Squabbling over the Robert Mueller findings will run its marathon but other nations now perceive that the House’s recently-minted Democratic majority can no longer seriously wound President Donald Trump and may have to give up on impeachment.
Loud rhetoric will continue in America after Attorney General William Barr publishes a redacted Mueller report. But the wait and see period on Trump is over for most of America’s European allies.
The dams that held back anger at Trump’s demands during the past two years may now burst as Europeans set red lines to block his triumphalism from spilling into more imperial foreign policy demands, especially if he is reelected in 2020.
Of course, Congress can still investigate Trump’s alleged ethical and other shortcomings but few think the Democrats can legitimize impeachment convincingly or weaken him grievously through obstruction of justice charges.
China looks likely to emerge as the big winner from Mueller’s dull-edged discoveries. Referring indirectly to more European defiance of Trump after meeting China’s Xi Jinping in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron said yesterday, “The order of things has been shaken”. He met Xi together with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
Macron signed several deals with Xi to sell 300 Europe-made airliners and work on power grids, shipbuilding and much else with China. Germany is already China’s largest trading partner in Europe. Italy became a member last week of China’s trillion dollar Belt and Road investment plan, despite Trump’s displeasure at such disloyalty by a G7 and NATO ally and a founding European Union (EU) member.
Confirming his goal of eroding America’s unipolar dominance over European powers, a pleased Xi told Macron that “a united and prosperous Europe corresponds to our vision of a multipolar world”.
The EU is urgently hedging its bets because, among other things, credible experts think Trump’s policies are igniting a US economic slowdown. This is scary at a time when EU economies, including Germany, are barely growing in part because China is buying less as it struggles to handle Trump’s trade and investment war against it.
Europeans are America’s allies but are looking for more ways to say “no” to Trump. The demands they dislike most concern investments and trade with China, war in Yemen and withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Many would have preferred to see Mueller weaken Trump. He might then have drawn back from trade and investment wars with China and frictions with the EU. He might also have pandered less to his selfish core supporters who place their own interests above the common good of Americans and friends around the world.
Large swathes of people feel alarmed that Trump’s pugnacious rise in the past two years has fueled populist European demagoguery tinged with racist and nationalist deceits.
Emulation of Trump’s political style is driving fragmentation of EU unity and is damaging the existential European project of “ever greater union” among its 27 members (after Britain’s exit). The ills of fragmentation are evident in the run up to the May elections for European Parliament.
Macron wants a “European renaissance” and canvassed for a unified Europe in the 2017 French elections. He is raising red flags because politics in every EU member is riven by illiberal demands to reduce pooling of national sovereignty for the common European good.
Major countries like Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary are already dallying with illiberal leaders. Tellingly, Poland and Hungary are accepting only Christian immigrants from countries like Ukraine while rejecting those from Muslim countries. So France, Germany and Britain are starting to react more strongly to protect liberal values, especially against inflammatory anti-Muslim nationalism.
Defying Trump is seen as a necessity to preserve liberal EU values. Merkel is directly defying his threats to punish anyone standing against his pro-Saudi policies in Yemen. She has renewed a ban on exports of weapons and components to countries attacking Yemen. So, Saudi orders for Europe-built warplanes and other weapons can no longer be filled because they require German-made parts.
A defiant EU is bolstering its plan to do business with Iran using a barter system that bypasses the US dollar, despite naked threats by Mike Pompeo and Steve Mnuchin. Britain, France and Germany are continuing their blunt refusal to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran signed by Barack Obama but terminated by Trump.
The EU has also increased its financing of a United Nations agency catering to some 5.5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps, despite Trump’s firm calls for allied unity when he banned US funding last September as a gesture to Israel.
Brij Khindaria