLENCE: For those not living and dying by the machinations of European politics, a big annual meeting of leading European and American political and military figures was held last weekend in Munich, Germany, at which the new US Vice President, JD Vance, scolded Europeans about their adherence to the rule of law, then met with the far right party’s candidate for Chancellor in Germany’s election, to be held on Sunday. He did not meet with current Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Consider that the United States rebuilt Germany after it helped to defeat Adolf Hitler eighty years ago and airlifted food and fuel to keep Berlin alive for fifteen months when Moscow blockaded the city at the end of World War II. Consider that Germany sent the most troops to Afghanistan after the United States, and it did so because the United States was attacked on 9/11. The Germans stayed in Afghanistan for almost twenty years.
Now a new American Vice President has traveled to Germany in the midst of an election campaign, criticized its government’s commitment to the rule of law and aligned himself very publicly with the AfD, a party whose politicians use Nazi slogans, have called Berlin's Holocaust memorial a "monument of shame,” and participated in planning a foiled far-right extremist takeover in eastern Germany.
Attendees from across Europe convened in Munich to hear the new American administration’s stance on Ukraine, but Vance didn’t address that. Instead, alongside sour condescension toward the host country, Vance criticized Romania.
In Romanian presidential elections late last year an agronomist named Călin Georgescu ran without party backing, polled under ten percent but in the end, led with 22.95% of the vote.
Nobody expected that. Georgescu spent almost no money on his campaign. He seems to have been elected solely because of his use of TikTok. His campaign reported no expenses, Georgescu himself stating he spent "zero" money on his campaign. The Romanian constitutional court cancelled the election, suspecting Russian voter manipulation.
Vance used the Romanian election to question Europe’s commitment to the rule of law. A lecture on respect for the law is rich from the second-in-command of the man who presided over the January 6th riot, but this is where we are.
Administration opponents worry that Team Trump is firing people really fast and unnecessarily losing expertise, but they seek solace in the notion that with the institutional memory that comes with 250 years of history, our institutions might make it through.
Now comes Vance mocking the struggles of a 35 year old democracy, one that was held under the Soviet boot for half the twentieth century, whose successor state has been ruled for 24 years, 289 days by a man who has never stood in a free and fair election, Donald Trump’s new friend Vladimir Putin.
A SIDEBAR ON JD VANCE:
DON’T BEND THE KNEE, EXCEPT TO MAGA: Vance’s speech made headlines for several reasons - because he was the highest ranking US official at Munich, because he didn’t address the topic at hand - instead giving a culture wars speech, because of his just downright rudeness and because of his meeting with the hard-right German AfD.
Some Europeans worked up a theory that Vance wasn’t addressing the people in the room, but was instead ‘speaking to a domestic audience.’ I think that’s half right. I think he was indeed talking to a domestic audience, but a very narrow and specific one.
It’s important to understand that JD Vance is fighting a different, though complimentary, fight from the Trump administration, and he’s been doing it for years. In Munich, he was talking to people politely called Evangelical Christian Nationalists, who might more plainly be described as religious authoritarians.
There is a burgeoning body of work by and about these folks, and maybe that’s a topic for a separate discussion here, but for today, David French gets to the essence:
“the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, (especially) on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.”
When Vance criticized annulment of Romania's election he contended the election was canceled based on "flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.”
He mocked Europeans: "If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with.”
This is where the Vice President aligns with the objectives of Trump’s people. Both have set out to strengthen illiberal governance in Europe, and they have made progress.
It’s a complicated region. Let’s see how that’s going.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban wrote the playbook illiberals have mostly followed so far, explicitly calling his Hungarian system “illiberal democracy.’ He’s in. If MAGA has Hungary in the bank, where else looks like fertile ground?
To the north of Hungary is the smallish country of Slovakia. Its Prime Minister, Robert Fico, has halted Slovakia’s assistance to Ukraine, declaring, "We will not send a single bullet" to Ukraine.
Now look where Romania is. Romania is an important conduit for arms to Ukraine, as we showed last week. So note that there’s a fight going on down there, and Vance picked sides last weekend, criticizing the biggest and most important country on Ukraine’s southern flank.
Now add MAGA attempts to replace Zelenskyy.
WHAT’S UP WITH DONALD TRUMP’S CALL FOR UKRAINIAN ELECTIONS? In calling for elections in Ukraine, President Trump is arguing Vladimir Putin’s position. And it’s rich (it comes back to this every time on just about every issue. Once you’ve subverted democracy you can’t unsubvert it.) that an insurrectionist should lecture anybody about elections.
