Oportet ut scandala eveniant

Europeans rightly loathe Trump's behaviour but do they want to stop the war?

Commentators on my scribblings here often contact me by email rather than in the comment thread. This piece from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica was sent by a much-respected friend, presumably because it summed up his thoughts on what he called the “Gunfight at the Oval Office”, referring to the Trump/Vance drive-by shooting of President Zelensky. I reproduce it here because I think the sentiments are echoed by many on the left this week.

However, my own thoughts on re-reading it are primarily frustration at the lack of any coherent solution to the crisis or practical proposals to stop the killing. The left is very good at invective, and everyone agrees that Trump is a beast, and that his “transactional” resource grab is distasteful - though seeking material advantage through conflict is hardly unique in the history of US foreign policy. However, like many European commentators, Massimo Giannini, who is deputy editor of La Repubblica , is infuriatingly vague on what he would actually do to stop the war in Ukraine—that is, if he really does want to stop it. It’s not entirely clear from this that he does. As so often with these wordy excoriations, which I seem to have been reading for the last 40 years, hyperbolic rhetoric betrays a want of clarity. Here he is on Maga man.

“Trump's constitutional butchery and Musk's digital hypnocracy, already successfully tested on the native forgotten man and now conveyed across the Atlantic through the fascist and neo-Nazi right.”

I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I admit that it sounds good. The forgotten man was a phrase Roosevelt used to refer to the ordinary joe, the man in the street.

“What is our destiny”, Mr Giannini asks, presumably calling on Europeans to act.

“Do we prefer to be the "object" of the great global partition, ceding sovereignty and dignity, or do we want to become the "subject" of international politics, reaffirming the values of our civilisation? Do we choose to be "protagonists", claiming History and memory, or do we only ask to remain "protected", lulling ourselves into the usual happy vassalage in the shadow of the resurrected Empires?

Again, I’m not quite sure what, if anything, this means. I would tend to argue that we have been living under a “happy vassalage” of the American empire for the last 80 years. It was the NATO nuclear alliance that projected US foreign policy during and after the Cold War. That is coming to an end now, quite rightly. But is the left now coming over all nostalgic about the old “Pax Americana” that they loathed and marched against only the day before yesterday? Do they want the US bases back in Greenham Common? Burn an effigy of Pat Arrowsmith?

No. Mr Giannini presumably wants the European Union to step in here to take over the Ukraine war from the US—at least, I think he does - to be the “subject” that saves our civilisation. But is that in any way credible? The EU isn’t a state—the left used to regard it as an anti-democratic exercise in bureaucratic neoliberalism. Europe doesn’t have an army. Nor is there the remotest willingness on the part of countries like Germany to declare war on Russia. It just wants its gas back.

Admittedly, Keir Starmer all but declared war on Putin in the Commons yesterday with his grand talk of boots on the ground in Ukraine. He even resurrected Tony Blair’s “coalition of the willing”, which those of us with long memories recall dragged Britain into the disastrous Iraq war. Is the left now part of this militant coalition?

But did all those cheering Labour and Tory MPs, take him seriously? Does anyone? The hollowed-out British army is down to barely 70,000 soldiers, and most of our weapons have been expended over three years of attrition on the Ukrainian battlefield. Take on the mighty Russian army with this feeble force? No way. We couldn’t even defend the Falklands.

Of course, the Prime Minister says that British boots would only be there “keeping the peace”, like some layabout blue helmets in countries like Lebanon. But as those UN troops there have demonstrated recently, they can only keep the peace if there is a peace to keep. And the only peacemaker around right now is Donald Trump, however much we loathe his manners, his selfish nationalism, and his America First isolationism.

By default, Starmer is actually endorsing the Trump deal, even as he man-hugs Volodymyr Zelensky. We know from JD Vance that, privately, European leaders like Starmer are telephoning the White House, urging the US to get the deal done, quick style, before they have to live up to their rhetoric about standing firm against Putin.

Like it or loathe it, the minerals-for-peace deal is the only one on the table. It represents a kind of “backstop” without the US committing to send troops to Europe, which is clearly never going to happen. The idea is that, with US contractors on the ground digging the rare earth minerals, Putin is going to think twice about breaking the ceasefire and invading the rest of Ukraine.

