An example of this was provided by Sarah Ferguson, host of the ABC’s 7.30 show when interviewing Simon Schama about Trump’s attack on Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Because the mainstream commentariat has such limited historical awareness and thinks in cliches, Ferguson seemed to think that Trump is taking the US back to 1930s isolationism. Trump may use the slogan “America First” but that is a shout-out to 1930s US fascism, not to an isolationist policy that was much more widely shared across the US political spectrum in the 30s than to just the right-wing fringes. How can anyone seriously suggest that Trump is an isolationist when within eight weeks of taking the Presidency he has threatened Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Mexico, Panama, Ukraine and Palestine with either military force, economic aggression, gangster-style “protection” or ethnic cleansing?

The mainstream media needs to get over other myths and “the west” must too. The main one is that the US has, since, WWII, been a selfless protector of democracy around the world. In truth, the US fought war after war, and destabilised countries and undermined elected governments again and again in order to make the world safe for US capitalists. Now US capital, especially in the form of big tech and fossil fuels, is simply in predator mode, so US foreign policy has cast off the pretence of caring about democracy, just as US companies – and an increasing number of Australian ones – have, without a second thought, abandoned “commitments” to fair hiring practices and action on climate change. In that context, Trump’s decision to cast his lot in with the other great predator, Putin, makes complete sense.

Europe needs to learn lessons from the US’s negative example, chiefly: don’t pretend to support the “rules-based order” and continually break the rules when it suits, or when it suits your allies – like Israel.

A post-Trump European security policy should be very different to today’s. Given the aggressive nature of Putin’s Russia, and Putin’s deep hatred for democracy and the kinds of freedoms that most Europeans have come to expect – including sexual and religious freedoms – and the influence of fascist Eurasianist ideology on his regime, European independence and security will need to be guaranteed with significantly enhanced military capability. This is deeply unfortunate, as humanity’s resources would be much better directed to dealing with the climate crisis and transitioning to renewable energy. But the world is as it is, and, anyway, ensuring that fascist petro-states like Putin’s Russia and Trump’s US don’t dominate the world is vital to the future of the climate.

To ensure rearmament doesn’t become just another means for big business to profiteer off human misery, arms manufacturing should be nationalised or at the very least tightly controlled by government. Sales of weapons overseas should be greatly reduced and more tightly regulated to prevent European arms fuelling civil conflicts and genocides in other parts of the world, including in Palestine. One significant advantage of state ownership of arms manufacturing would be to maintain the latent ability to shift production to more useful things if the threat from the global fascist alliance led by Russia dissipates – a Lucas Plan for the post-fascist moment that we hope will come.

Developing a European security policy independent of the US is a great opportunity for Europe to live up to the principles and promise that it has for so long promoted but more often honoured in the breach. The US is such a broken, dysfunctional society that it can only be, in the foreseeable future, a hindrance in the search for a more peaceful and just world.

Key to a decent and progressive European security policy must a rejection of European exceptionalism and arrogance towards countries in the global south. Understanding and solidarity would be far better principles to guide relations. Europeans must stop trying to spread their failed economic models under cover of aid programs or support for climate action. Let me give an example of which I have direct experience.

At the Glasgow COP in 2021, the European Union, the UK, the US (now withdrawing its support), Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Denmark and Norway as well as multilateral finance institutions proposed to help speed up the shift away from coal-fired power generation in developing countries through a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). The JETP would help to mobilise finance to build renewable energy capacity and close coal-fired power stations. It would also involve the restructuring of electricity generation systems, with a focus on imposing the kind of market-based system that characterises the European Union’s provision of electricity, as well as parts of the United States and Australia. This would mean “unbundling” vertically integrated energy utilities, that is, breaking them down to their constituent parts, so that generation, transmission and distribution, and retail would be treated as separate business units, if not completely disaggregated and privatised. Australians will be familiar with this model, which has characterised the National Electricity Market since the 1990s. The countries that have so far signed up to the JETP are South Africa, Senegal, Indonesia and Vietnam.

