As 2023 draws to a close, a spectre haunts Europe — the spectre of Donald Trump returning to the White House in the US Presidential elections at the end of 2024. Although there is more than a year before the next President is installed (in January 2025), the prospects of the re-election of Trump, whose hostility to NATO is intense, are sending a shiver down the spine of Europe.
Whether Trump can beat the incumbent President Joe Biden or not, the Republican Party is making it clear that support for Ukraine and, more broadly, European security is diminishing in Washington. The Biden administration is scrambling to win Republican support to keep the aid pipeline open to Ukraine this week.
If American politics has entered uncharted waters, there are no doubts about the re-election of Vladimir Putin for a fifth term as Russian president in March 2024. Together, political volatility in America and stability in Putin’s Russia will sharpen Europe’s geopolitical challenges in 2024. Even if Biden wins the election again, the Republican weight in Congress will ensure that there will be no consensus on Russia in Washington.
Europe, too, is set to elect a new parliament in June 2024, and a new European Commission will be in place at the end of the year. The Commission is the executive arm of the 27-member European Union. When she took charge as the President of the European Commission in December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen talked about building a geopolitically savvy Europe. But Europe has struggled to cope with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the first major armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Although it has managed the breakdown in its energy and economic relationship with Russia, Europe’s weakness in the security domain has been severely exposed by Russia. The US had to do much of the heavy lifting on the military assistance to Ukraine.
Europe’s inability to defend itself is a major vulnerability that will be magnified by political volatility in the US and the consolidation of Putin’s power after a few shaky moments in 2023. Although Russia has suffered many setbacks in the initial phases of the war, it has built a successful line of defence in eastern Ukraine, absorbed the Ukrainian counter-offensive, and could even be poised to make a few attacking moves of its own.
To be sure, Russia has suffered immense losses of military men and hardware in the war. However, its large size and the full mobilisation of its military-industrial complex have allowed Russia to sustain a prolonged war. Russia has also managed to limit the damage from Western economic sanctions, and its economy is back on the growth path. The hope that external pressures will either induce internal change in Russia or isolate Moscow in the world has turned out to be unrealistic.
Putin’s newfound self-assurance contrasts with the troubles his counterpart in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has begun to confront. Zelenskyy, who was hailed as a rare real-life hero in 2022 for rallying Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion, is now struggling to sustain both domestic and international support. Ukraine has already paid a huge price — in terms of its shattered economy and ruined cities — for its effort to take back territories occupied by Russia after February 2022. Although Ukraine regained some of those territories in late 2022, it has been hard to make additional gains in 2023.
Meanwhile, Israel’s war in Gaza has pushed Ukraine off the headlines. The European call for moral and political condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks less urgent amidst the unfolding humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. Even more consequentially, the Middle East has returned to occupy the American mind-space and its weapons depot. As inevitable war weariness envelops Ukraine, the sentiment in favour of peace negotiations is growing within the nation. Meanwhile, there is a growing war fatigue in Europe. If Europe’s hopes for a short war in Ukraine have been dashed, it appears utterly unprepared for a long one.
The initial political unity displayed against Russia in early 2022 is yielding place to divisions. The political divide is not just between the old (Western) and the new (east and central Europe) that have long argued about Russia and its role in regional security — if the former was willing to see Russia as a partner, the latter located on Moscow’s western periphery see it as an enduring threat.
But, it is Hungary — at the heart of Middle Europe — that is challenging Western support to Ukraine. At last week’s European summit, Hungary could not stop the EU from opening a membership track to Kyiv, but blocked the aid package of 50 billion Euros to Ukraine.
Europe’s problem is not limited to Hungarian dissidence in Ukraine. The opposition to the war in Ukraine and the empathy for Russia are only a part of the emerging right-wing internationalism in the West. There are growing trans-Atlantic links between sections of the Republican Party, on the one hand, and the far-right parties in Europe and Putin’s Russia, on the other. What binds them is the rejection of the “woke” Western nostrums on open borders, fluid genders, and secularism and the embrace of Christian nationalism, traditional culture, and conservative social values.
For Putin, divisions within Europe and across the Atlantic are the key to restoring Russia to its rightful place in the European order. If his Ukraine invasion in 2022 saw Europe come together, his ability to withstand the Western pressures in 2023 has thrown open the geopolitical future of Europe.
If Putin’s strategy demands a deepening of the intra-European and trans-Atlantic tensions on Ukraine and other issues, the EU needs to find ways to dampen those tensions. Europe is far from becoming a coherent geopolitical actor, but it is easy to underestimate its resilience.
For both Moscow and Brussels, the main geopolitical variable is in Washington. That is where Trump comes in. Although Trump’s political persona is widely reviled in the US and beyond, there is no doubt that his first term has forced the US to rethink its policies on China and economic globalisation. The Biden Administration has not departed from that course. In other words, Trump has been the instrument for a rearrangement of US national consensus on two key issues.
Could Trump’s re-election in 2024, or the very prospect of his resurrection, do something similar for trans-Atlantic relations and European security?
Any rearrangement of Europe will involve three big questions. Can Russia be accommodated in a new European order that will ensure the security of Russia as well as guarantee the sovereignty of its Western neighbours, including Ukraine? Can Europe pay for its own defence and liberate America to cope with the security challenges in Asia? Is there room for a global compact between Washington and Moscow? Whatever the answers to these questions, Europe’s geopolitical future might look quite unlike the recent past.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
Political unity against Russia in early 2022 is yielding place to divisions
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20.12.2023
As 2023 draws to a close, a spectre haunts Europe — the spectre of Donald Trump returning to the White House in the US Presidential elections at the end of 2024. Although there is more than a year before the next President is installed (in January 2025), the prospects of the re-election of Trump, whose hostility to NATO is intense, are sending a shiver down the spine of Europe.
Whether Trump can beat the incumbent President Joe Biden or not, the Republican Party is making it clear that support for Ukraine and, more broadly, European security is diminishing in Washington. The Biden administration is scrambling to win Republican support to keep the aid pipeline open to Ukraine this week.
If American politics has entered uncharted waters, there are no doubts about the re-election of Vladimir Putin for a fifth term as Russian president in March 2024. Together, political volatility in America and stability in Putin’s Russia will sharpen Europe’s geopolitical challenges in 2024. Even if Biden wins the election again, the Republican weight in Congress will ensure that there will be no consensus on Russia in Washington.
Europe, too, is set to elect a new parliament in June 2024, and a new European Commission will be in place at the end of the year. The Commission is the executive arm of the 27-member European Union. When she took charge as the President of the European Commission in December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen talked about building a geopolitically savvy Europe. But Europe has struggled to cope with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the first major armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Although it has managed the breakdown in its energy and economic relationship with Russia,........
© Indian Express
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