Athens
The new European Parliament is expected to constitute itself this week in Strasbourg – simultaneously with the Republican Convent meeting in Milwaukee to name officially what is already a fact: Donald Trump as its candidate for the presidential election in less than four months. Surely a coincidence, but thought provoking nonetheless.
Europe is stronger than many realize, not least Europe’s enemies in fascist Moscow. The center right – a little to the right, a little to the left – will continue to navigate cautiously on the murky waters of international politics, knowing that it is full of rocks, which we know of, and drifting mines, which we do not know of.
Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, is on the right, but not getting Europe into trouble – quite the contrary. Poland under Donald Tusk has resumed its responsibilities in Central Europe. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a conservative, has stabilized Greece. Britain under the Social Democrat Keir Starmer will sail along on a calm breeze. In France president Emmanuel Macron has brought right-wing Marine Le Pen off course. In the process he harmed himself, but did French democracy a service. Eight Nordic and Baltic countries are in safe democratic hands.
The Acropolis of Athens tells me not only about the triumph of the Greeks over the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC, but also about their downfall, because they failed to unite their small states, when later on the military power of Rome encroached upon them. State-building is about knowledge, not about the direction of the wind, and certainly not about grand gestures. Laws should be made and implemented, not by the masses in the street, baying for entertainment, but by wise men and women, democratically elected onto high office.
It seems fair to me to put a question: do the newly elected European Parliamentarians take themselves and the world around them seriously? Most NATO leaders do, judging by last week’s almost trouble-free summit in Washington. They could and should have given president Zelenskyy more, but he did not return to Kyiv empty handed. Not at all. Ideally, president Biden and chancellor Scholz had shown more strength, but the problems at the summit were related to disloyal or partially disloyal figures such as Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who can be dispensed with, and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who cannot be dispensed with, and who in the end might – just might – be useful.
More important, of course, are the forthcoming congressional and presidential elections in the United States. Europe can hope that Joe Biden or another Democrat will emerge as the winner, but they must fear that Donald Trump, the isolationist and convicted criminal, returns to the White House, and his cowed Republicans win both the Senate and the House of Representatives. This worst case scenario will move the international order from being problematic into a flaming crisis. Even If Trump, reinstated as president, will be restrained by a fully or partially Democrat-controlled Congress, we shall find ourselves a zone of storms, expanding the room of maneuver for fascist and belligerent Russia.
The days when Washington saw itself as the winner of two parallel wars are gone. After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the trend in the US is to retire from an unruly world, demonstrated by president Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan in 2021. Trump is both orchestrating and benefiting from this change of geopolitical and geostrategic conception. Can he win in October? According to the latest polls, yes. Trump is not a repeat of Adolf Hitler in Germany, but of Benito Mussolini in Italy: lazy and vain, preoccupied with the glamor of power rather than with its duties and responsibilities, a gangster, a narcissist and a convicted criminal, a raging psychopath, who should have been put into prison or a mental institution long ago. Hopefully, the Strasbourg Parliament, just as NATO in Washington, will think hard and act decisively.
The newly elected parliamentarians must fill the vacuum of power that decades of naivety and frivolity has left in the House of Europe. They must recognize that the parliament is not a European parish council, but the forum – the agora in the parlance of ancient Greek democracy – the responsibility of which is to secure Europe, Ukraine included, in a world, where the gangster states advance and the US hesitates.
The Acropolis tells me, on one more boiling day in Athens, that we need an integrated European army, possibly nuclear, located from Estonia over Ukraine to Bulgaria, manning the forward defenses of European civilization. Europe, not just the EU, must prepare for war now in order to avoid war in five or ten years’ time. Post-Greek Europe faces its post-Roman enemy in the shape of ever present imperialist Russia.
Those who sit back will invite the ruin of 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.
