Should Europe still rely on American protection?
The outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel warned Europe in 2018 not to take American military protection for granted. If Donald Trump regains the Whitehouse in 2024 there is even more reason to strengthen our own forces than there was in 2018.
This week I watched Angela Merkel hand over the German chancellorship to Olaf Scholz. In good European tradition Merkel wished her successor all the best and he thanked her for her great service and leadership. Nothing remarkable there, unless you compare it to the last transition of power in the United States. The outgoing president refused to admit defeat and did not attend the inauguration of his successor.
Early in his presidency, Donald Trump made his European allies uneasy by casting doubt on American willingness to come to their aid, in the event of an attack. Angela Merkel told a rally in Munich in 2018 that “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.”
Until that point the United States had been the benevolent guarantor of peace and democratic governance both in Europe and elsewhere. President Ronald Reagan even characterized his country as a “shining city on a hill” for the world to admire, be inspired by and follow.
The present American political discourse leaves little to admire. When Barak Obama became president, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said that the single most important task for the Republican Party was to make sure Obama became a one-term president. The way to do that was to vote against all his proposals.
The British opposition is often referred to as Her Majesty´s Most Loyal Opposition. The political debate can be fierce and opinions vary greatly as to the action needed, but no one doubts that both sides in Parliament has the good of the country and its people at heart.
This is no longer the case in the United States. The losing party will now try to make the country as ungovernable as possible, and then blame the government for the state of affairs.
And it seems to be getting worse. Several commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post are worried about the activities in several state legislatures, including Georgia and Texas, where laws have been passed restricting voting opportunities and strengthening the candidates right to challenge the elections result with claims of fraud, as well as the means for overturning the results of the election.
The commentators are suspecting that the Republicans are preparing for the presidential election in 2024. In 2020 Donald Trump tried to persuade election officials such as Georgia`s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11.000 votes in order to overturn the election result. Raffensperger refused, but next time the election officials may not be as independent and powerful as they are now. Trump, not having ruled out a run for the presidency in 2024, is still insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Many voters agree with the former president.
In their book Peril the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa describe in detail the events on 6. January, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, in order to stop the formal procedures making Joe Biden the 46th president of the United States. As they end the book, they quote Trump´s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale on Trump´s prospect for a comeback in 2024: “I don´t think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance.”
In such a scenario, European leaders, as well as voters, may want to heed Angela Merkel´s warning in 2018. It may be time to take Europe´s future in our own hands.
