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
