A year and a half ago, the insightful liberal columnist Janan Ganesh offered a prediction in the Financial Times. Dodging the campaign rhetoric, he pointed out that Europe could probably handle Donald Trump becoming president again. Ganesh mused about NATO that “Trump would be willing to sell it out for a buck. But he can be persuaded not to for a buck, too.” His words proved prescient. The very next year, Donald Trump racked up defense spending promises from NATO’s allies that made Joe Biden’s vaunted European meetings (the ones his staff weren’t covering up his inability to attend, at least) look less like a “Zeitenwende” and more like the bare minimum in retrospect.
Ganesh was right. It is well known that President Donald Trump is searching for a legacy. He is also trying, like his predecessor Joe Biden, to find a reasonable conclusion to the Russo-Ukrainian war. To many liberal critics and a few paleoconservative ones, this is an outrageous claim of continuity to propose between the previous Democratic president and the current Republican one. But the most extreme doubt was always a frenzied conspiracy theory on the campaign trail, if briefly fashionable with some intelligent and foolish people. The record of Trump 1 and Trump 2 on Europe so far has proven the election propaganda wrong time and time again.
Donald Trump is not simplemindedly abandoning Ukraine (which he armed to the teeth in his first term while demanding Europe’s leaders untangle themselves from Russian energy), but triangulating between European desires for him to be a good Atlanticist and European desires for America to take up the bill of enforcing European security and whatever borders the Russo-Ukrainian war ends with. These are not the same thing. Nor is talking about your shared values and getting Germany (the continent’s largest economy and most important nation) to uncap its debt limit on defense. President Biden talked plenty about shared values with European leaders while admirably trying to triangulate Ukrainian nationalist demands for support. But he never sufficiently focused on Germany, the most important nation in Europe. Values are important, but they cannot replace actual nations and their decisions.
Donald Trump is a nationalist who talks mostly about transactions. Accordingly, he has been ruthless in his political dealings across the Atlantic. His maneuvers on the Ukraine matter effectively scared the German Green Party into reforming the military debt limit with a conservative German Chancellor, against the principles of their whole party history. Trump was certainly ruder than a Democratic president would be to center-left politicians in Europe. But since they (like most American Democrats) are uninterested in sustained defense spending on its own terms, his demand had the benefit of working. Trump’s team understands that putting America First is not the same as putting America alone. Ganesh could have written as much given his wise column’s concluding line: “The ultimate rule of negotiating with Trump is that no one will be worse at it than an intellectual.”
Unfortunately, a similarly dismal read applies to Janan Ganesh this last June. The very same week his newspaper reported on the new European defense budget goals, Ganesh was blowing the dust off Robert Kagan’s 2003 book, as if a neoconservative thesis from two decades ago1, and not the current American president, had just forced the Atlantic alliance towards a stronger path to put money where its mouth is. Two weeks ago, Ganesh went a step further and decided to become an outright parody of a liberal intellectual columnist altogether. “The worst of all worlds is one in which Trump blows hot and cold, and we are living in it.”
The old saying goes that a liberal won’t take his own side in an argument. Ganesh, always more creative than the average liberal pundit, demanded reality to undo his vindicated prediction. He writes as if Trump should abandon Europe’s defense at once so he may have a comfortable room temperature. “[Europe] might fail, of course, but there could be little doubt what should be done,” proclaimed Ganesh in ridiculous demand for clarity. What the wisest liberal columnist at the Financial Times is saying is that he, precisely like he imagines Trump to be, is so obsessed with good headlines that he would rather entertain disaster.
How to explain this alternating prescience and parochialism of a liberal intellectual2 on Trump’s handling of Atlantic affairs? We should not make too much of columnists. To focus on this liberal folly as the matter of debate is a mistake when the future of Atlanticism is up in the air. In order to understand Trump and his potential legacy3, one must delve into history and compare him to past political figures in the West, a community of nations that NATO was created to defend. It is the historic role of larger than life characters in our collective past, not their psychological motives or ideological descriptions, that might best predict Trump’s legacy. I firmly believe this man’s potential greatness or failure lies in Europe more than most of us could predict a decade ago.
In realizing this spirit of the times, I plan to publish three essays comparing Trump to other Gonzo Atlanticists who, like Trump, employed curious and controversial tactics to maneuver the issues of their day. The essays will be of sufficient length to inform, but also sufficient brevity to convince. They will be released each week on Friday. The three men of the Gonzo Atlanticism I will compare with Trump are:
Theodore Roosevelt, Right-wing Progressive and 26th President of the United States
Joseph McCarthy, World War 2 Marine and Republican Senator of Wisconsin
Franz Josef Strauss, West German leader of Bavaria and Dreamer of Greater Europe
From New York, to Wisconsin, to Bavaria, I’ve found the tradition of reconciling domestic right-wing politics and trans-Atlantic internationalism is actually a bit more strange and winding than any of us realize. It’s time for a conservative theory of how the West formed itself out of the ashes of two horrific wars in the 20th century, and how politicians on the right should envision America and Europe in the future. Whether one supported Biden or Trump, we must admit, the destiny of America and Europe hangs in the balance, waiting for a Grand Design to address its crisis. History, not newspaper headlines, will have to be our guide.
In general, neocons are overrated as a foreign policy actors. The real actors in the Bush 43 admin’s decisions didn’t care for labels. The main cause of Bush 43’s bad foreign policy was smart alumni from Bush 41’s foreign policy team obsessed with Saddam Hussein, not paeans to building liberal democracy, which as Tanner Greer has documented, only came after the invasion took place on nationalist grounds. None of this changes the often omitted fact that one of the best things Donald Trump ever (unthinkingly) did was end the careers of people who made bad judgement calls in the Bush 43 admin. This was accomplished by permanently alienating most of them (the one who wrote a parody of Machiavelli’s The Prince on men’s clothing got to stay for a while) from the Republican party’s foreign policy staffers.
I’m being generous here in picking Ganesh. I haven’t bothered to list the stupider hot air said about Trump and Russia over the last eight years. We’ll just say most liberal pundits are worse than Ganesh on average, who is good at avoiding many of the bien-pensant liberal takes on Trump or Biden and offers reasonable predictions about his home country’s Labour party while calling out indulgent left-wing advice for them. You should read Janan Ganesh, and given the landscape of opinion journalism, you could do a lot worse.
Careful readers will notice this is not a straightforward pro-Trump argument. The historical greatness or evil of a man depends on both his character and his fortune to address the moment. Any definitive conclusion for or against Trump in foreign affairs is, almost by definition, premature.