The Indian Panorama

Tag: Martin Kettle

  • Europe is holding the line against Trump’s and Putin’s plans for Ukraine. But it won’t be able to for ever

    Europe is holding the line against Trump’s and Putin’s plans for Ukraine. But it won’t be able to for ever

    In the 21st-century imbalance of power, Europe and Nato have neither the arms nor the wealth to impel Russia or the US to take its peace settlement seriously

    By Martin Kettle

    The failure of this week’s peace talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff fits into a now well-established pattern of standoffs on Ukraine during Trump’s second term. But the dynamic that produced these talks may be becoming more entrenched. The US and Russian interests driving the process have not changed, while the conflict on the ground is intensifying. The lack of progress this week means there will be another attempt to end the war soon, and perhaps another after that, until, one day, there is some kind of US-backed deal to halt the conflict on terms broadly favoring Russia.

    The geopolitical algorithm driving this effort is too consistent to ignore. It has been repeated ever since Trump re-entered the White House in January. On the campaign trail, Trump had claimed he could stop the war in a day. That was never going to happen. But from 12 February onwards, when Trump first talked directly to Putin about Ukraine, the intention and approach have not altered. There is no reason to suppose they will do so now. Indeed, Tuesday’s impasse may spur them on again.

    The internal logic of the interactions that have brought us to this point is familiar by now. Trump refuses to give arms to Ukraine. Instead he attempts a bilateral deal with Putin to stop the war at Ukraine’s territorial expense. Russia bombs Ukraine and makes attritional battlefield progress. Ukraine and its other allies mobilize to challenge any emerging pro-Russian deal. The US rebalances its plans to take account of the objections. Talks take place. Putin says no deal. The war continues, but so does the diplomacy.

    As this process repeats itself, as it will, one of two things will happen. Either the process will be recognized as achieving nothing, or some aspect of it will be changed to make an outcome more likely. The first option, abandonment of the process, is a possibility, but this would mean humiliation for Trump. It would also mean the war would intensify and become more lethal, destructive and destabilizing. Pressures to stop it would thus recur, leading to the resumption of the US diplomatic effort, but from a weaker position than today.

    The second option, the alteration or bypassing of some aspect of the process, therefore seems more likely. This inevitably places Nato and Europe firmly in the crosshairs of Moscow, in particular, and also of Washington. It explains why the Kremlin hinted yesterday that there were still agreements worth making – agreements, in other words, between Russia and the US, from which Europe is excluded. Putin could not be clearer that he sees Europe as Trump’s weak link. “Europe is preventing the US administration from achieving peace on Ukraine,” he said before the talks with Witkoff this week. “They are on the side of war,” he said a little later. “Russia does not intend to fight Europe, but if Europe starts, we are ready right now.”

    Some of this is nonsense. But Putin’s key insight is right. Europe – more accurately Nato minus the US – is indeed managing to frustrate Trump from making the kind of deal with Putin that he wants. The Nato allies’ consistent dedication to this task has not been widely celebrated, for fear of provoking Trump, but it is impossible to miss. The effort has been intense, from the moment that Trump and JD Vance publicly abused Volodymyr Zelenskyy during his Oval Office visit on 28 February. It has also been more or less successful.

    This so-called “coalition of the willing” has the power to wound US-Russia plans, but it lacks the power to shape them. The coalition involves most European nations, plus Canada, all of whom have committed to material support for postwar Ukraine. Its aims have been pursued ad hoc, and partly within Nato, as in yesterday’s foreign ministers’ meeting at Nato HQ in Brussels, from which the US secretary of state Marco Rubio was conspicuously absent.

    Either way, the European scramble on Ukraine’s behalf has repeatedly managed to hold the line against Trump and Putin. It did so again this week when the Witkoff plan was tweaked before the Putin meeting. Hugging Zelenskyy closer has been a key part of this effort ever since the Oval Office disaster. It would be surprising if Zelenskyy was not being intensively advised and consulted by the allies at almost every turn. I would bet that, if we ever get access to a log of his messages, memos, meetings and travels, we will find that Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, plays a big role in this effort.

