Divergent Interests

The mainstream liberal and center-right press howled against alleged mistakes on the part of the US president, who they portrayed as insufficiently briefed and scornful of expertise. Ahead of the summit the Financial Times warned that Trump would suffer having made cuts to the National Security Council, which would ordinarily prepare extensively for such an encounter. Such reputable journals went on to conclude that Putin, a master manipulator, had indeed toyed with Trump.

These criticisms of the president’s personal style, as ever, serve to fill the gaps in the confused worldview of the declining liberal establishment. Or perhaps they are now euphemisms for what cannot be admitted in public: that Trump is not mistaken, but merely pursuing interests at odds with those of the US’s NATO allies.

What the Alaska summit reflected, in its ostentatious bilateralism, is the possibility that both the United States and Russia can be victors in the Ukraine war, so long as Europe and Ukraine can be made to foot the bill in defeat. And this seems to be the direction of travel. Russia aims for territory and a settlement on the political status of Ukraine. The United States wants, and has already largely secured, greater control over European states and markets.

This is less a true convergence of interests between the United States and Russia, than a chance meeting on separate paths. We should not overstate this coincidence as some kind of deep realignment. The United States and Russia remain competitors and antagonists, locked in a very real proxy war.

Nonetheless, it is necessary to strip away the mystification of a contiguous “West” bound not just by political, military and economic relations, but also by some kind of transcendent civilizational mission. More clearly than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and perhaps since decolonization, “the West” reveals its character as a collection of competing capitalist states with divergent interests. What sometimes appears as their unity is in fact the domination of the United States, by far its most powerful and aggressive party. From Trump’s conspicuous humiliation of his NATO allies, vivified at the subsequent Washington summit when they were packed in like sardines at every opportunity, it is clear that the relative and managed decline of the United States is being outpaced by the chaotic decline of Europe.

It is common by now to note the disorientation of European liberalism in the face of these events. It has been badly out of joint for a decade or more. But the ascendant forces of the European authoritarian right are no less confused for being too much part of the zeitgeist. Many of its leading lights foam stupidly about how great the vibes are, oblivious to the fact that Trumpism and European nationalisms are natural antagonists. Or they would be, if this nationalism was in fact a quest for sovereignty. As Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has demonstrated, these supposed defenders of European culture seem perfectly happy to be trampled under US power, in much the same way as the liberals they overthrew.

In the meantime, both centrist disorientation and the new right’s ascendancy is strengthening the United States’ grip on Europe. As one EU source briefed Politico: “If one considers how politically weak Macron and Starmer are, it is not easy to see how this plan [to give security guarantees to Ukraine] will go.” Like ouroboros, Europe is eating itself. US subjugation feeds the Ukraine war, failure in the war feeds political instability, and instability feeds subjugation. Socially and economically, the continent is stagnant, angry and dysfunctional. As governments respond with increasingly authoritarian measures, this only further propels decline.

Multipolarity

This summer of court antics should give us cause to reexamine what we mean by multipolarity. Just as some theorists at the end of the Cold War mythologized globalization as a smooth, contiguous space in which capitalist relations would demolish the unsightly carbuncles of history, such as fractional interests and inter-state conflict, so now it would be possible to project the obverse: multipolarity as some pluralistic global democracy, with a rich diversity of regional orders and powers. But if anyone imagined that multipolarity would mean the emergence of Europe as a more autonomous actor, they would be disappointed.

We should learn to expect apparent paradoxes: in this case, that the retreat of US hegemony may actually mean the deepening of US domination in parts of the world system where its grip is firmest. The challenge of Russia to this domination is also one side of a vice, driving US allies harder into the Atlantic embrace. This casts new light on debates from the turn of the century about the extent of US hegemony over allied states, what Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin expressed as the superintendence of global capitalism. Then, the debate was whether more traditional forms of inter-imperial competition still persisted between the United States and its strongest allies, such as Japan and Germany. Now we can see that such a conflict need not only be measured in the resistance of the allies, but the predation of the United States. The divergence in interests between Washington and European capitals is quite clear, even the latter have their spines missing. The old format of superintendence is being traded out for something more savage.

Multipolarity means a new global architecture in which great powers intensify competition over regional influence, while simultaneously courting local players whose bargaining position increases in consequence. But this will not be some kind of liberation. It will be hard fought, and tightly managed, not least by the United States itself. The tail of US relative decline is likely to be long, owing to that power’s accumulated advantages. In the meantime, it will use this lingering strength to reshape the changing world, scoping out new opportunities and manipulating crises as they arise.

So far, this has involved an accelerated pivot to China and the Pacific theater, dependent on a reorganization of politics on two important fronts. In the Middle East, this means the attempt to construct a caretaker alliance between Israel and the Arab Gulf states. This remains a troubled and chaotic project, as the slaughter in Gaza and the wider Israeli rampage, supported by the United States and European allies, attest.

Trump has found more ready success in Europe, where NATO operates as an extractor of tribute, and state elites have become acclimatized over decades to forms of member-statehood that alienate sovereignty the better to discipline the working class. The United States has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to put its allies through a mangle. To guarantee the continued flow of arms to Ukraine, European leaders must remilitarize the continent and trade on terms favorable to the United States. Following the harsh Turnberry deal, the Washington meeting secured a further $100 billion of purchases in US arms from the beleaguered Ukrainians, financed by the European allies. It’s not enough that European NATO members have already pledged to spend a massive 5 percent of GDP by 2035 on remilitarization. The United States’ cyclical economy of warmongering, arms sales and debt farming would be comical if its consequences were not so appalling.

European Question

Notwithstanding the real material bind in which the Europeans find themselves, no one forced the continent’s incompetent and vainglorious political heads to so fully commit themselves to the war in the east. The hysterical early reception of the Russian invasion, witnessing an internationally coordinated propaganda offensive, encouraged a generation of leaders to mortgage their already slim credibility on achieving a clear-cut victory that was always unlikely. Governments that were accustomed, at most, to waging predatory expeditionary wars against remote and impoverished enemies, have been taken aback by their enemy’s persistence, whatever the failures of Russian arms. A sociological dynamic is at play, too. European states, with degraded public spheres and resentful publics, have produced an artless, unimaginative crop of politicians from a narrow social base. None of them, apparently, understood the lobster trap they were waddling into.

What we can call the “European Question” has become permanent and inescapable in every national context. The eurozone crisis was not a bump on the road of the historic consolidation of the continent, finally emerging from its youthful era of imperialist rivalry and war. Instead, the post–Cold War EU was a hubristic utopian scheme, very much of its time. Greece, Brexit, the Ukraine war, and German industrial decline are not isolated calamities, but part of a wider picture of systemic dysfunction that shows no signs of abating.

This meltdown presents opportunities to a radical left willing to take them. With both the old establishment and the new right paralyzed by the problem of US domination, a political force willing to break the common omertà would possess a real advantage. But this would mean ditching the confusions with which so many on the Left greeted the outbreak of war. Far too often, the Left has simply joined an unnatural silence around a massive, bloody, conventional war raging on the European continent. A war of a kind we were told had been banished forever by NATO, the EU, and the benign influence of the United States. To answer the European Question, we must begin by demanding an end to the war in Ukraine and an end to the wider push to rearmament, with all its terrible and mounting costs.