A new verb was circulating at the NATO summit that Joe Biden hosted in early July, in the—unbeknownst to him—last days of his presidential campaign. With Donald Trump looking more likely to wrest back the White House in November, European diplomats and their advisors boasted of how they planned to “Trump-proof” the international order, starting with aid to the Ukrainian war effort. On one hand, European leaders were recognizing the immovable democratic reality that the present-day Republican Party represents: none failed to swear loyalty to the Trumpian proposition that Europe ought to pay more for its defense. On the other hand, they continued to cast Trumpism as a “threat to democracy,” albeit one that could be neutralized with the help of a few political tricks. They proposed a $100-billion five-year funding plan for the Ukrainian war effort, shifted authority over the arms-contributing nations from the U.S. to NATO itself, and declared Ukraine’s path to NATO membership “irreversible.”
Even in the best of circumstances, “Trump-proofing” would appear to be a counterproductive strategy. Leaders do not get to lay out the policies of their elected successors. Were NATO to reconfigure itself in such a way as to stymie the verdicts of American democracy, it would alienate many more Americans from the alliance than President Trump has thus far managed to. And the roll-out was poorly timed. A few days after the summit, a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, would try to Trump-proof the West in his own way: by sending the former president to kingdom come.
But Europeans are less worried than one would think by that kind of threat to democracy. Wrapped up in a collection of American-style arguments over corruption and populism and ethnic strife, they have adopted a style of politics that a decade ago seemed unique to the United States: mixing up domestic and foreign policy, constitutionalizing policy differences, suppressing dissent over dubious experimental policies, failing to distinguish between loyal opposition and treason, refusing to surrender power when they surrender power. It is a world in which long-standing allies can quickly turn into adversaries, and vice versa.
Collapse of Moderation
The most bizarre situation is to be found in Britain. On July 4 the Labour Party returned to power with the second-most-overwhelming single-party majority in more than a century. It did so on the strength of a popular vote so feeble that it might almost be called a repudiation. Labour had been pummeled in the election of 2019, winning just 202 seats, fewer than a third of the Parliament at Westminster, with 32.1% of the vote. This time, with the mild-mannered human rights lawyer Keir Starmer running in place of the aging anti-colonialist Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s numbers scarcely budged, improving by 1.7 percentage points to 33.8%. But that was sufficient for Labour to more than double its representation to an invincible 411 seats, 63% of the 650-seat Parliament. The “plurality voting” system that Britain bequeathed to the United States has failed to produce the stable two-party system that, political scientists assure us, is its logical consequence. The humdrum election result—a government of the moderate Left—masks a radicalization.
In early August the knife murders of three small girls attending a Taylor Swift dress-up party brought anti-immigration riots across England. British people were alarmed but not shocked. For quite some time now, their country has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Back in 2019, Conservative Boris Johnson won a resounding parliamentary mandate to secede from the European Union—a mandate that voters had already given his party once, in the so-called Brexit referendum of 2016. It had been thwarted by the parliamentary and judicial machinations of a political establishment that included Conservative prime minister Theresa May. Having won Brexit, Johnson lost focus and drifted into progressive causes—from banning “conversion therapy” to honoring “animal sentience” (see “Boris Johnson’s Party Politics,” Spring 2022). His conservative base, ticked off at being lied to, abandoned him. Johnson was ousted by the same pre-Brexit establishment he had recently outsmarted, on the pretext that he had attended a couple of office parties during the COVID lockdown. When his successor Liz Truss’s hasty tax-cut plans occasioned an attack on the currency, the establishment returned in the elfin form of banker Rishi Sunak. Immigration rose to levels previously inconceivable—in 2022, 1.3 million; in 2023, 1.2 million, more than 1.5% of the U.K.’s total population each year. At those levels, immigration causes problems that are equally inconceivable: budget deficits, housing shortages, a broken healthcare system. Rhetorically, Sunak seemed to lose track of the distinction between “restrictive” and “inhumane”: he proposed flying rejected asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
But he never did anything. Voters who had been won over to Brexit by the slogan “Take Back Control” now found it a cruel joke. They now abandoned the Conservative Party outright. This did not mean conservatives’ affection for Brexit had dimmed. This year they gave their votes to the arch-Brexiter Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, splitting the formerly Conservative vote right down the middle in what had been the party’s safest seats. These fell to Labour or to the Liberal Democrats. Truss herself was ousted. It was the Tories’ worst showing since before the American Revolution. They lost two-thirds of their seats, falling to a paltry 121. The West’s oldest political party could well die.
