Crocodile tears for Ukraine won’t stop the far right
US President Donald Trump has reduced the Western establishment’s liberal imperialist wing to a blubbering heap.
Even before the White House humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski, the Atlantic magazine was warning about “The End of the Postwar World” and the crumbling of the system of alliances “allowing democratic societies ... to prosper”. A teary-eyed Christoph Heusgen, long-time German diplomat and chair of the annual Munich Security Conference, bewailed Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech to the event last month as a “European nightmare” in the context of Trump’s proposals to end the war in Ukraine.
The administration’s plan for Russian annexations and American plunder of mineral resources is undoubtedly abhorrent. According to Rating Group, a Ukrainian pollster, only 1 percent of Ukrainians support accepting Russian conditions to end the war. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to carve up Ukraine against the will of its population, normalise expansionist imperialism and trample the right to national self-determination.
But the waterworks from Europe’s ruling classes have nothing to do with genuine concern for human rights. The first rumblings of official unease with Trump did not come in response to his mass expulsion idea for Gaza, his plans for mass deportations of migrants in the US or his collaboration with the Hitler-saluting Elon Musk.
Moreover, British and American leaders happily supported Russian barbarism in the contested region of Chechnya when that suited their interests. Western backing for Ukraine against Russia was always about strengthening ties between US and European imperialism—but now, Europe’s leaders are increasingly anxious about their own position within the existing imperialist hierarchy.
The Munich Security Conference exemplifies the favoured branding of post-war capitalism known as the “liberal rules-based order”. We should shed no tears for an order that brought us the invasion of Iraq and the genocide in Gaza. The West’s professed love for democracy hasn’t stopped its flirtations with dictators from Pinochet to bin Salman. And despite all that they preached about the Second World War being fought against Hitler and fascism, the Allies stood aside as General Franco imposed a military junta on Spain, and they assisted Nazi collaborators in Greece.
Assembled at Munich were the remaining dregs of the European political establishment not already overrun by a new, 21st-century wave of far-right forces. They covet American military protection from their aggressive Russian neighbour. Since 1945, their alliance has functioned under the guise of “shared democratic values”. But all that waffle was underpinned by the “percentages agreement” between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, dividing Europe into spheres of influence without the slightest regard for the opinions of the people to be ruled by one or the other of the imperialist blocs.
Vance’s speech made it clear that Washington will no longer operate within the post-WWII ideological framework. The second Trump administration intends to bolster illiberal far-right parties and authoritarian regimes across the Atlantic. “[What] I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia”, Vance teased. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its ... values shared with the United States of America.”
Vance charged that “across Europe, free speech ... is in retreat”, citing a few examples when police have prosecuted “anti-feminist” and Islamophobic activists. The reality, of course, is that far-right provocateurs and activists are ascendant, catapulted forward by the ever-deepening chauvinism of establishment capitalist politics. What upset the audience at Munich was that Vance turned capitalist sanctimony about “freedom” and “democracy” on its head.
Vance’s message was that more governments should follow Trump’s lead and discard the liberal rhetoric they regularly use to legitimise their rule. Vance quipped that “there’s a new sheriff in town”, and he wants to bring the system’s most brutish dynamics out into the open. He hailed a recent move by German conservatives to work with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on border controls. “There is no room for firewalls”, Vance insisted, referring to entrenched German parliamentary taboos against collaborating with fascists.
The new administration in Washington wants fewer restrictions on fascist organising and more alliances between traditional conservatives and the electoral far right. After all, Make America Great Again began as a project inside one of the main parties of US capitalism and now counts Hitler-saluting adherents among its key personnel.
The pro-Russia sentiment in Vance’s polemic poured salt on the wounds, and not just because Putin is a traditional enemy of European states. The war in Ukraine has become a rallying point for the far right over the past three years precisely because of the ideological narratives constructed around it by the liberal establishment.
Biden and NATO cynically presented the conflict as a war between the “democratic” West and authoritarian Russia. In this clash of civilisations, the far right unsurprisingly chose to side with Moscow’s openly authoritarian regime. For many European far-right parties, as well as for many US Republicans, Putin’s ultraconservative strongman style is a model for pushing back liberal social attitudes.
Trump’s punitive approach to Ukraine and his warmth towards Putin reflect political sympathies for the Russian despot. And Vance’s references to Russia made clear that America is on the side of the European far right, not the European establishment. As the vice president departed to meet AfD leader Alice Weidel, he left the assemblage of ruling class representatives in Munich grieving. “We have to fear,” said Heusgen, “that our common value base is not that common anymore”.
The values of status quo capitalism deserve no lamentation. But Trump and his supporters are determined to usher in a new order of fascistic brutality and open imperialist aggression. In foreign policy and when it comes to civil liberties in the West, Trump’s administration wants a world in which might makes right.
Faced with a new far-right onslaught, we cannot rely on the snivelling hypocrites currently grumbling about Ukraine. They created the order out of which fascism and authoritarianism have again reared their monstrous heads.