As I set out in an earlier Radical Civility post, marketized energy systems are not working to deliver renewable energy at the pace and scale needed to avoid disastrous climate change. I have been working with Indonesian unions that are opposed to JETP’s privatisation and marketisation strategies. These unions can see the way that “reform” to Indonesia’s energy system and the introduction of renewables are being used to undermine a state-owned energy system that is supposed to be protected by Indonesia’s constitution. They can see that the reforms are fundamentally about improving the ability of private capital to profit from the transition to renewables, rather than about decarbonising the electricity system in a just way. An example: Indonesia’s public electricity utility, PLN, has been forced into “take-or-pay” arrangements with private owners of electricity generation facilities – some of these are coal-fired power stations, but increasingly they are renewable energy generators. This means that PLN has to take whatever these generators produce or it has to pay them anyway, thus giving a privileged position to private owners over state-owned generators. And, even more egregiously, PLN has to pay private generators in US dollars, while it can, obviously, only sell energy to Indonesian customers in Indonesian Rupiah. The financial pressure that this is putting on PLN will have significant ramifications not just for the company but for the energy transition, since state investment is essential to make the transition successful.

JETP is not providing anywhere near the amounts of money that are needed to decarbonise electricity grids, and most of it is being provided in the form of concessional loans, further adding to the debt loads of developing countries. Undermining the viability of state-owned power companies will not help deliver an energy transition, although it might boost the profits of European investors in renewable energy projects. Much better would be for Europe to assist PLN and other state-owned generators to make the transition to renewable energy by providing grant funding, debt-relief and technical assistance. Imposing the failed nostrums of neoliberal energy policy on countries where the energy transition is a vital necessity does not help with the transition; nor does it improve the status of Europe as a partner in development that is just and effective.

Europe should develop independent, neutral security policy geared towards defending Europe as a democratic realm. It should not see itself as inherently part of some “western” alliance against Russia or China or for the US. Its relations to these powers should be primarily defensive, that is, responding to those powers’ attitudes to Europe. Currently, the primary military threat to Europe is Russia, but the primary economic threat is from the US. Europe has no place trying to “prevent the rise of China” so long as its rise presents no threat to Europe as a democratic space.

Wars are not just fought by militaries. They are fought by societies. Wars can not only be physically destructive; they can destroy the social fabric of societies that fight them. They can also, on occasion, strengthen that fabric, as appears to be the case in Ukraine today. Europe must be careful not to let the need for rearmament destroy its social fabric. If it uses cuts to social spending or other forms of social austerity to fund rearmament it will simply pave the way to power for the AfD, Reform and Rassemblement National, all of which are integral to the global fascist alliance against which Europe should be rearming. It would be the final, most absurd and obscene act of Europe’s neoliberal elites if their rearmament efforts against Russian fascism were to bring to power within their own countries Putin’s ideological fellow travellers.

European independence needs to be comprehensive – not just in the military sphere. Access to energy supplies shaped much of the history of the second half of the 20^th century. Energy will play a similar if not more important role in the 21^st. Europe needs to develop energy independence from Russia and from the US. The best way to do this is to develop its own independent energy resources, resources that cannot be controlled by other countries. This means, of course, solar and wind energy. Rapidly transitioning to renewable energy would strengthen European independence, contribute to the fight against climate catastrophe, help rebuild struggling manufacturing bases and potentially be able to benefit from some of the investment in manufacturing and R&D capacity resulting from rearmament.

Trump is both a radical breach in the existing system and a malignant manifestation of decades of trends within the US polity and the global order. The only way for Europe and other countries, including Australia, to respond is to counter with a radical new approach to security and international policies, one that casts off the shackles of being an accomplice of US imperialism, and one that actually builds (and respects) a rules-based order that helps and respects countries in the global south, a rules-based order that is not a cover for western domination of the global system.

Although I use part of this Broken Hill union banner in my Substack communications all the time, I thought a picture of it in its entirety to accompany this essay was appropriate. And another reminder, below, of the crucial role that workers and unions played in the victory against fascism in WWII. This banner was made by the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Association.

Colin Long

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