The
man who wants to unmake the West
Europeans
are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his crosshairs.
By MICHAEL
CROWLEY 3/12/17, 7:07 AM CET
It was the day after
Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, and the Western
world was still absorbing the shock. With no clear plan for what
would come next, the globe’s fifth-biggest economy had abruptly
announced a divorce from the neighbors it had been trading with for
nearly 45 years. Markets plunged. “A calamity,” declared the New
York Times. “Global panic,” proclaimed one London headline.
Steve Bannon had a
different reaction. He booked the calamity’s chief architect as a
guest on his radio show to celebrate.
This was then still
weeks before Bannon emerged into the national spotlight as CEO of
Donald Trump’s struggling presidential campaign. Bannon was an
executive at Breitbart News, an activist-editor-gadfly known mostly
on the far right, and the “Brexit” campaign was something of a
pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in Barack
Obama’s presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising
across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious
about immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats. The cause touched
on some of Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism,
Judeo-Christian identity and the evils of Big Government. In early
2014, Bannon launched a London outpost of Breitbart, opening what he
called a new front “in our current cultural and political war.”
The site promptly began pointing its knives at the EU, with headlines
like “The EU Is Dead, It Just Refuses to Lie Down”; “The
European Union’s Response to Terrorism Is a Massive Privacy Power
Grab”; “Pressure on Member States to Embrace Trans Ideology.”
One 2014 article invited readers to vote in a poll among “the most
annoying European Union rules.”
Bannon’s site
quickly became tightly entangled with the United Kingdom Independence
Party, a fringe movement with the then-outlandish goal of Britain’s
exit from the EU. In October 2014, UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage,
poached a Breitbart London editor to work for him. That September,
Bannon hosted a dinner for Farage at his Capitol Hill townhouse.
Standing under a large oil painting by the fireplace, Farage
delivered a speech that left the dozens of conservative leaders in
attendance “blown away,” as Bannon later recalled.
On June 23 of last
year, Britons defied the pleas of Europe’s political elites and
narrowly voted for Brexit. Many observers called it the most
traumatic event in the history of a union whose origins date to the
1950s. Suddenly the future of all Europe, whose unity America had
spent the decades since World War II cultivating, lay in doubt. It
was the next day that Bannon hosted Farage for a triumphal edition of
his daily radio show.
“The European
Union project has failed,” Farage declared. “It is doomed, I’m
pleased to say.”
“It’s a great
accomplishment,” Bannon said. “Congratulations.”
Bannon now works in
the West Wing as President Donald Trump’s top political adviser. He
is, by all accounts, the brains of Trump’s operation — a
history-obsessed global thinker whose vision extends far beyond
Trump’s domestic agenda and Rust Belt base. Bannon co-wrote Trump’s
“America First” inauguration speech, which hinted at a new world
order, and will join the president’s National Security Council —
apparently the first political adviser to get a permanent seat in the
president’s Situation Room. And while commentators are focusing on
Bannon’s views about nationalism here in the United States, his
public comments and interviews with several people who know him make
clear that, even as he helps Trump “make America great again,” he
has his sights set on a bigger target across the Atlantic Ocean.
“Bannon hates the
EU,” says Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart writer who split with
Bannon last year but who shares the sentiment. “He figures it’s
mainly an instrument for globalism — as opposed to an instrument
for the bettering of Western civilization.”
“What we
understand from Bannon is that the EU is abhorrent,” one Western
European government official told me.
The idea that one
man could threaten the European project might sound extreme. And it
would be an exaggeration to say that even the full-throated support
of Breitbart London was what tipped the scales toward Brexit. But
having the ear of the president of the United States is different —
and the question of just what Bannon plans to do with his influence
has become a huge preoccupation of diplomats, European government
officials and experts on the venerable trans-Atlantic relationship.
In more than a dozen interviews, they recounted a creeping sense of
dread about the very specific ways that Bannon could use American
power like a crowbar to pull the EU apart.
“The European
Union is under serious threat,” Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian
prime minister and now a senior EU official, told a London audience
in late January. Its enemies, he said, now include Trump — thanks
in large part to “the enormous influence of his chief political
adviser, Mr. Bannon.”
Since
the election, European officials have been combing the internet,
including Breitbart’s archives, for clues to Bannon’s worldview
and how he might counsel Trump. And what they’re
finding is stoking their deepest anxieties. “They have a deep well
of psychological reliance on the American-led order,” says Jeremy
Shapiro, a Hillary Clinton State Department official now at the
European Council on Foreign Relations in London. Now they’re
bracing for an American assault on that order.