    Yet this cannot and will not continue indefinitely. The central problem for both Ukraine and Europe is that the 21st-century imbalance of power is turned against them. In this new imbalance, Europe and Nato have not enough arms, power or wealth to leverage an alternative peace settlement that Russia and the US are compelled to take seriously or accept. The postwar idea of the west may not be dead, but it is in intensive care. European and some American surgeons are battling with all the skill at their disposal to keep it alive. The truth, though, is that Trump could very easily pull the plug tomorrow.

    If that were to happen, the danger of Russian troops eventually marching down Whitehall might remain remote. But the threat to Kyiv’s main street, Khreshchatyk, would undoubtedly increase. Whether Trump grasps this, or cares, is hard to say. It is not impossible that an effective Ukrainian government, whether headed by Zelenskyy or not, could continue to function and win the financial and military support of international backers to begin reconstruction. Much would depend on whether the west’s frozen Russian assets, worth £253bn, ended up in Kyiv or are returned to Moscow.

    Either way, Nato could then prove to be yesterday’s solution to tomorrow’s threat. The Nato nations would all still have their weapons and armed forces. They would retain their commitment to an independent Ukraine and to their common values. They would also continue to possess what the London-based historian Georgios Varouxakis, author of the widely praised The West: The History of an Idea, calls their “capacity for self-criticism and self-correction”. But the strategic self-correction required of Europe in the absence of a fully committed US partner would be arduous, and could involve a price tag that few European nations and voters would be willing to pay.

    It may not be true, yet, that Trump’s US has reached a fateful fork in the road, where it decides to choose between Europe and Ukraine on the one hand, and Russia on the other. But that place and that moment are getting closer than at any time since 1945. The looming tragedy is that history has conferred upon Europe a role in support of Ukraine that it is ultimately unable to fulfil to anything like the degree required.

    (Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist)

  • Perilous and chaotic, Trump’s ‘liberation day’ endangers the world’s broken economy – and him

    Perilous and chaotic, Trump’s ‘liberation day’ endangers the world’s broken economy – and him

    While the president has identified the need to do things differently, his strategy risks a slump, hitting the very Americans he claims to champion

    By Martin Kettle

    It would be “liberation day” in the US, the White House announced. Well, we shall see. Yet even if one puts the noise and nastiness that accompany a Donald Trump announcement to one side – in this case tonight’s pronouncement that there will be an executive order announcing “reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world”, a 10% tariff on the UK and 20% on the EU – the significance of the theatre is hard to miss. Whether they presage the US’s liberation, or instead the disintegration of the global trading order, Trump’s tariffs add up to an attempt to transform a badly broken economic model. And that is something that affects us all.

    Trump’s announcement was awash with insult and rambling nonsense. The rest of the world had looted, raped and pillaged, had scavenged and ransacked America – shocking claims if they had come from any other US president, yet water off a duck’s back today. But the hard core was there all the same: tariffs on the whole of the rest of the world. The shutters were up.

    This threatened trade war will appear to supporters – of whom there were rather fewer this week in some important US electoral contests – exactly like the Maga big bazooka he promised in his inaugural speech in January. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he said back then. The new tariffs turn those words into realities.

    Even to Trump’s opponents, though, the tariffs should be seen as the most important piece of evidence so far that he has American workers on his agenda. Where Joe Biden tried major tax, borrow and spend programs to combat post-Covid economic precarity, Trump is deploying tariffs, ostensibly to the same purpose. There has been speculation that this will be merely tactical, to be quickly lifted or adjusted. Right now, that looks a long way off. For Trump, tariffs are not so much a negotiating tactic as a policy, a new revenue stream and a “made in the USA” commitment.

