The world looks a little different from Iowa and New Hampshire than it does from Brussels. Republican Party supporters in both US states recently chose the somewhat erratic amateur geographer Donald Trump as their favorite for the presidential race. He thinks very highly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the EU’s little “dictator” (quote from former Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker), but in October last year he still suspected that the Hungarian was leading Turkey, which borders Russia.
Orbán’s wish to Trump: “Come back, Mr. President!”
Of course, Turkey does not share a land border with Russia, but both states, like Ukraine, border the Black Sea. Orbán, on the other hand, can be said to be close to Russia, but not a common Hungarian-Russian border.
The Prime Minister of Hungary, who is the only head of government in the EU to still shake hands with Russian warlord Vladimir Putin, would not have the slightest objection to Trump’s second term in office and has already encouraged him: “Come back, Mr. President! Make America great again and bring us peace!”
Peace overnight – on Russia’s terms
In the White House, where he could sit again in January next year, Trump wants to make good on his bold announcement that peace will return to Ukraine within 24 hours. Rachel Thousandfreund, an expert on transatlantic relations at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), sees good reason to believe “that Trump would end US support for Ukraine and push for a quick agreement without caring much about Ukrainian territorial losses.” .
In a GMF analysis, Thousandfriend also judged that Trump could not remove the USA from NATO because that would not be possible without the support of the US Parliament. However, he could “neglect and undermine” the alliance in favor of bilateral agreements.
Trump 2.0 would mean new punitive tariffs and uncertainty about NATO
In his first term in office, Trump spread uncertainty about whether the Western leading power, the USA, would actually keep its NATO support promise if the worst came to the worst. He also expressed disturbing views about the EU, considering it an “enemy” when it came to trade policy. New American punitive tariffs on foreign products are expected if he becomes president for a second time.
While Orbán, who understands Putin, seems to be looking forward to Trump 2.0, this scenario is giving others nightmares. The President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, told the French television channel “France 2 TV”: “If we want to draw the lessons from history, I mean the way he managed the first four years of his term in office then that is a clear threat.”
EU wants to “arm itself” for Trump
The “Handelsblatt” was frightened: “If Trump succeeds in returning to the White House, there is a risk of unbridled politics at all levels, with autocratic features.” The news portal “Politico” even wanted to panic in Europe about the prospect of four more years of Trump have perceived.
But Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, whose country took over the rotating presidency of the European Council at the turn of the year, said in front of the European Parliament about a possible Trump comeback: “Europeans should not be afraid of this prospect. We should prepare ourselves for this.”
Merz for “Plan B without America”
The FDP’s top candidate in the European elections, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, complained during a visit to Brussels that the EU had not managed to seriously address the question of Trump’s re-election for three and a half years. The imponderables of the consequences of the US election on November 5th led CDU leader Friedrich Merz to resort to a comparison that recalls the situation before the First World War. Merz told the “Table Media” portal that the EU and especially Germany’s preparation for a revenant Trump in the White House was “careless” and ignored “a Plan B without America”.
Merz also criticized the fact that one had to ask the question regarding the federal government: “Have they actually understood what is currently happening in the world?” And then he added: “For me it has something like a sleepwalker.” “The sleepwalkers” – this is the title of the successful title of the Australian historian Christopher Clark, in which he described how the European powers stumbled into the meat grinder of trench warfare in 1914 through a mixture of political blindness, a lack of assessment of the consequences and arrogance.
Call for a European atomic bomb
Europe is still not accomplishing much together militarily, while Russia has apparently shifted entirely to aggressive imperialism. Without America’s protective hand, the EU states appear to be at the mercy of Moscow. Only one of them, France, is a nuclear power. However, the French nuclear arsenal cannot be compared to that of Russia. The same applies to the second European power with nuclear weapons, Great Britain.
The German historian Herfried Münkler called in several media outlets to think about having our own European nuclear force – in order to be prepared for the eventuality of the US nuclear umbrella being eliminated. He designed the construct of a nuclear suitcase with the red button that travels between several European states, including Germany – a thought experiment about a transatlantic “Trump-ocalypse” (“Politico”).