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HP's avatar
Jul 18Edited

The idea that the Trump regime hates Europe because it sees us as squandering a common culture is intriguing, but is there any proof that would be its main motivation? To me it looks like the regime hates Europe because we stand for liberal and democratic values that it rejects. Trump likes dictators because they recognise the legitimacy of his self-image as “boss”, whereas we will always see him as ideologically illegitimate and legally suspect. That familiarity breeds contempt is certainly very true; you can only really resent and even hate someone whom you understand and offers a plausible countermodel. The best comparison is Russian Europhobia. What is also pretty self-evident and you do not remark upon, is that MAGA looks very Eastern European and is ironically a major turn away from American (and to a slightly lesser extent Western European) political tradition. In a sense the US right is more understandable to us than the US left and its identity politics, as the transatlantic confusion over the word “liberal” demonstrates. Trump might turn out to be the indispensable wake-up call that Europe needs. It is true that the power differential has grown and we need to address it urgently. But even at the present moment we are uniquely placed to harm the US economically and politically. The more pressure Trump puts on us, the less reason there is not to. In other words the real question is not the power differential but the Trump regime’s ability to take pain. That seems actually pretty limited, as the Chinese have demonstrated.

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