It is clear to everyone, even Zelensky, that Crimea and the Donbas are gone now. There will presumably now be a kind of permanent ceasefire and de facto partition, as happened in Korea in 1953. That endured, and there is no obvious reason why partition should not work in Ukraine. At any rate, with Ukraine running out of young men, having already lost over 100,000 of them, something has to be done to call a halt while this ravaged country recovers. It is ugly and compromising and mercenary, but it is the only game in town—especially now America has stopped sending weapons to Ukraine.

The bizarre thing is that this is broadly what the Stop-the-War left has been calling for over the last three years. They cannot bear the thought of agreeing with Trump, but haven’t Jeremy Corbyn and The Morning Star been trying to stop the “masters of war” profiting from the arms trade? Haven’t they demanded an immediate end to the killing? And don’t the Corbyn left largely agree with JD Vance that the war is at least in part a product of relentless NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, plus the machinations of CIA-backed organisations promoting regime change through vehicles like USAID?

Of course, there is no guarantee that any deal struck this week will make Putin cease his militant expansionism. He may just bank it and start threatening the Baltic states. But Russia, too, needs a ceasefire and a lifting of the trade embargo. Trump’s grubby little deal makes a kind of transactional sense. At least it is honest. It is also supported, tacitly, by the European Union, whatever Ursula von der Leyen says.

But that is only my view and no doubt will make me one of the willing executors of the Trumputinian Revolution. You decide. Mr Giannini’s piece is certainly a right riveting read as the editors of legacy media used to say.

La Repubblica 1/3/25

“America is No More” Opinion piece by Massimo Giannini.

The willing executioners of the Trumputinian Revolution will now be happy. The Atlanticists on command who in this lost Europe continue to exalt the transactional approach of the tycoon who barks but does not bite, threatens but negotiates. The sovereignists who in disunited Italy continue to repeat that the New York messiah sent by God to save humanity deserves the Nobel Prize. Now the whole world knows what the pax americana is according to the sheriff of Washington. We saw it live on TV, in the Oval Office transformed into a grim saloon, how The Donald treats governments that do not bow to his imperial doctrine. Above all, we have seen how he intends to end the war in Ukraine. There is no "just peace," only a terrifying peace.

There is no compromise with the aggressor, only the capitulation of the attacked. The meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White House is truly a turning point in history. It marks a before and after, not only in the epilogue of the conflict of these three years, but in the future global geo-strategic balances. It was obvious to everyone that the negotiation was not easy, and the preamble on the exploitation of Ukrainian rare earths demanded by the US was only part of the problem. And yet — even for those who have never believed in the phony legend of the holy negotiator — it was difficult to imagine that the Commander in Chief could offend and humiliate in this way the Head of a State invaded, bombed and tortured for almost a thousand days by the Russian army. That he could scrap in the middle of the afternoon a few decades of US foreign policy, the world's policeman and guarantor of Western values. That he could throw away that certain idea of America as an "indispensable nation", the largest democracy on the globe, the frontier of freedoms and rights, even with all its contradictions and its skeletons in the closet: a soft-power that was already compromised, but which is now lost forever.

The accusations hurled at Zelensky in recent days — the "mediocre comedian," the "failed dictator without consensus," the "beggar who comes here with hat in hand" — are caresses compared to the latest insults. Shouting in his face "you have to be grateful to us", "either you make an agreement or we pull out, you will have to deal with it alone and I don't think it will be a good thing": this is a cowardly blackmail, similar to what a nineteenth-century Empire would impose on one of its distant "provinces". Vomiting on him "you have millions of dead on your conscience", "you are playing with the Third World War": this is a miserable outrage, aimed at the leader of a people who are paying with the blood of hundreds of thousands of victims for his strenuous resistance to the insane post-Soviet ferocity. And it was precisely that heroic resistance that Zelensky himself demonstrated, standing up to Trump's insults, retorting blow by blow to his delusions and mockery. Even this, the host and the world allowed himself: with that "this time he dressed well" — addressed to his "guest" who was not wearing the camouflage — the sheriff of Washington hit a bottom that we did not believe possible.