Putin’s position is obvious. In any election he would stand up a candidate whose campaign mission would be to destabilize Ukraine. Even the man Zelenskyy defeated in the last elections, held before the war, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said an election would undermine national unity and benefit Russia.
In Poroshenko’s words, elections would compromise internal cohesion and serve the interests of the Russian adversary. Another former political opponent, Yulia Temoshenko, agrees.
Ukrainian elections are explicitly prohibited under martial law. For elections to happen, martial law would have to be lifted, but martial law is the basis under which Ukraine has mobilized and conscripted soldiers. Ukraine would end martial law at peril of disbanding the military, as Vladimir Putin would want, and as Donald Trump well knows, even as he advocates for precisely that.
President Zelenskyy has said that if martial law is suspended for the elections, Ukraine may lose its army. He underscored that the issue of elections is being raised by the Russians. His remarks:
“Our people are against elections during the war, because everyone understands what will happen. I am not afraid of elections, but what are elections? We have to end martial law or suspend it. If we suspend martial law, we may lose the army. And the Russians will be happy because the issues of spirit and combat capability will be lost. Moreover, it is legally impossible to retain such an army. This is a fact. People will return home, and they will have every right to do so. This will undoubtedly be used by Russia as a basis for counteroffensive actions.”
PROFILES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL COURAGE: Back home, it is just an extraordinary moment, this sudden, juddering close to 80 years of history. The postmortems, if democracy and the rule of law are restored, will be utterly brutal for members of the president’s party. Of Mr. Trump’s calling Mr. Zelensky a dictator, this week Senate Majority Leader John Thune murmured only, “The president speaks for himself.”
Here is what passes for courageous leadership in today’s Republican Senate. Of the administration’s headlong rush to relegitimize Vladimir Putin, the indicted war criminal, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said “Well, it sounds like that’s the direction they are headed.”
“I think we need to be very careful,” she added.
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EURO IMPOTENCE: There’s nothing easy about this. I wouldn’t want to be a Euro leader who took an early stance to oppose America. Steely determination may be where heroes are born, but that’s usually in the very long run.
In the meantime, French President Emmanuel Macron convened meetings this week, one of the more assertive outcomes of which would have been commitment to a tripwire force of European troops cobbled together with no assurance that America would be there in the event the wire is tripped.
Poland, home of probably the most capable military land forces in Europe, ruled the idea out entirely, Prime Minister Tusk judging it a fool’s game. Just now, he, his country, the Balts and Nordics are concentrated on wielding their young men’s bodies in defense of their own lands. Which leaves the defense of Ukraine to the august leadership of countries farther back, like Spain. Greece. Luxembourg.
It’s all tragic and terribly sad. No heroes, no villains really, wherever you look.
WHAT WE HAVE LOST: One big thing, built up painstakingly since February 2022 and lost in a few days, is Vladimir Putin’s pariah status. Indeed, the Trump administration’s main objective, more important than Ukraine’s fate, seems to be to engage with Moscow, quickly, and make like nothing ever happened.
Who knows the consequences to come, but a few are discernable out in the hazy distance: the coming militarization of Europe, the breakdown of Schengen, soldiers at the borders of European countries and, if a low grade terrorism takes hold, in their streets. Thirty-odd individual European gendarmeries, each with their own rules.
The luckiest Americans are those without family in Europe who have already had their Covid revenge vacations. As someone with family and friends in Finland I have to ask, if Helsinki gets into trouble with Moscow, will the United States have Finland’s back? No it will not. The Americans have aligned with Russia against Europe.
The United States president is out to move the country to some kind of transactional authoritarianism. His people in place at the power ministries, State, Defense and Treasury, in the way of Donald Trump, have all already been individually compromised by their actions in a presidency that’s only a month old.
The United States cannot decide the ultimate fate of Ukraine. The US has huge influence, but declarations in the name of the United States without buy-in from Kyiv are illegitimate. Marco Rubio knows this. So what is he doing? In the Secretary of State's own words, spoken in 2016:
“… for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large, that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well.”
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Bill
Thank you for this thoughtful and nuanced overview of not only the changing relationship between Europe and the US, but the dynamics within the European countries. The earth is moving under the feet of the majority of humans that currently inhabit planet Earth. While many of us "didn't see it coming", those behind these changes have been planning it for oh so long. They just needed a critical mass of American voters and a narcissistic authoritarian who lacks any sense of shame, ethics, morality, or fairness and we're "off to the races". I feel bad for all the nations and peoples who have, by design, become "dependent" on the US and are now being completely abandoned and/or manipulated with the ruthless moves in play right now. These moves will not be without serious consequences to America and Americans. When and how they are visited upon us is yet to be determined.