Rio de Janeiro
Latin America, having for centuries been subjected to the whims of an imperialist and often colonialist United States, observes with a sense of foreboding and déjà vu the treatment that Washington under Donald Trump is metering out to Europe. “You are now experiencing what we experienced for generations. Rest assured it will get worse,” warns a Brazilian friend of mine, a writer and translator with expertise in German literature.
We sit with a caipirinha, Brazil’s favorite drink, on a terrace overlooking the Guanabara Bay, in front of us the sharp peak of Mount Corcovado with the statue of Christ the Redeemer, 700 meters above the heavy traffic of Rio de Janeíro. “Washington is not and never was the good-natured capital that the United States showed to its privileged European allies,” says my friend. “We know the real Washington, a relentless apparatus of power.”
Hundreds of yachts rock gently on the waves of the bay. Then follow the skyscrapers of Rio, multilane highways, elegant parks, and mile after mile of honey colored sandy beaches, where the city’s population is on the move day and night. Further out the poorer neighborhoods, believed to house around a quarter of Rio’s six to seven million inhabitants.
Does this megapolis ever sleep? Maybe, but only maybe. Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country with the world’s seventh largest population, around 215 million brown, yellow and white inhabitants, raging dynamism, needing no less than three capitals. Brazil in the hinterland takes care of the political intrigues, São Paulo makes the money, Rio provides culture and traditions.
I remember my first visit in 1971. The country suffered under a military dictatorship. In 1984 the ruling officers retired, never to be punished, but never to be forgotten. President Lula, socialist and democrat, and back in power since 2023, leaves the military in peace on the understanding that the military leaves him in peace. Is a slip back into some kind of dictatorship conceivable? In Latin America, anything is possible, says my friend, adding that Lula’s predecessor, Trump-admirer and semi-fascist Bolsonaro, is kept under house arrest, awaiting trial for attempting to overthrow the democratic state order. Was he inspired by Washington? Possibly, just possibly.
Is there a living soul in Europe, poor and partly ruined Ukraine included, who believes in the USA? Not just Trumpian America, but any America in any foreseeable future? The United States to my mind has returned, not very surprisingly, to its historical role as Europe’s adversary. We seem to have forgotten that millions of immigrants left Europe, also Habsburg, Prussian and Zarist Ukraine, what for them was a Europe of kings and wars and prisons, of poverty and hunger, to build a new Jerusalem in America. The USA is not a born protector of Europe and just potentially its enemy.
Trump, like earlier American generations, back in the 18th and 19th century, sees Europe, in Trump’s case the EU, as a conspiracy against US interests. Trump is in line with traditional North American thinking – tempered, but not forgotten in the 20th century – when he wants to sell Ukraine to the Russians and to buy the Danish territory of Greenland (as if Denmark was in the business of selling human beings).
This week Greenland has the dubious honor of a visit, very unwelcome, of a high-level US-delegation, led by President Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz and energy minister Chris Wright, the wife of Vice President Vance in tow as a decorative decoy. Two enormous Hercules planes landed in the small capital of Nuuk. Did they ask for landing permissions? Was a landing permission given and if yes, why in a situation, where the Greenlandes, shortly after a parliamentary election have no effective government? The interim Greenland Prime Minister’s comment being, that the American visit was provocative and that nobody from his government would meet with the delegation.
Do the relevant Danish authorities know what kind of listening, seeing and measuring equipment these highly sophisticated aircrafts carried beyond its passengers, their security personnel and their baggage? The whole business stinks of the circumstances, in which Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. The Latins of America can sing a song or two about all this, so can the East Europeans, accustomed as they are to the vociferous imperialism of Washington and Moscow, born out of political fantasies and economic greed (in the case of Greenland, rare metals and land, explained away by Trump, that constant liar, with security concerns).
Could it be that Trump and his friend in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, have come to a quiet understanding? I help you to Crimea and the Donbas, you help me to Greenland! A repeat of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, a repeat of Yalta six years later. Yes, it could well be.
Hence this salute: the hour of the criminals has arrived. We are back in a clash of civilizations that has been going on between Europe and the US since the 17th century. On one hand the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, among them a regulated democracy. On the other hand a boundless freedom, which includes the right of citizens to run around with high-powered assault rifles, to get rich at the expense of the common good and to die of hunger on the next street corner. Not to speak of massive violations of international law.
Washington is the new Rome with its Senate, with its eagles and rows of columns. The emperor of America is as mad as Caligula in ancient Rome, about whom legend has it that he wanted to proclaim his horse a consul, an honor now bestowed on the world’s supposedly richest person, Elon Musk, a galloping monster in the role of co-emperor. It seems that for Trumpist Washington as for Putinist Moscow Democratic Europe is satanic culture, which in the name of God must be helped to disappear.
What will be next? An American invasion of Greenland, possibly by a small group of badly uniformed men hidden inside a Hercules or two? A falsified plebiscite? Russian military pressure on Denmark in the Baltic? I cannot imagine a US-bombardment of Copenhagen. But I cannot know where we shall be a year or two from now.
My feeling is, however, as I approach the end of a six months long journey through the Americas, that Europe is waking up to the existential threats surrounding it, that we are finally combining our very considerable forces, that at the end we shall overcome our foes, inspired not the least by the brave Ukrainians. I am looking forward to being back in Europe.
By Per Nyholm
*These opinions are solely those of the author. The Ukrainian Review takes no, position and is not responsible for the author’s words.
Per Nyholm has been a Danish journalist since 1960. He is based in Austria and is a columnist and foreign correspondent at the Jyllands-Posten, a liberal Danish daily newspaper.
Tetiana Stelmakh adapted this text for The Ukrainian Review.
