Whatever the outcome of the US elections on Tuesday, Europe will be the looser. The republican nominee, Donald Trump, whom I see as a crook and a madman, might win, in which case we can expect a dangerous change in the transatlantic climate, probably sometime in the course of the spring, when he and his people have found their feet in The White House and starts implementing their ideas, including cozying up to Vladimir Putin, the Russian warmonger, and weakening the American commitment to the democracies east of the Atlantic, Ukraine included.
A victory to Kamala Harris, the nominee of the ruling Democratic Party, an honest and reliable politician, should promise stability. Being a Californian, her foreign policy priorities most probably will be the Pacific and China, not Europe. She will honor US commitments to Europa, but not with the enthusiasm of her predecessor, Joe Biden, an ardent Atlantic, maybe the last of his kind.
Europe will draw a sigh of relief, if Ms. Harris and her vice-presidential nominee, governor Walz, wins, but in real terms there may not be much to celebrate. Firstly, each state plus the District of Columbia will have to ascertain the election result, which the Electoral College may – or may not – confirm, leading to the Senate acceptance of the new president on January 6 next year, a long and tricky process. There is a fear that should the ticket Harris/Walz win – and in the best of circumstances such a victory will be narrow – Mr. Trump will call his mob onto the streets of America, clamoring that the elections, possibly also to the Senate and the House of Representatives, were stolen, a repeat of his attack on the Capitol in January 2021. The fear is not unreasonable. On the campaign trail in March, Mr. Trump literally said, in his rather bad English: “If I do not get elected, it is going to be a bloodbath…and that will not be the least.”
The United States prior to one of the most fateful moments in its history – balancing between the existing democratic state and a pre-fascist state – clearly is the disunited states. Even if by some miracle or other means it will be at peace with itself after the arrival of the inauguration of the next president, it will be occupied with itself for weeks and months and possibly for years. Europe, seen from Washington, is already a kind of sideshow. Miracles do not often occur in politics, and nightmares have a tendency to materialize, when and where wishful thinking takes over. In New York, where I spend these anxious days, I hear again and again, that the worst cannot happen, that Mr. Trump for all his tantrums is not so bad, and that his handles will rain him in, should he make it to the Oval Office. Maybe, and then maybe not.
I do not believe that even violent demonstrations – say Mr. Trump’s bloodbath – will be the end of the present state. I cannot imagine a regime break down, equal to what happened in Moscow in 1991 (though that was not expected either). The legal forces must and will take care of such unrest, should it occur. But the underlying dynamics will remain and sap the strength of the already weakened democratic institutions. The deeper, existential problem in the US is not the irascible Mr. Trump, but the fact that about 70 million Americans or half of those, who go to the polls, idolize this convicted criminal as their savior and will follow him, even in his rumored capacity of Russian agent to the golden halls of the Kremlin.
Personally, for a while I shall keep my distance to Europe. I plan to leave the US by late November (that is, if we do not have another civil war) and to travel for several months through Latin America. I hope to do some sailing around Cape Horn (having recently crossed the Atlantic by boat), then to visit, among many other places, Petrópolis in Brazil, where the great Habsburgs poet and writer, Stefan Zweig (“Die Welt von Gestern”), committed suicide in 1942, despairing of the Europe, he had lost to murderous fascists and antisemites.
In Ukraine, Russian fascism is killing, maiming and destroying human beings, civilization and culture. I am not despairing of Ukraine, which is in my heart, and which I see as being of vital importance to the security of our common European culture. On the contrary, I expect that within the next two years or so the Ukrainians shall win this war of aggression, which is indeed another genocide or Holodomor.
American and other experts, not to be confused with easily moved reporters and professional pessimists, believe that Russia is slowly, very slowly, losing the high ground. The Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk pocket is a sign of this, another more telling one is that Russia has asked North Korea for soldiers to die on European soil – on top of the very considerable masses of weaponry, which is already being supplied by the regime in Pyongyang.
The North Korean dictator appears to have made available as many as 10 000 of his troops to his fellow Russian dictator. This can maybe be kept a secret at least denied in North Korea, but not in Russia, and there some people might start thinking, what is already being taught in America – that the Russian aggression cannot go on for much longer. The Russian generals, if they are worth their salt, would have told their master in the Kremlin no later than in the spring, that their armies, having lost between half a million or 600 000 men since February 2022 plus incredible amounts of material, cannot sustain the present offensive for much longer. The North Korean assistance to Russia is one more embarrassment on top of the pile of strategic mistakes, which began with the failed attempt at occupying Kyiv in 2022.
It may be, that presently Ukraine is not winning on the battlefield, and that Putin banks on a victory to Trump, his friend and possible agent in Washington, followed by a stop of the armament deliveries from America to Ukraine. For sure, the Russian war in Ukraine can continue for a long time, but it cannot be won by Moscow. Putin’s wishful dream of Making Russia Great Again has turned into a nightmare, which he might want to escape. For that reason, he has ordered the present terrible offensive, leading up to a terrible winter – terrible for the defenders, terrible for his own troops – in the hope of moving on to whatever negotiation table may be offered. The West should deny him this prospect.
The global geopolitics have been changing since the demise of the Soviet Union, and they are changing at this very moment. Europe and NATO may – as a result of the US elections – move into a period of relative weakness vis a vis Russia, but Europe and NATO are easily, in absolute terms, in a much stronger position than Russia and quite capable, provided that the political will, can be mobilized, of standing up to Putin the Killer, even after a possible American retreat across the Atlantic. As a matter of fact, a Trump-victory could be a blessing in disguise, bringing Europe to its senses, where it starts taking its short term safety and its long term security serious.
The deployment of North Korean soldiers on a European battlefield constitutes a dramatic shift in the nature of the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine. It is no longer just another Russian war. It is a war between two civilizations, between Europe and Asia, and it needs the strongest possible answer on the part of Europe. If NATO cannot do it, individual NATO countries must provide Ukraine with soldiers – not frontline personnel, but soldiers, who can do a lot of the more tedious and not very dangerous work, which any fighting army must do behind the front, thereby realizing Ukrainian soldiers for first line duty.
The West, that really is Europe, must increase and speed up its military deliveries to Ukraine and must allow the Ukrainians to use Western weapons, also fighter planes and missiles, as they deem tactically and strategically right, inside Ukraine, inside occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself.
It is high time – considering the collusion between Putin in the Kremlin and Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, both of whom Donald Trump has showered with praise – for the West to correct its approach to the war in Ukraine. The present defensive thinking is self-defeating. Through decisive planning and offensive action Europe must convince itself and its enemies that it intends to win this war, that Russia and Russia’s Asian allies (not only North Korea) will be removed as strategic players from the European theater, that Europe can take care of itself, whether the American president is Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The goal in a not too distant future must be a geopolitical environment, relevant to realities of the 21st century.
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.