Europe as we know it
has never been more vulnerable to such an assault. Economic malaise
and high debt are testing the EU’s financial structures and pitting
its members against one another. So is the historic influx of
refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Nationalist parties
and candidates hostile to the Union are ascendant in France, Germany,
Italy and the Netherlands—all of which are set to hold elections
this year. Russia, which may stand to gain the most from a disunited
Europe, is gleefully aiding the process by disrupting Europe’s
domestic politics with propaganda and hacking meant to discredit the
pro-EU establishment.
In an ordinary time,
the White House would be the crucial counterweight to such
nationalist passions. In what he billed as an address “to the
people of Europe” from Hanover last spring, President Barack Obama
issued a plea for for European unity. “This is a defining moment,”
he said, warning that “a unified, peaceful, liberal, pluralistic,
free-market Europe” had begun to fray. America and the world, Obama
said, “needs a strong and prosperous and democratic and united
Europe.”
Since
the election, European officials have been combing the internet,
including Breitbart’s archives, for clues to Bannon’s worldview
and how he might counsel Trump.
But as one European
diplomat puts it: “With Obama gone, there’s no benign father
figure anymore.” Instead, there is a threatening stepfather in
Bannon, for whom unity is not the solution but the problem. Bannon’s
vision, as laid out in public remarks and private conversations,
opposes international organizations in favor of empowering
nation-states. He has complimented the National Front, the party of
the French right-wing presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who
pledges to extract France from the EU (and who was spotted in Trump
Tower soon after the election). And he brokered a post-election
meeting between Trump and Farage, who recently told Fox News that
European leaders are “terrified” about what Trump means for their
political union.
The EU, of course,
can’t be pried apart overnight. The union—a borderless political
and economic compact of 28 countries with a collective GDP of $16
trillion—is too large, its governments and economies too entangled.
But if momentum toward dissolution continues after Brexit, possibly
urged on by the United States, that too would be hard to reverse. The
shakeup of the postwar European project could be one of Trump’s
biggest legacies. Which is why European officials, former Obama
officials and trans-Atlantic experts are starting to consider how it
could really happen—and what the consequences for the world order
might be if its most stable and prosperous political alliance comes
undone.
***
Is that what Trump
wants? It is Trump and not Bannon who is, at least notionally, in
charge of U.S. foreign policy. But while vague, Trump’s own views
about Europe also clearly fall outside American norms. Trump’s
“America First” mantra implies a reduced U.S. commitment
overseas. He has suggested that NATO is both obsolete and a bad deal
for the American taxpayer, and in February, Defense Secretary James
Mattis issued an unprecedented warning that the United States would
“moderate its commitment” to the alliance if other members don’t
contribute more to its budget. Nor does Trump like complex trade
deals with multiple entities like the EU’s jumble of member states.
(Trump did unexpectedly tell an interviewer in late February that he
was “totally in favor of” the EU. But his rote language—“I
think it’s wonderful, if they’re happy”—left many observers
unconvinced.)
And then there is
Trump’s unhappy personal experience with the EU, in a place called
Doonbeg. In early 2014, Trump paid $15 million for an 18-hole golf
course in the seaside town on Ireland’s western coast. The course
and hotel, which Trump spent millions more to expand and upgrade,
sits on eroding sand dunes that he wanted to protect with a 15-foot
rock wall on the beach below. Locals fought the barrier, forcing
Trump to back down.
When Trump talks
about the barrier now, he frames it as a bitter parable about the
EU’s growth-killing bureaucracy. “I learned a lot because I got
the approvals very quickly from Ireland. … [But] to get the
approvals from the EU would have taken years,” Trump told the Times
of London in January. “I said forget it. I’m not gonna build it.
… I found it to be a very unpleasant experience.”
In fact, Trump’s
tale has little to do with the EU. It is true that one of several
objections involved the beach’s EU-approved status as a sanctuary
for a tiny endangered whorl snail. But the project never required
Brussels’ approval. As for Ireland’s government, it rejected a
petition to consider the dispute, leaving the matter to county
officials, who are now evaluating a proposal for a smaller barrier.
So while Trump might
lack clear policy goals, his visceral nationalism and disdain for
rule-making in Brussels make him a ready vessel for Bannon’s
world-historical ideas about the EU’s invidiousness. Bannon is a
wide reader with a deep interest in history; a Breitbart editor
recalled to the Los Angeles Times the “staggering collection of
books” on Bannon’s desk. Bannon takes a special interest in
Europe. In a 2014 speech to a European audience, he noted that the
next day was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the trigger for World War I and
what Bannon casually called “the end of the Victorian era.”
