The “King” of America and his European Vassals
When the new geopolitical reality is “might makes right” it is necessary to have a debate about the application of international law to Donald Trump’s unnecessary war against Iran. Doing so is a complicated process to weigh legal against moral reasoning because any conclusion will remain ambivalent. Yes, but…or no, but. It is equally necessary to warn about the impact of attacking the leaders of the illegitimate and murderous regime of the Islamic Republic. Where and when to stop with a war that was started following the long-preached and practiced logic of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu. But even if you are prepared to ignore the tenets of international law and agree with Israel’s right to self-defence you should never leave such a massive gamble with people’s lives and the borders of a permanent crisis zone to the demented warriors who are trying to rule the world from the Pentagon and the White House. No matter how quickly the war against Iran will end, the feeble and fake loyalty to Donald Trump as currently practiced by many European leaders is morally reprehensible, politically stupid, and it will cost Europe dearly.
International law has always been open to interpretation as it was in the case of Kosovo in 1999 or the Iraq War in 2003. But then there was at least a political debate within and among participating nations if no consensus in the end. Now going to war has been just the decision of a narcissist in the White House in command of the strongest military on earth and an administration filled with crackpot Yes-men and women who would have trouble to find employment with any well-run global enterprise.
In such a scenario, you might think that you are clever when you ingratiate yourself with the US-President whilst sitting next to him in the White House and reserve your critique of the war for the day after, as the German Chancellor did. You might think that you are a hero by openly contradicting and challenging Trump, as done by the Spanish Premier. You might want to save your political skin by sitting on the fence and just care for your own troops stationed around Cyprus, as his British counterpart tried. Or you might be initially critical of the war effort but then send an aircraft carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean, as a compromised signal from the President of France. Trump is right: No Churchill in sight, on either side of the British Channel.
But whatever reaction would have been right or wrong, this total lack of coordination and failure to come up with a collective stance has further weakened Europe’s standing in the world. That is of a Europe which will be hit most by the impact of this gratuitous war to be counted in rising energy prices and refugees from the Middle East. Such a failure is doubly reckless in the face of a war run by lunatics of all kinds not bound by international law, constitutional limits, republican thinking and traditional ways of US domestic and foreign policy.
Because what has been happening in Washington is not just another swing of the pendulum between isolationism and interventionism but a take-over by nationalists, crypto-fascists and evangelicals under the tutelage of a man who by now feels and acts like a king. And it is less the actual policy proposals or military operations but the language in which those decisions are being phrased and enacted which is giving away the real nature of the dangers this gang of regime changers poses to US-democracy and now even the Middle East.
Leading the Pentagon into this military adventure without a plan the self-declared “Minister of War”, Peter Hegseth calls dead Iranians “toast” and proudly said “we are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”. The same was done to immigrants in Minnesota and other cities. Hegseth is a former presenter on Fox-TV with a slogan of the Crusaders tattooed on his forearm now reenacting the fight lost against the Muslims united by Saladin more than 800 years ago. And he is not alone.
There a more Evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists in and around the second administration of Trump than most people have noticed, from right-wing media to the middle-ranks of the Pentagon. You can tell them when they take recourse to the bible after running out of arguments before a microphone or a Congressional committee. Many of them, like the US-Ambassador in Tel Aviv and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee, are fervent Zionists at the same time, still defending “their” Jerusalem and claiming parts of the Middle East.
This kind of cheap biblical thinking is where the righteous and ruthless language of those domestic and foreign culture warriors stems from. At the same time, Hegseth’s generation was raised on computer war games and Marvel comics as the naming of their foreign policy adventures suggests. If you like, these younger warriors in the Trump Administration are doubly desensitized - by religion and technology. With this mindset American casualties are discounted as “tragic things (that) happen”. And attacks on civilian desalination plants become just a necessary part of war gaming.
Even the most hardened commentators of liberal America have started to describe Trump’s personnel and their decision making as “a new level of insanity” or “a sea if imbecility… wave upon wave of cretins”. “The desensitization of Americans to this kind of violence”, writes President Obama’s former deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, in the New York Times, “is what it is broken in our society”. Historians of the future will have a hard time to explain how the political rise of such cocksure imbeciles could have happened.
But why do European leaders arrange themselves with this “foreign policy vision of imperialism”, as the commentator Peter Beinart calls it, “a global outlook that closely resembles Mr. Trump’s governing style at home, both featuring spectacular violence and contempt for the restraints of law”? Because Europe’s leaders have been addressing the dilemma between their dependency on the US and the interests of their own publics not in union but only within their domestic constraints.
On the Ukraine war it was unavoidable to suck up to Donald Trump because of Europe’s military weakness. On the issue of tariffs, it was already an open question if a concerted resistance to his threats could have worked better than caving in, despite the economic dependence. But on this reckless war against Iran the message should have been better choreographed and clear: “Mr. President, we are not convinced and won’t be part of it. No sorties from our military bases against Iran.” Of course, these military, economic and geopolitical dependencies are interconnected. But even if you support Donald Trump on Iran, it does not mean that he will be helping you against Russia.
Watching the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy hesitating and disagreeing instead of openly and jointly resisting is a demeaning spectacle. When Israeli and US warplanes are destroying the backbone of the Iranian state and the infrastructure of a country of 90 million that might then burst at the ethnic seams of its periphery - and create another refugee crisis for Europe - such feeble or fake loyalty of vassals is morally reprehensible, politically stupid, and it will cost Europe dearly. It is a weakness feeding on itself.