The EU and MAGA: Re-engaging Trump’s mythology of American greatness
13 November 2024
‘‘Promises made, promises kept’’: President-elect Trump’s governing mantra, expressed in his victory speech, continues to reverberate across the Atlantic. In addition to the White House, Trump’s Republicans will likely control both chambers of the 119th Congress, enabling the administration to cut taxes and wage trade war for American workers; drill more oil and stop climate commitments; keep — and send — undocumented immigrants (and others) out of the country; and tighten the screws on Iran and on China, including through a sweeping legislative agenda already laid out by House Speaker Mike Johnson to further protect sensitive US tech and data from foreign adversaries. New pledges include rescinding President Biden’s guardrails around AI innovation and investing heavily in space tech and manufacturing. Trump may even have the votes to repeal Biden-backed legislation associated with the ‘‘Green New Deal’’, including (parts of) the controversial 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
These policies may well entail massive new deficit spending and inflationary risks. They may well, too, attract investment and boost US productivity even further. The legacy of Trumpism will largely depend on it.
EU leaders are ostensibly planning for all this: for rule-of-law concerns in the US, breaches to multilateral agreements, less support for Ukraine and new transatlantic tensions. Aligned with the Biden administration’s China policy (which carried on much of Trump 1.0’s), European Commission President von der Leyen has led efforts to strengthen EU economic security and commissioned major reports this year on how the EU should become more competitive and resilient. EU members have largely increased their defence commitments. Reciprocal EU tariffs on US goods are reportedly being prepared. And yet the European Council’s first statement following Trump’s election, in its Budapest declaration this past Friday, was less than inspiring, given the stakes, suggesting not so much urgent action as familiar logjams.
EU leaders are right to fear the tactics of bullying and mis- and dis-information which Trump has wielded to his benefit. They must also reckon with the stark possibility that Trump will re-enter office in January 2025 obsessed not just with a desire for personal retribution but with designs for perpetuating a legitimate Trumpist legacy: in supporting politically aligned causes and candidates domestically as well as in Europe and elsewhere; in securing Vice President-elect Vance in the White House till 2037; and most fundamentally still in the attempt to cement for posterity his reputation not just as the most transformative president since FDR, as The Economist has already touted, but as the greatest president in all of American history.
This will mean, for Trump, harnessing US capital to re-industrialise the US economy and maintain geopolitical supremacy. It will mean making all US efforts to address climate change about adaptation, market efficiency and technological breakthroughs rather than about cutting emissions per se, through regulation or targets. It may mean attempts to transform the global order itself.
Starting in 2015 with his ‘America-First’ campaign, Trump set in motion a new bipartisan consensus on containing China. It may be true that for Trump himself this is less ideological than geographical, based in old mercantilist and even spheres-of-influence paradigms. (The difference here could ultimately come to a head, crucially, over the value of defending Taiwan.) But the trend among US policymakers to think in terms of a new cold war has not diminished. Talk in recent months among Trump advisers of ‘‘AI Manhattan’’ projects suggests a renewed determination on the part of the incoming administration to maintain technological pre-eminence at all costs — whether to privacy, fairness or the environment.
It is in this light that Trump’s potential tariffs should also be seen: the long-term goal being to downgrade the ability of the Chinese government, led by the Chinese Communist Party, to outcompete the US economically and military. To this end, Trump and his team seem all too glad to subvert multilateral principles — and willing to subject American trade partners, and even American consumers themselves, to considerable economic pain.
It is in this light, too, that Trump’s potential Russia policy can be framed. Whatever his personal intuitions regarding Vladimir Putin’s Christian-nationalist revanchism, Trump will be listening to advisers arguing that to win the 21st century, Russia must be pried from its deepening axis with China, Iran and North Korea — and that sanctions against Russia are at once ineffective, in terms of deterrence; costly, by raising energy prices; and detrimental to US power, by incentivising alternatives to dollar-denominated transactions. Whatever Trump’s rationale, ultimately, Europe must prepare to shoulder a heavier political, economic and military load here.
Trump will no doubt also covet the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour granted to Barack Obama in the first year of his first term but for which Trump was later passed over despite having brokered the 2020 Abraham Accords. Alongside promises to stop the fighting in Ukraine, Trump may well redouble efforts — which October 7th 2023 foreclosed for Biden — to stabilise the Middle East with a grand pact including Israeli-Saudi normalisation. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both politically attuned to Trump’s appeal, may be amenable to granting Trump such a win in exchange for new security guarantees in consolidating an anti-Iran coalition.
What is the EU to make of all this? The options, admittedly, are not enviable: muddle through and react; further expose Member-State economies to China’s; join the Trump train; or become a real and strategic actor by pushing past longstanding national concerns to create a truly integrated, capable and more federal EU. The first would likely mean ever-declining relative competitiveness. The second involves not just more trade vulnerability but active support — via data transfers to train AI models, for instance — of China’s own super-power ambitions. The third means hard conversations with Washington about the meaning of transatlantic and democratic burden-sharing, including for market access. The fourth means perhaps harder conversations, still, within and between Member States, about the sustainability of their existing social contracts within the framework of the broader European project: whether with regard to defence spending, fiscal stimulus or the potential integration of Member States’ respective energy, banking or procurement systems.
The policies of Trump’s second administration will no doubt have uneven, if dramatic, effects. But he will have one great advantage vis-à-vis the EU, aside from the strategic autonomy the US has already achieved: Trump has a strong and coherent mythology of American purpose which for the foreseeable future looks likely to sustain his agenda politically. He will probably not much care how Europeans square the circle of pooling and deploying the capital needed to cover a myriad of investment shortfalls; these are not his problem, and he may have tailwinds enough to avoid much collateral damage if Europe suffers. Trump has mobilised a resurgent vision of American greatness. The EU must find a new voice, too, and quickly.
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