Bannon’s public
remarks, and accounts from people who have spoken with him, make
clear that he believes Brexit and Trump’s election are part of
something bigger, a global political revolt that could restore what
he calls lost “sovereignty” on the continent. “I think strong
countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong
neighbors,” Bannon told an audience of religious conservative
activists at the Vatican in 2014. “That is really the building
blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think
it’s what can see us forward.”
The notion that this
could happen—and that it might be a good thing—is a
whiplash-inducing reversal from decades of American foreign policy.
It has long been an article of faith in the West that a unified
Europe represents a historic triumph of diplomacy, in which America
itself has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of
lives. The EU has real flaws, to be sure: Its bureaucracy is
cumbersome; its common currency limits fiscal policy at times of
economic crisis; and its now virtually borderless interior left it
unable to control the huge influx of refugees from Syria and
elsewhere. But consider those flaws in the context of what the EU has
achieved: not just economic prosperity, but an end to the centuries
of horrific armed conflict.
To Bannon, however,
a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to civilization: a body
that dilutes national identity and whose border policies allow Islam
to invade the West, one refugee at a time. Bannon, who did not
respond to interview requests, has repeatedly made clear his views
about Europe. Most revealing is the widely read transcript of his
Vatican talk, in which Bannon declared that “the world, and
particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis.” Europe’s
citizens, he said, are restless for “sovereignty for their country,
they want to see nationalism.” And, Bannon added: “They don’t
believe in this kind of pan-European Union.”
To
Bannon, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to
civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border
policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time.
Bannon has also
expressed admiration for the reactionary French philosopher Charles
Maurras, according to French media reports confirmed by Politico.
Maurras, like Bannon, was a Catholic nationalist, and he argued in
the early 1900s that the Enlightenment had elevated the individual
over the nation. (One person who knows Bannon said he has spoken of
the coming end of the Enlightenment.) To Maurras, a hero of the
modern French right wing, the French Revolution ideals of “liberty,
equality and fraternity” were a liberal cosmopolitan corruption of
France’s authentic identity. Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras’
distinction between the “legal country,” led by elected
officials, and the “real country” of ordinary people, as a frame
for the populist revolt underway. Maurras even warned about the
nefarious influence of Islam in Europe.
As does Bannon. In
February, a Danish newspaper editor named Flemming Rose recounted in
the Huffington Post a conversation he had had with Bannon at a
private gathering in New York last spring. In what Rose described as
profane and “passionate” terms, Bannon “made it clear he had
lost faith in Europe as secularism and arriving Muslim immigrants had
eroded traditional Christian values as the founding pillar of our
civilization,” Rose wrote. “Losing the Christian faith, in his
view, has weakened Europe—it’s neither willing nor able to
confront Islam’s rising power and some European Muslims’
insistence on privileged treatment of their religion.”
Bannon’s solution?
Rebuilding the firm borders between European states—to keep the
Muslim immigrants out, and to keep in the religious and national
identity. “I have admired nationalist movements throughout the
world,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal shortly after the U.S.
election. “I have said repeatedly, strong nations make great
neighbors.”
But do they? Many a
European leader, not to mention historian, disagrees. Runaway
nationalism led to, among many other horribles, Franz Ferdinand’s
assassination and World War I, and gave us Hitler, Mussolini and
Milosevic. Those things, in turn, drew America’s military across
the Atlantic.
“I don’t get it.
Americans have spent a lot of their history either fighting against
Europeans or fighting on behalf of Europeans against other
Europeans,” says Charles Kupchan, who served until January as the
top official for European affairs at the Obama White House. “Anybody
who wants to bring Europe down risks putting us back in the 19th
century or the early 20th century.”
European officials
note that this happens to be a goal of Russia’s president, Putin,
who is busily undermining the post-Cold War internationalist order in
favor of a nationalistic, geography-based power politics. A U.S.
effort to dismantle the EU, one Western European government official
says with distaste, “would put America on the same side as Putin.”
The thought is
rattling Europe at the highest levels. In January, Donald Tusk, the
president of the EU’s European Council—who calls himself “an
incurably pro-American European who is fanatically devoted to
trans-Atlantic cooperation”—sent a letter to member states
characterizing the Trump administration as a menace to the Union,
alongside the likes of Russia and radical Islam. “[W]ith the new
administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of
American foreign policy,” Tusk wrote, America now had to be
considered not a stalwart friend of the EU but a “threat.”