By comparison, Labour looked like a “steady pair of hands,” at least until August’s stabbings and riots. Part of its landslide came at the expense of the Scottish National Party, which seeks to make Scotland independent from the U.K. The “Scots Nats” used to hold virtually all of the seats north of the border. But last year their leader, Nicola Sturgeon, tried to enact the most ambitious deregulation of sex-change procedures in the history of the planet, including “gender reassignment surgery” for young people. Sunak used rarely invoked powers to annul the law. It was the only triumph of his 20-month stint as prime minister. Britain is the country in which the reaction against transgenderism has been boldest. Sturgeon’s popularity plummeted. At that point she was exposed to allegations of corruption and her political career is effectively over. Labour took most of her seats.
But Labour has proved vulnerable to defections—notably among those who prioritize Gaza and global warming. There is a set of Labour radicals who form the equivalent of the congressional “Squad” in Washington, and by the end of Starmer’s first month in power many of them had already “lost the whip”—which is to say, they had been exiled from the party for insubordinate voting behavior. There are also five independents outside the party who were elected on a pro-Palestine platform. In essence they constitute a political party of their own—one that has as many members of Parliament as Farage’s Euroskeptics. And Parliament has room to radicalize further—43% of the electorate voted neither Labour nor Conservative, the highest number since World War I. That’s the paradox: Britain’s government has grown more centrist because voters have grown more radical, radical enough to risk exclusion from the system by voting for fringe parties. Britain is pregnant with some kind of realignment. In this it resembles the United States of ten or 15 years ago.
Enemies of Democracy
Or France in the here and now. The French had not expected to be among the Western countries holding elections this year. But when Marine Le Pen’s patriotic National Rally won European Union elections in late May with a third of the vote, making them the country’s largest party, President Emmanuel Macron called an election. Since Macron is abysmally unpopular among his countrymen, his allies assailed him for his stupidity. But Macron understood something they didn’t: a French legislative election is susceptible to behind-the-scenes control in a way that an election to the European Parliament is not. The same third of the electorate that could win you an election under European rules—and could win you a landslide majority under British ones—could be shut out of government altogether under French ones. Europe was about to get a lesson in Le Pen-proofing.
Effectively, France has degenerated into a bizarre “three-party” system (see “Ungovernable France,” Spring 2023). A year before the 2017 election, with great strategic insight, Macron decided that the French Socialist Party, which he was then serving as the dashing 38-year-old economics minister, was not the party it claimed to be. Its main constituency was no longer the working class. It was the metropolitan elites of the new economy. Macron founded a new movement called En Marche (its name, personnel, and principles have changed several times since), taking two-thirds of the Socialist Party with him. The remainder—the part that actually was socialist but nowadays cares more about race and gender—gravitated to various “cause”-based parties, above all La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Macron was almost immediately joined by the more economics-obsessed part of France’s conservative party, Les Républicains. The rest of the French Right gravitated to the National Rally. So, as noted, the system now had its three stable blocs: Macron’s opportunistic center, and parties of the so-called radical Left and Right. In July’s national elections, the National Rally topped the popular vote by a mile, with an even higher tally than it had won in the European Union contest the month before.
What? Perhaps that isn’t what you have read in the newspapers, which reported that the National Rally had lost. Yes, in the most important sense, Le Pen’s party finished a disappointing third. But that was the result of a rules-based misallocation of seats to rival the one seen in Westminster just days before. The National Rally took 37% of the votes, which was good for only 142 seats—a mere 25% of the 577-seat assembly. Mélenchon’s Left coalition, the New Popular Front, finished 11 points behind the National Rally but nonetheless “won” the election, taking 26% of the vote but 31% of the seats—180 in all. And Macron’s centrists turned 25% at the polls into 28% in the assembly—159 seats. In the end, it required almost twice as many votes for the National Rally to win a seat as it did for Mélenchon.
This result was made possible by an electoral alliance between Macron’s center and Mélenchon’s Left. The two blocs strategically withdrew candidates from three-cornered contests to promote their common advancement. There is nothing illegal about it, and it even looks like common sense for the two old wings of the Socialist Party to rejoin. They were bedfellows just seven years ago and still interact socially in various institutions (such as universities) where National Rally voters are seldom seen. What is damaging, and ultimately radicalizing, is the spirit of moralistic bamboozlement in which the alliance was forged. In a fashion reminiscent of the United States, Macron and Mélenchon claimed to be “defending democracy,” forming a “barrage” against extremism.