Oportet ut scandala eveniant: now everything is finally clear. It is clear, as Bret Stephens and Masha Gessen wrote in the New York Times, what "agreement" means to these architects of chaos: not mediation, but the capitulation of the weaker contractor. It is clear what Ukraine means to them: a historic opportunity to rewrite, around the "clang of the Caucasus chains", the new world order that interests the White House and the Kremlin. All the horror that derives from this is clear, in this Yalta-Bis inspired by the return of spheres of influence (as Putin's ideologue Alexander Dugin theorizes), based on the logic of predatory states and based on the idea of "coercive conquest": the emptying of Ukraine reduced to geographical spoils for Russia and an energy reservoir for America, the vilification of the EU left on the sidelines by all tables, the outrage in Gaza debased to a five-star Yankee Gomorrah. Then a model of international relations that, in the name of the MAGA and the Mega, makes a mess of a multilateral system built between the ruins of the two conflicts of the twentieth century: the UN transfigured into a theater of ghosts, NATO sneered as a cabal of saprophytes, the International Criminal Court denounced, the WHO delegitimized, and so the G7 and the G20, the WTO and NAFTA. And again, the battle of tariffs that will collapse trade and world GDP by 7 percent. Finally, Trump's constitutional butchery and Musk's digital hypnocracy, already successfully tested on the native forgotten man and now conveyed across the Atlantic through the fascist and neo-Nazi right. All variants of the tsarist autocracy of the Kremlin Man, who participates in this orgy of power and pollutes the ballot box with the hybrid weapons of cyber-war.

Now Ukraine stands alone on the heart of the Earth, pierced by a ray of sunshine. To understand whether it is immediately evening, we need to question Europe, or what remains of it. It is up to the Union to decide whether to stay by Zelensky's side. And at this point, really, "die for Kiev". If it existed, and still felt what Ernst Junger called "the force of gravity of the Continent", Europe would have to shout its "no" to the sky. A no to Trump and Putin that starts from Ukraine, but goes beyond Ukraine. A no that should be raised from the streets, as Michele Serra proposes, finally mobilized to defend the European way of life from a virus within the West that threatens democracy, that is, the separation and balance of powers, equal rights and duties for all, religious freedom and the secularity of the State, equal dignity and equal legitimacy for those in government and for those who oppose it. But a no that should also be raised by the elites, as Giuliano Ferrara writes, that is, by the heads of state and government of a Europe incapable not of speaking with one voice, but of speaking tout court. The communitarian establishment whines vainly about the lost West, and in the meantime wears itself out in an unseemly ballet of trips to the court of the Global Caudillo. From Macron to Starmer: all hunters of photo-opportunities and joint communiqué, but unfortunately bearers of nothing. Just a few rushes forward on improbable sending of troops boots on the ground, or useless increases in military spending under a special golden rule. Nothing to do with the birth of a true "European defense", hinged instead on the harmonization of weapon systems and the sharing of the debt necessary to finance it.

What is our destiny? Do we accept ending up crushed between oligarchies and autocracies? Do we prefer to be the "object" of the great global partition, ceding sovereignty and dignity, or do we want to become the "subject" of international politics, reaffirming the values of our civilization? Do we choose to still be "protagonists", claiming History and memory, or do we only ask to remain "protected", lulling ourselves into the usual happy vassalage in the shadow of the resurrected Empires? There are no answers, only confusing proclamations. Worse than this anguished European cacophony is only the shameful aphony of Italy. Meloni has been silent for days, she no longer even pronounces Zelensky's name, she does not have the courage to say the word "Russia" when denouncing the attack on Ukraine, she does not give a single judgment on the Trumputinian follies that are shocking the world. After the painful show in the Oval Office, she does the minimum and asks for an immediate summit between the US, EU and allies. But the time of duplicity, cunning and ambiguity has lasted too long. And in any case it has expired. Donald threw off the mask. Now it's Giorgia's turn. You will see how much they resemble each other.

ENDS