Wolfgang Ischinger,
former German ambassador to the United States, put it in starker
terms in remarks at a February security conference in Munich attended
by top Trump officials. “Is President Trump going to continue a
tradition of half a century of being supportive of the project of
European integration, or is he going to continue to advocate EU
member countries to follow the Brexit example?” Ischinger asked.
“If he did that, it would amount to a kind of nonmilitary
declaration of war. It would mean conflict between Europe and the
United States. Is that what the U.S. wants?”
***
Seeking to allay
such anxieties, Vice President Mike Pence flew a few days later to
Brussels, the EU’s center of government, with a reassuring message.
“The United States is committed to continuing its partnership with
the European Union, and I wanted to make that very clear,” Pence
said.
But whatever solace
his words might have given to EU leaders was short-lived. The very
next day, Reuters reported that, shortly before Pence’s olive
branch to Brussels, Bannon had met with Germany’s ambassador to
Washington and sent a very different message by repeating his
idiosyncratic views about Europe. The White House downplayed the
conversation, confirmed by a source to Politico, as a quick hello.
But the encounter with Bannon affirmed fears in Germany’s
government that Europe must prepare for a policy of what an unnamed
source quoted by Reuters called “hostility towards the EU.”
A United States
hostile to the EU would be terrifying for Europe at any moment, but
never more so than right now. Economic weakness, a flood of refugees
and a drumbeat of Islamic State terrorism have combined to create
what Guy Verhofstadt calls “an existential crisis.” Making things
worse, the EU-bashing Marine Le Pen has a chance in France’s spring
presidential elections, while anti-EU candidates have gained traction
in the Netherlands, which votes in March, and Italy, which may call
elections this summer. In September, voters in the EU’s anchor
state, Germany, will deliver a verdict on Chancellor Angela Merkel, a
staunch defender of European unity whose popularity has severely
eroded in recent months.
Some European
leaders worry that Trump and Bannon could issue a de facto
endorsement of Le Pen, turbocharging her supporters and her media
coverage. In a post-election tweet, Le Pen’s niece Marion, who is
also a prominent member of her party, wrote cryptically that she
accepted Bannon’s alleged “invitation … to work together.” A
few weeks later, French officials were startled to learn that Marine
Le Pen had been seen in the lobby of Trump Tower, though a Trump
spokesman denied that she had taken any meetings there.
But tweets and photo
ops might not be where Trump could inflict the most damage. The White
House commands the awesome economic and political might of the United
States, and can employ that power as a sledgehammer against the
weakened, post-Brexit EU. “I think Brexit is going to be a
wonderful thing for your country,” Trump told Britain’s prime
minister, Theresa May, during her January visit to Washington. Last
year, Obama had tried to discourage Brexit by promising it would put
Britain “at the back of the queue” for American trade deals. Now
Trump was making clear that it had a place safely at the front.
“You’re going to be able to make your own trade deals without
having someone watching you,” Trump added.
Many European
leaders heard that as game theory. Signaling that he will reward
countries that turn away from a united Europe creates an incentive
for them to do so early. No one wants to be at the back of the queue.
Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, sees things the
same way: As one member of Congress who recently spoke with the
billionaire investor recounted his attitude, “Bilateral is where
we’re going. Why would we trade with seven countries at once?”
EU rules bar member
countries from striking up formal bilateral trade talks, but nothing
stops the kind of informal discussions May has begun with Trump. And
experts say there are plenty of other arrangements and loopholes that
Trump and Bannon could exploit to pit EU members against one another.
Trump
could even provoke a powerful backlash against Bannon’s anti-EU
project. The new American president is deeply unpopular in Europe.
“For an American
administration, breaking up the EU is like falling off a log. The
majority of EU countries value their relationship with the U.S. more
than they do with the EU, and are readily open to American requests
that would even run counter to the letter of their European
obligations,” Jeremy Shapiro says. That might apply to issues
beyond trade, he says, speculating that Trump could roil EU members
by rewarding some and punishing others with tax and immigration
policies. “It’s trivially easy,” Shapiro says. “If you
differentiated between countries, you could create a lot of damaging
tension within the EU.”
The Trump team is
already pressing on a purple bruise within the EU—the resentment of
its lesser members toward mighty Germany, whose economy dominates the
continent. “You look at the European Union, and it’s Germany.
Basically a vehicle for Germany,” Trump told the Times of London.
“That’s why I thought the U.K. was so smart in getting out.” A
few days later, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, piled on,
arguing in the Financial Times that Germany’s use of the common EU
currency, the euro, translates to an unfair trading edge. That Trump
and Navarro have keyed in on anti-German resentment reflects a savvy
understanding of the EU’s fault lines. Shapiro recalls meetings
between Obama officials and European counterparts, who initially
boasted about their unity. “Two or three meetings later, they’d
be talking about keeping Germany off the [United Nations] Security
Council,” he says.