But the evidence that the National Rally today has anything anti-democratic about it is thin. It is certainly anti-immigration. When it was founded as the National Front in the early 1970s, its members were defenders of French colonialism. But never have any of its leaders questioned democracy. In the 1980s, in his prime, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen was accused of anti-Semitism but the evidence was always ambiguous. The worst offense was a radio interview in which Le Pen is alleged to have said that the Nazi extermination camps were a “detail” of World War II, although on a closer listen he seems to have been referring to certain arguments about workings of the camps. Since she took over the party in 2011, Marine Le Pen has scrupulously excluded anti-Semitism from her party.
The same cannot be said of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Aiming to open the vote bank of France’s largely Muslim migrants, who are estimated to outnumber French Jews by ten- or 20-to-one, Mélenchon focused his legislative campaign—sometimes obsessively—on the Middle East. He accused Israel of having committed genocide against Palestinians in its response to the Hamas attacks of last October 7. The upshot: Macron proposed to protect France’s democracy against a party that was possibly anti-Semitic in the past by allying himself with a party that 92% of French Jews (according to a poll by the French Public Opinion Institute) consider unambiguously anti-Semitic right this minute. Having formally co-operated with Mélenchon to win votes in the election’s second round, Macron now found himself obliged by the conventions of French democracy to co-operate with the hard Left as it took the first crack at forming a government. Some barrage against extremism! Macron tried to set a philosophical trap for his rivals: when you have a three-party system in which two of the parties claim to offer a genuine systemic alternative, victory will go to the party hypocritical enough to ally with the establishment. As Michel Houellebecq predicted a decade ago in his novel Submission (2015), France’s establishment has joined forces with its immigrants against its natives.
In an extraordinary essay published in Le Figaro in mid-July, the political philosopher Pierre Manent described a situation in which the rhetoric of “defending democracy” was itself becoming a threat to democracy. The excommunication of the National Rally creates a powerful governing tool for the political class, “a means of social and moral control that it uses to undermine the sincerity and the freedom of the civic conversation.”
In a functioning democracy, Manent points out, voters choose between competing visions for the community. But in today’s hyper-moralized democracy the choice is between “the legitimate community and those excluded from the legitimate community.” The ruse is self-defeating. If one party to the elections is illegitimate, then the government is, too: We didn’t vote to install it, voters will say, but to exclude the alternative. That is why the National Rally has been able to attract voters without ever having developed a coherent plan for governing. The establishment’s attempt to delegitimize the main party of the French working class has boomeranged back on the establishment itself.
Ukraine and NATO
Though procedural details may vary, the struggle between populists and elitists follows a common pattern in most Western countries. It is not surprising that Western elites have begun to network across borders to defend their interests. The World Economic Forum, held in Davos each winter, is the classic example: to elites, it is the place where the world’s future is laid out; to populists, it is a malevolent cabal. What is surprising is that actual government summits—occasions that should vary in their orientation according to member countries’ changing electoral whims—have degenerated into conclaves for a permanent elite ideology. The NATO members that convened in Washington in July spoke as if they were on some kind of sacred mission to trammel populism, notwithstanding that several of the states in attendance have populist governments already, and the most powerful among them may have one again soon.
The debate over Ukraine has been particularly interesting in this light. What is it about? In France and Britain both, the most extravagant military commitments have been declared with the flimsiest of resources. Macron spent much of last February and March not just hinting but outright declaring that, even in the absence of a NATO commitment, France might choose to send ground troops to Ukraine.
What troops? France used to dominate Central and West Africa, but in the last three years, local armies have risen up in one satrapy after another to boot them out: Mali in 2022, Burkina Faso and Niger in 2023. France now plans to reduce its manpower to 600 trainers continent-wide. So how does it propose to join the Ukrainians in a major European ground war against Russia, which has several hundred thousand troops who have withstood an American proxy war for the better part of three years?
Britain is doing something similar. It is consistently the most hawkish major country in the Ukraine alliance, with a reputation as one of the few European nations to maintain a robust defense, keeping expenditures above the 2% of GDP that has become the benchmark of whether a country is pulling its NATO weight. Yet its military is atrophying. If you exclude the country’s nuclear deterrent, its military spending has fallen to 1.8%; Britain is now spending less to defend itself than to pay the interest on its vast debt. In an interview with the Financial Times in early July, a former director of the British Ministry of Defence’s office of net assessment judged the U.K. military unprepared for “conflict of any scale.”
