Trump won’t make America great by wrecking NATO and the global post-war order – by Charles Moore for The Telegraph – 21.02.25
- Michael Julien
- Feb 22
- 6 min read
Relentless optimism at home, but unyielding pessimism abroad: that is the disconnect in the president’s message.
What President Trump said about President Zelensky this week was disgusting. Zelensky is not a dictator. No country fighting an all-out invasion could hold elections in the middle of it. Zelensky did not start the war. Putin did.
Trump must know this, so one’s disgust deepens. By speaking as he did, he was not merely insulting Zelensky personally; he was disrespecting the suffering of a whole people to whom America pledged support. He was in a rage because the Ukrainian president had complained that Trump was “surrounded by disinformation”. But Zelensky was right: the Trump lines are Putin lines, as whispered by people like Tucker Carlson.
The Putin lines have one purpose – the Russian defeat of Ukraine. So naturally one asks, is that what Trump wants? We do not know for certain, but so far, he has made concessions to Putin – keeping Ukraine out of NATO, out of the preliminary talks, and without hope of regaining the borders that Russia and the West conferred on it 30 years ago – and has demanded nothing in return.
This is defeatism, or worse. In an intemperate tweet (“moralistic garbage”) on Thursday attacking the historian Sir Niall Ferguson, vice-president Vance spoke of “the reality on the ground”, as if Russia were all-conquering and nothing could be done about it.
Actually, despite vastly outnumbering Ukrainians, the Russians have won astonishingly little since they invaded three years ago. They have lost perhaps 150,000 dead, roughly 10 times more than in any other conflict since 1945, for no definite gain.
Vance underrates what can be done with allies. The United States and Western Europe can outmatch Russia, if they want to. He and Trump are right about the weakness of Europe and of America under Joe Biden. What is it about Putin that makes Trump want to weaken the West still further?
Trump speaks in clear English, but he is followed around by sympathetic “translators” who explain he must not be taken “literally” and that what he “really” meant was something else.
One should not discount this. It is certainly a Trump characteristic – possibly a tactic – to ignore his previous words when convenient. Since Trump has risen to power chiefly because of his unique communicative gifts, we all need to understand what it is he is, underneath, communicating.
Something in there is good, in a very American way. It is an intrinsic optimism about what the American people can do. In the Obama era – returning, much worse, under Biden/Harris – a great gloom set in. Government was super-sized, over-mighty yet ineffective.
In academia, Hollywood and much of the media, the rewards went to people who denigrated American history and culture.
Extreme ethnic and LGBT groups were lionised, and institutionalised by DEI. Their critics were persecuted. Partly because of uncontrolled migration, crime rose and whole cities decayed.
Industry and wealth creation were attacked by net zero doctrines.
The resurgent Trump proudly declared that Americans, less governed, would be better than that. Most Americans voting agreed. Hence the burst of energy since he won and the global internet-based ripple effect which is emboldening people to confront cultural self-hatred, wealth-destroying ecomania, vast immigration and semi-Islamisation.
When vice-president Vance used the Munich security conference to tell European countries they were not doing enough as military allies and that some of their domestic policies – such as migration and censorship – “offend the sensibilities of most Americans”, he was right. But his tone missed something. The wind is blowing his way, and European electorates are responding. How much more effective it would have been to infect our continent’s people with American optimism than just to lecture its elites, richly though they deserve it.
Somewhere in what Trump communicates, clashing with his optimism, is a sourness – the expression of accumulated resentments, especially among white, male, not very rich people, that the world is against them, and therefore they want out of it.
It is an understandable feeling, but weirdly pessimistic. It misses the global opportunity. You do not have to be American to want to share the Trumpian energy.
NATO would become a vital force if the European member states spent the sort of money the Trump administration keeps advocating. But in his approach to Ukraine, he is offering a flat contradiction – claiming the sole right to make peace, but then to get out, leaving others to look after the result. How could any European country want to follow him down that path?
Trump is making life more difficult for his European sympathisers than his European foes. It won’t be long before the latter raise a clamour to get Britain back into the EU. After Trump’s criticism of Sir Keir Starmer yesterday, expect our prime minister to lead the charge.
President Trump seems to have a post-imperial mindset and is thinking of Europe, as the British thought of India in the 1940s, as one big headache for which the only cure is to scuttle, even if it causes partition. If so, he underrates his unique chance to effect change.
Take, for example, these semi-secret negotiations between the United States and Ukraine about the sharing of the latter’s mineral resources. Zelensky was bound to reject what was first proposed because it was expressed in such grasping, hostile form. How different would it be if the US, with the rest of NATO, were to step up its security guarantees for Ukraine. Then US business ambitions would be welcomed with open arms and America would have first pick of all Ukrainian mining, energy and military tech manufacture opportunities.
Remember that the Marshall Plan, which did so much for the recovery of Europe after the war, achieved even more for America. Remember that America led the successful economic and democratic recovery of Germany and Japan after 1945, to its great advantage. And remember that NATO itself, often derided, prevented a third world war, and created an environment of nuclear balance, free trade and broadly shared political values which dominated the global order.
Trumpians rail against globalisation. They are right that it has become an objectionable, antidemocratic, legalistic ideology, run for the benefit of those who take its salaries. But it does not follow that there should be no global order. One can be confident that it will be a better one if reconstructed by America and European NATO allies rather than infiltrated by China and Russia in the name of the “global majority”, as is happening now.
Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican president since the Second World War and the most American of Americans, could see this so clearly. If only Donald Trump would do the same for our even more insecure world today. Some say an American retreat from Europe would free up the US to deal with areas that matter more to it, such as the Far East. I wonder.
If President Trump sees the continent of Europe as an incumbrance that can be safely dominated by the aggressive autocracy of Russia, why would he make better efforts in relation to China? His temptation would be to cut a deal with the world’s second biggest economy, giving up on the Pacific defence of Japan, South Korea and, once he has set up enough semi-conductor labs in Arizona, to leave Taiwan to the mercies of Beijing.
Nothing is yet settled, but Trump has said something very big and bad. He has approved Russia’s redrawing of the boundaries of Europe by force. That ricochets beyond one continent. He was born in 1946, NATO in 1949. He says he wants peace, and I believe him, but he risks outliving the organisation that has kept the peace for all of us.
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Charles Hilary Moore, Baron Moore of Etchingham (born 31 October 1956) is an English journalist and the chairman of The Spectator. He is a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Sunday Telegraph; he still writes for all three. He is known for his authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in three volumes (2013, 2016 and 2019). Under the government of Boris Johnson, Moore was given a peerage in July 2020, thus becoming a member of the House of Lords.
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