***
Pressured by U.S.
trade deals, harassed by Russian hackers, sniped at by local
Breitbarts — does the EU stand a chance? Well, for now, yes.
Although this year’s elections could greatly empower anti-EU
nationalists, none is likely to trigger sudden Brexit clones. Even if
Le Pen were to win, she would be unlikely to gain the needed
parliamentary power for such a radical move. And while it will stun
Europe if Merkel loses her own parliamentary majority in September,
her right-wing rivals will be similarly limited. The same goes for
the Netherlands and Italy. Polls show that clear majorities across
Europe still support the EU. Modern Europe was built over 70 years
and won’t be easy to tear down in a presidential term.
Trump’s
unpopularity in Europe could even provoke a powerful backlash against
Bannon’s anti-EU project. In Germany, for instance, the surging
Social Democratic candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, has
positioned himself against Trump and invoked the memory of Germany’s
Nazi past. Trump’s “attacks on Europe are also attacks on
Germany,” Schulz said at a February rally. “In a time when the
world is drifting apart, in a time of Trumpism, we need values-based
cooperation of the democracies in Europe now more than ever.”
Several European
officials argued that attempts by Trump to meddle directly in their
electoral politics—by, say, tweeting support for a specific
candidate, like Le Pen or the Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders—would
likely backfire given the new president’s toxicity on the
continent. One person who has spoken at length to Trump and Bannon
about Europe told me Trump understands the risk of backlash from
openly backing populist European insurgents. “As far as Bannon,”
the person began, before trailing off and adding in a knowing tone,
“You’ll have to ask him.” Bannon could also get some help from
his old colleagues at Breitbart, which recently announced plans to
expand to Berlin and Paris. “The aim is to help elect right-wing
politicians in the two European countries,” Reuters reported,
citing sources “close to Bannon.”
At the top levels,
there are signs that the EU’s once-complacent leadership has
genuinely woken up to the realities of a Trump-and-Brexit world. In
Washington, the EU has kicked off a lobbying campaign to save itself.
In mid-January, dozens of foreign policy reporters gathered at an
elegant townhouse in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, so close
to Obama’s new home they had to walk through a police checkpoint.
Their host was the EU ambassador to Washington, Peter O’Sullivan.
As the influential guests enjoyed white wine and hors d’oeuvres,
the Irish-born O’Sullivan, who has the harried manner of a man
playing defense, delivered a short speech in defense of the embattled
institution he represents. He and his colleagues also held events at
both national party conventions this past summer, and at the EU
offices on Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor, visitors can
find a thick glossy brochure, “The European Union: A Guide For
Americans,” which explains the EU’s structure and functions, and
declares that the U.S.-EU partnership “is the single most important
driver of global economic growth, trade, and prosperity.”
In an interview at
his office, O’Sullivan dismissed the most alarmist talk of Trump’s
intentions as speculative and overblown. And, as at his evening
cocktail party, he addressed the idea of dismantling the EU in
Trump’s language: raw economics. “On the basest level, just look
at it from America’s self-interest,” he said, arguing that a
giant single market for American goods is the most profitable and
efficient arrangement. “Would it be in America’s interest to see
that fragmented to 28 separate markets?”
O’Sullivan seems
torn—between wanting to downplay the specter of imminent disaster
in the EU (which, after all, wants to be seen as a safe investment)
and reminding Euroskeptics that they are playing with matches in a
very dry forest. Brexit, he insists, was “a special situation,”
made possible by Britain’s long uncertain relationship with the
European continent. And he predicts that the EU can calm populist
anger with gradual reforms to its immigration and border policies.
When pressed,
however, O’Sullivan admits that the alternatives can get dangerous
fast. “Anyone who would support a more assertive national identity
in Europe has not read their history,” he says. “It doesn’t
take long for people to say, we’re better than you.” Nationalist
leaders in Europe will likely be quick to take up the cause of ethnic
kin who live on the other side of foreign borders, some of which were
disputed for centuries before the EU diminished their importance. The
notion raises the specter of nationalist conflicts around Europe
similar to implosion of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s—conflicts
that ended only after major American interventions. A small crack
opened by preferential American trade or tax policy, with the help of
some Russian meddling, could widen to a chasm with alarming speed.
“Before you call
for France and Germany to go their separate ways, you better think
about the longer-term consequences,” says Kupchan, the former Obama
official. “Otherwise, we may be sending some armored divisions back
that way.”
Authors:
Michael Crowley
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