Other European countries present even wider gaps between braggadocio and capability. The pseudonymous military Substacker Big Serge often writes that NATO’s mistake was not simply expanding toward the Russian border but doing so “at the same time that it was rapidly disarming.” He points out that the most truculent members of NATO tend to be the most lightly armed. Between them, he notes, the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—have fewer than 50,000 soldiers and not a single main battle tank.
So whatever is being discussed at these NATO conclaves, it cannot just be the defense of Ukraine, because the great majority of countries can offer Ukraine little military help. Rather, it seems that NATO summits have become convenient campaign forums and networking opportunities. Foreign policy nowadays involves arguments not so much about Machtpolitik as about identity politics. These permit the taking up of positions and reinforcing of alliances without any expenditure of political capital. As long as you don’t accidentally yack-yack your country into a hot war, summits are just a new outlet for domestic grandstanding. In the U.S., Ukraine has been a Democratic Party policy protectorate (and trough of nepotism) at least since the Obama Administration. Federal officials detailed to Ukraine policy got the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump underway. And the Ukraine war has become, whatever else it is, a battle front in the now internationalized civil war between populists and elitists.
It is striking how sanguine policy experts are about the prospects for “Trump-proofing” the international system and all its institutions. After Biden abandoned his re-election run, the American historian Timothy Naftali told Foreign Affairs magazine he hoped the president could “ensure the continuation of the systems that are below the surface.” The underlying attitude is that Biden is the representative of America’s friends (or its “best self”) and Trump is the candidate of America’s enemies (or its “dark side”). It was in a Foreign Affairs article last winter that five political scientists popularized the concept of Trump-proofing in the first place. “European leaders,” they wrote, “have traditionally had more in common with Democratic than Republican U.S. presidents.”
Internationalization of American War
New political situations arise from the instrumentalization of foreign policy. When Joe Biden opened this year’s State of the Union Address by saying that “Putin of Russia is on the march” just as “Hitler was on the march” in 1941, and that “not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” he was recasting opposition to his foreign and domestic policies as Nazism on the one hand and racism on the other, and consigning the whole of the domestic opposition to outlawry. Disagreement in peacetime becomes indistinguishable from treason in wartime. The sentiment has become widespread among certain political activists that there is no punishment too severe for someone who can be accused of racism or fascism. Needless to say, this stance occasions a horrible escalation of political rhetoric and, with it, political tension. It is a dangerous compromise to assent to any element of a political program advanced under such conditions. That is what Speaker of the House Mike Johnson did when he agreed to fund the president’s Ukraine war in the weeks that followed the president’s rhetorical escalation.
For the same reason, the appointment of the London race activist David Lammy as foreign secretary in the U.K. presents challenges that it would not have a decade ago. Lammy has called Donald Trump a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer,” and threatened in 2017 to chain himself to the door of 10 Downing Street if Trump were permitted a state visit. It is enormously empowering to tell yourself that Donald Trump (or Vladimir Putin, or whomever) is Adolf Hitler. It relieves you of any responsibility to tell such a person the truth or even respect his personal safety. Any private citizen is entitled to his opinion, but in the context of the intellectual populist-elitist civil war, it would take an extraordinary apology to render Lammy an acceptable interlocutor with a democratically elected Trump Administration.
In the context of NATO, the flinging around of Confederate and Nazi imagery presents ironies. As an expression of “values,” it is inoffensive, if hyperbolic. As a tool of domestic politics, it is meant to discredit and silence those who think of the United States as primarily a “European” country. And yet it is doubtful that NATO would have been founded in the first place if Americans had thought of themselves in any other way. The credibility of an American commitment to defend Europe rests on the sincerity of Americans’ understanding that Europe is somehow special, the wellspring of American culture. Biden has tried to draw on this credibility abroad while undermining it at home.
How much Americans are willing to sacrifice for NATO has lately depended on whether they inhabit the cosmopolitan, immigrant-filled, Democrat-voting coastal cities of the global economy or the Trumpian hinterland. It has been the former who insist on defending NATO, even as they lead the United States away from the civilizational vision that NATO was founded to protect. Over the decades, this controversy, complicated to begin with, has become a partisan one, engulfing and imperilling the United States. Now it is reaching the rest of the civilized world.