    Before the announcement, markets and foreign governments were jittery. But the uncertainties have not disappeared. Listening to Keir Starmer continue to advocate a “calm pragmatic approach” does not disguise the fact that he knows, as we do, that Trump’s approach is the exact reverse. We are in a trade war now, whether we like it or not, and Trump, as the leader of the strongest economy in the world, likes it a lot because he thinks the US will win.

    Things may not look so benign, however, when the rubber hits the road. It is inevitable that enthusiasm will be dulled – either among the public or in markets – when the inevitable price hikes are passed on to consumers, when inflation and the cost of mortgages begin to rise, when real wages remain flat, or when investment stalls and the US economy starts to experience a Trump slump.

    All this, though, is speculation about the future, and a lot of it is for the fairly long-term future at that. It takes time for the real economic effects to be felt from a tariff wall of the kind Trump is planning. It is true that the tariffs have to be charged immediately, and that retaliatory tariffs are likely to kick in fast too. Nevertheless, it will be months, if not years, before many US companies or sectors have the confidence and the cash to invest in the way “fortress America” supporters hope. Longer still, maybe, before US car workers or farmers feel truly confident about paying down their debts and spending again.

    It makes perfect sense, therefore, to emphasize the uncertainties that Trump has just unleashed. All the more so because of the man himself, as well as the policy. It is hard not to feel, yet again, that part of what drove Trump’s decision was the sheer thrill he gets from his power. He glories in the way the world hangs on his every move, as the world must when its largest economy is controlled by a grudge-bearing manchild with guns who governs by decree.

    Yet step back a little and it is also apparent that Trump is acting more logically than that. He is acting, albeit in a willful and perverse manner, because the international economic model has been broken. He is responding to something real, namely a global recession that stems most immediately from the combined impact of the banking crisis of 2008-9 and the Covid pandemic of 2020. This was not something fake or imagined. Nor was it – or is it still – something felt in the US alone, but elsewhere, certainly including Europe and Britain.

    The common root of today’s economic burden was the overload of debt and credit that caused the banking crash of 2008. That crash was principally confronted by spending massive amounts of public money on quantitative easing. But, just as before the crash, this was money based on credit more than on production or goods. This triggered attempts to square the circle – tax cuts in the US, austerity in Britain, pension cuts in France – which in turn provoked so-called populist responses, such as Trump’s election win in 2016, Brexit in the UK, the gilets jaunes in France. But before any of these national responses could resolve, Covid arrived, causing recessions all round, stock-market collapses and a rise in inflation.

    Faced with these continuing problems, Trump’s response takes the form of tariffs. It is very uncertain whether they will work, even for the US itself. They may also trigger recessions, and the resultant tax and spend policy dilemmas elsewhere, in places such as the EU, Britain, Canada and Japan. In addition, they are likely to widen the gulf between the US and its postwar allies. While Trump talks of liberation, Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, talks of “independence from the USA”.

    Trump and Musk have ushered in the era of cataclysm capitalism. But I have a plan to counter it. In his tariffs, Trump is clutching at straws. He may divert the US’s tariff income into orthodox neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich, like him. But his approach can also be seen as an illustration of the limited strategic options that today’s democratic political leaders have at their command when faced with economic recession or, worse, depression.

    In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson has drawn an illuminating historical contrast with the post-depression 1930s. In the early 1930s, he writes, governments also followed economic orthodoxy with disastrous consequences. Back then, their failure forced the public works programs of the New Deal (and of the Nazis) and then, after emerging from the abyss of war, the postwar establishment of Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes himself, it is worth noting, was no dogmatic free-trader and was sometimes an advocate of tariffs.

    In the 2020s, governments face a comparable dilemma. They, too, have been constrained by an economic orthodoxy that is increasingly difficult to sustain. They, too, have occasionally been forced into interventionist measures such as the Covid furlough scheme.

    But beyond that? Trump is no New Dealer; he is the New Deal’s sworn enemy. At least he sees the need to do things differently. But his tariffs are the opposite to the new paradigm of political economy that the democratic capitalist world so obviously and urgently craves.

    ( Martin Kettle is a Guardian  columnist)