23.1.26
Dear Partners in Thought,
It is hard to believe that one year into Trump 2.0 we are in a situation where the future of the Western world, including America itself, and globalisation is looking very bad. Trump was always a dangerous, but very few would have predicted the insane unfolding scenario we witness on a daily basis. There are so many features of Trump’s destructive policies that affect all parties globally that they are at times hard to follow, which may be a tactical approach in itself.
Trump’s ever deal-making and at times punishing tariffs approach has hurt all parties, including the US and its very voting base in terms of affordability, all while breaking trust between trading partners. Globalisation, or peace through trade, have been affected to a degree that the White House and its advisers do not realise yet. The anti-immigration drive, with its awful deportations often involving honest people who contributed to the US economy and its tragic developments, like in Minneapolis, has now created the grounds for a quasi-civil war in the making. While Trump was going as usual back and forth with his threats, seizing control of an allied sovereign territory, like Greenland, which cooperated with America for decades, would have been the unbelievable end of NATO and the Western alliance – not to mention a potential massive conflict in the making. In the end, a framework agreement with NATO to strongly enhance Arctic security changed Trump’s approach within hours at the World Economic Forum in Davos. While all of Trump’s policies are not always bad, these are only a few key examples of a massively destructive drive of the Trump administration, with the latter being the most worrying for our world as it weakened the needed trust between key historical allies, even if a workable solution was finally found.
It is hard to believe that those voters who backed Trump in November 2024 would all rejoice at what we see today. Some still do. While Trump’s poll ratings have declined massively after one year, there are still some Americans – a clear minority – who think all is fine and we should all wear MAGA hats and sing his praises. It is today a combination of deeply disgruntled individuals who think America and the world did not treat them well at the personal level while hating Democrats who went too far on issues like diversity, that did not help them either. Many Trump voters are by-and-large uneducated or with very few degrees, often passport-less and living in marginalised and increasingly empty states, while they hate the traditional and often urban elite they also resent as having stolen their future. There are naturally some highly pragmatic educated ones who feel that their interest is to follow the supreme leader as it is best in the short-term for their career or financial interests – this including among others all the officials working directly or indirectly for the Trump administration, many elected Republican officials or Big Tech Bros and their teams and followers. The Trump support base is a strange and diverse one, all the more so today. Such a group will dwindle over time, but perhaps not before domestic and global chaos may prevail.
Even if the outline of an agreement with NATO was finally and unexpectedly found at Davos, the end of the Western military alliance linked to the threat of a military seizure of a sovereign Greenland or, as a latest Trump option, its forceful control “of a piece of ice”, would have definitely meant the end of the Western world as we have known it since WW2. A world where the US assumed a clear and highly beneficial leadership at all levels while Europeans naturally relied too much on the big American brother for its defence. The end of NATO would de facto have been a victory for Putin’s Russia, confirming the many views that Trump always liked Putin too much (as seen with peace attempts on Ukraine), as if he was working for him, willingly or not. In many ways, seizing Greenland would have been for Trump what Ukraine has been for Putin in a return or, more aptly, the acceptance of 21st century superpower supremacy and its associated means. As Trump’s aggressive approach over weeks created deep angst and broke the trust Europeans need in the key transatlantic alliance, such a move, in spite of a last-minute likely agreement with NATO, should make China stronger and Europe closer to it as previously stressed and now agreed by many leading foreign policy experts and media. It is now clear that quite a few Republican US Senators will be gradually waking up to the fact that Trump’s moves may serve the interests of their nation’s old foes while weakening its core alliance and America itself.
It may be time to realise that Trump is losing his mind as gradually seen by his long and rambling aggressive speeches where sentences are never finished. His key speech in Davos (funnily the emblem of globalisation) stressed Trump’s wild and dangerous incoherence, all the more regarding what he really wanted to do or not with Greenland, also oblivious to his MAGA base’s key rejections. Trump is clearly no longer “there” while nobody in his team will stand up to him as they would have in his first term. His core team of Secretaries are not equipped to do their jobs – stating their names is no longer required – while too obedient to say anything, job preservation being their key driver. While a deranged individual is running the White House and the leading country in the world, there is no safeguard to put him in check, even at the US Supreme Court level with its clear obedient majority. It is as if Trump could do anything he wanted, whatever the outcome for America and the world while enriching himself and his family and friends without any societal backlash.
One would hope that many Republican elected officials in the US House of Representatives and Senate will wake up and finally focus on the interests of their country and indeed those of the world. It is not too late, but nine months before the mid-terms, when Trump could become a lame duck, is a long time, all the more if further Greenland invasion-like developments bring Western chaos and might be an easy reason to suspend elections too. Crazy scenarios for sure, but we live in Trump times where everything, especially awful developments are possible.
Once again, it is not being anti-American to wish for Trump’s demise (some even waiting for a new Lee Harvey Oswald, all the more in the NRA-friendly and mass shooting America), which could lead to a more reasonable approach to the strategic management of the leader of the Free World. It is clear that one should hope for a gradual and stronger rise of the institutions that made America (as happily seen with so many judges across the land) to stop this massive and, so far, historically unseen drift in governance that will hurt itself and our world. One major benefit for Europe of Trump’s erratic and aggressive approach to the key transatlantic relationship is that it should make it stronger and more independent. Trump may indeed have been the unwitting unifier of Europe. We should naturally all support changes that will bring America back to its roots, values and principles while ensuring a sound leadership and partnership of our Western world.
Warmest regards,
Serge
Desperate Measures 