Trump’s
victory has fractured the western order – leaving Brexit Britain badly exposed
Rafael Behr
To navigate
the dangerous new era, Keir Starmer must end the culture of denial around the
biggest strategic mistake of modern times
Wed 13 Nov
2024 07.00 CET
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/13/donald-trump-keir-starmer-britain-brexit
The 35th
anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was not commemorated much in Britain
last weekend. It is no Poppy Day. The unravelling of the iron curtain doesn’t
compete with Remembrance Sunday for cultural resonance. But it is more relevant
to the world we live in today. More poignant, too, now that Americans have
chosen a president who is no friend of what used to be called the west.
Few world
leaders will be gladder to see Donald Trump return to the White House than the
former KGB officer who sits in the Kremlin, craving vengeance for his Soviet
motherland’s humiliating defeat in the cold war.
Vladimir
Putin can’t restore the old superpower parity with the US, but he can make
European democrats fear Moscow again. He can proselytise for a vicious strain
of authoritarian nationalism that suffocates liberal norms and undermines
multilateral institutions wherever it takes hold. That malevolent spirit has
usurped orthodox conservatism as the driving force of rightwing politics on
both sides of the Atlantic. Expressed in the Trump vernacular, it appeals to
more Americans than the idea of Kamala Harris as president.
American
democracy won’t suddenly perish. The system that put Trump in power can remove
him, as it has before. Resistance to tyranny is enshrined in law and embedded
in US culture, but fastidious political vandalism can dismantle those
protections. Trump will enter the Oval Office with a more systematic programme
of constitutional subversion than he had the first time around. He has tech
oligarchs onside. He can nobble referees in the information arena.
The
governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological
faith and corruption, held together by favours, a personality cult and
paranoia. It will be a dogmatic kleptocracy where people who know how to spout
the right beliefs to the right people will get lucrative jobs and contracts.
Such regimes normalise the hypocrisy of plundering a nation while claiming to
make it stronger. There are no contradictions or shame when submitting to the
will of the leader is synonymous with doctrinal correctness.
For the
people who benefit from such a system, election defeat represents not only a
loss of income but a threat of judicial investigation under a new president. It
isn’t only that they despise democracy. They don’t want to go to jail. The
apparatus of free and fair voting has to be subverted.
It will be
harder to pull that off in the US than it was in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or
in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done,
especially when the Republicans control the Senate and the supreme court, while
the opposition are demoralised and divided.
If it works,
Trump’s inauguration will be remembered as the setting of a sun that rose over
Berlin 35 years ago. The ideas that won the cold war will no longer prevail in
Washington. The Trumpian right still sometimes identifies itself with something
called “the west”, but in its mouth it is a crusade to protect white
Christendom from mass migration, not liberal pluralism or the rule of law.
The abrasive
reality of a post-west America will take some getting used to. It represents an
acute crisis for Britain, which counts the US as its paramount defence and
security partner, while relying on European trade for its prosperity.
Once upon a
time, that was a geopolitical balance with huge benefits. The UK was
Washington’s best friend in Brussels and Europe’s hotline to the White House.
Surrendering that status made Brexit a terrible idea in 2016. It hasn’t aged
well.
It leaves
Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start. He will
also make Europe less secure. The variables are quite how little he cares for
Nato, how much he will appease Putin, how spiteful he will be to EU leaders and
how contagious his politics will be in continental elections.
This puts
Keir Starmer in an invidious position. Powerful currents of realpolitik demand
intimacy with any US administration, regardless of how repulsive the incumbent
president might be. Righteous decoupling is not a serious option when national
security interests are densely interwoven. But as the price of keeping that
relationship sweet, Trump will demand vassalage, which will complicate
Starmer’s ambition for closer European ties.
Britain
could carry on pursuing a new security deal with the EU, while grovelling for
special exemption from US tariffs. Maybe Starmer has steady enough hands to
thread that needle. But just the hint of alignment with Trump will sour any
conversation about easing UK access to the single market.
There will
be pressure from all sides for Britain to spend more on defence faster. But the
growth models on which Rachel Reeves’s budget is built have already been
scrambled by the prospect of rising protectionism. And that is before Trump
unleashes chaos by trying to stamp down the US trade deficit with China.
It is still
early days. No 10 is understandably reluctant to give a running commentary on
events. So far, it has all been conventional diplomatic platitudes.
Inscrutability is Starmer’s default style. He doesn’t busk, especially when the
stakes are high.
But there is
a cost to pretending that not much has really changed. No one buys it. Labour’s
foreign policy blew up on 5 November. Plan A was a version of the old
mid-Atlantic bridge role that wasn’t wholly convincing to begin with. It relied
on the pretence that Brexit was something that happened once in the past, a
page that has been turned. In truth, it is a nagging, self-aggravating injury
to the country’s strategic position. Without some acknowledgment of that
reality, it is impossible to give a meaningful or honest account of the choices
that lie ahead.
Labour had
compelling electoral motives not to go there in opposition. There are plenty of
people around Starmer who still see Brexit through that lens, as a conversation
to be shut down for fear of upsetting swing voters; a domestic scab not to be
picked.
But Trump’s
victory reinfects the wound. It leaves Britain looking friendless in the
post-western world. The shortage of good options isn’t a reason to pretend
there isn’t an emergency. Squirming and cavilling around Britain’s biggest
strategic blunder in a hundred years is not a sustainable path.
It is hardly
a secret that Starmer thought it was a stupid idea at the time. And yet, such
is the deep perversity of British political debate over Europe that the only
permissible terms are dictated by the people who were proved completely wrong.
Having been right all along is considered a weakness and a prohibition on
telling it how it is.
Now, once
again, the prime minister faces a blank page where Britain’s role in the world
must be written. The policy of not daring to name the problem has failed to
deliver workable solutions. Perhaps it is time to start afresh, this time from
the truth.
Rafael Behr
is a Guardian columnist
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