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ACAST is the home of podcasting, including such shows as The Logbooks, The High Performance Podcast, and The One You're Listening To Right Now. Hello and welcome back to These Times. I'm Tom McTague. And I'm Helen Thompson.
With Donald Trump announcing that after Canada and Mexico, the EU will be next to be hit by significant US tariffs, and the Danish Prime Minister touring Europe's capitals trying to draw up support over Greenland, Helen and I wanted to turn back to the question of Europe and its... dependence on the United States. Following on then from last week's episode, the question we're asking this week is, why does Europe seem to have no answers to the Trump problem?
NATO's taken advantage of us because we were, look, two things. Number one, they take advantage of us on trade, meaning the European nations, okay, like terrible. They don't take our cars, they don't take our food product, they don't take anything. They think it's a disgrace.
And on top of that, we defend them. So it's a double whammy. So let me just tell you, I was able to get hundreds of billions of dollars put into NATO just by a tough attitude. I said to the countries, I'm not gonna protect you unless you pay. And they started paying.
And that amounted to more than $600 billion. That's a big thing. Otherwise, they wouldn't even be fighting. They wouldn't have any money to fight. If they're paying their bills, and if I think they're treating us fairly, the answer is absolutely, I'd stay with NATO.
So I think the first thing to say, Helen, is obviously that an awful lot has happened since we spoke last week, that we could devote a whole episode to each of these stories, the tariffs that Trump has placed on China, on Canada, on Mexico. Of course, China... new AI rival DeepSeek, which is a fascinating topic in and of itself. But we thought it was worth sticking with Europe and picking up where we left off last week.
because Trump has made it clear that Europe is next, that he hasn't sort of forgotten about the EU. So let's think about where we were at the end of last week's episode. And that was finishing with the end of the Cold War. Because in a sense, the Cold War is the only logical way to think about NATO. And the presence of the United States militarily in Europe with, I think you said last week, something like 200,000 American troops in Europe at the height, you know, really extraordinary numbers.
And so with the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, we could have expected, or perhaps we should have expected... that would end, that military presence, that military dominance would end and Europe would kind of emerge as a power on its own. But that evidently... didn't happen. And so I suppose when we're thinking about the world today and the primary strategic challenge for Europe being Russia and the war in Ukraine, I guess the question that kind of that history begs is...
Why wasn't there a major change geopolitically at the end of the Cold War in terms of Americans' military presence? I think you've hit, Tom, on the central paradox here is that the depth of West European dependency... on the United States, was created by the Cold War, and the Cold War in Europe was with the Soviet Union. And so...
The end, not only of that confrontation with the Soviet Union, but the end of the Soviet state itself, its dissolution in December 1991, should have thrown everything about the US-Western Europe relationship. into question and in a way it does but in order to understand how that happened and the answers that there came in a sense to that question we've got to
Factor in, or start really, I suppose, with just what a geopolitical shock to Europe as a whole, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union is. And in a way, I think that the extent of the shock... It wasn't really recognised at the time, and it's not, I think, even particularly well recognised now. And the reason why I think it wasn't recognised at the time was because it was given such an optimistic... and it seemed that this extraordinary thing had happened.
not just the dissolution of the soviet union but the end of soviet rule prior to that over eastern europe including obviously over eastern germany and reunified germany came out of that and it was all done peacefully I mean, the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania was not entirely peaceful, but the rest of it was. And so I think that the take...
became that this was an extraordinarily benign development. And in lots of ways, it was. But at the same time, there was fault lines underneath it in terms not only of the relationship between the United States and Europe, but crucially... the relationship between Western Europe and Eastern Europe in relationship to Russia.
Yeah, I think this moment in time is, I mean, it's extraordinary in so many ways, isn't it, that we could spend endless episodes talking about this. But this question of... the soviet union or russia and what is the sort of the principal threat here to the west and how should the west think about that and respond to it also how it should think about the
collapse of the USSR into Russia. I mean, I think I've mentioned this before, but there's this summit in Chequers where these questions are dominating Thatcher's mind. And she says, she's giving a note from Charles Pohl. foreign policy advisor and she scribbles on it that she wants to widen the discussion that she's not happy with how the discussion has been framed so far and she says we must widen the discussion to include the future of the ussr and of russia she puts in brackets
whether we pursue spheres of influence or an alliance of democracy or geographical alliances as a future policy. And I think what she has understood there is the significance of the moment that the old... world of you know an ideal ideological divide in which
you have the west versus the east is breaking apart because of this moment and we will have to start thinking about whether in a sense you return to older ways of thinking about foreign policy when she's talking about spheres of influence or geographical alliances.
And yet those thoughts were almost intruding on a discussion that other people didn't want to hear at that time. They wanted to hear that it was a kind of end of history moment and that those sort of elemental challenges about foreign policy didn't apply. where she is saying that they do, that we have to think about the countries that are close to old Russia. We have to think about geography. We have to think about balance of power on the continent.
which I think is interesting. It seems to me that while in the past history was determined largely by the personalities and ambitions of the rulers of people, in future it will be decided much more by the character of the people. So I think there she's getting at...
This emerging sense that these countries will be democracies and how the people in those countries think about themselves will also play into those geopolitical considerations. And again, I think that's quite prophetic in a way because she's saying...
all the stories that the people of Poland or Ukraine or Russia think about themselves will matter. And we need to think about that. But in a sense, history is kind of washing her away at that point. She's losing power and influence and she's going to be replaced by people who don't.
I don't think, on the whole, want to think about these questions. They want to turn to really the question of the EU and its expansion in terms of John Major, Cole, Mitterrand and others. Yeah, I think what's interesting about this is... The question of whether NATO existed in the first place in relation to Soviet power, with the emphasis there on the communist part of it, or in relation to Russian.
power, the old expansionist ambitions of the Russian state, actually is there right at the beginning of the formation of NATO. It's in that telegram that George Kennan sends to Washington in 1947, I think. It comes back in an acute form then when you get to the end of the Cold War because if it's the case that the Soviets were the threat to Europe and that meant in practice...
Effectively a Soviet empire over Eastern Europe Extending into East Germany And the Soviets relinquished that empire And crucially the Soviet Premier Gorbachev Allows for the reunification of Germany then NATO has no need to exist any longer. But if the issue is Russian power, and then you have states that have effectively re-established their independence from Russian rule...
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, that will quickly become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Then the question of whether they need a security guarantee against Russia, NATO being the only... military alliance that can provide that really very much comes to the fore. And then I think the tension comes because the German political class almost entirely buys in to the end of history thesis.
because what they've been able to achieve in that political moment is German reunification and they have secured Soviet consent. And so they see a future in which there can be actually not just peaceful relations between Germany and Russia, but actually deepening economic relations between Germany and Russia. And so their assumption...
has to be that actually the states of Eastern Europe that sit between Germany and Russia can be incorporated in to that peaceful international order. And so the German response to the NATO question, if you like, then in the 1990s becomes, well, we can demilitarise. We no longer need to be the military state that West Germany was, including effectively conscription. We can be a peaceful end of history state.
And there is some sense, I think, in which that confidence that something radically has changed moves out across the European Union. And that comes to a... before the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis, so the wars of Yugoslav, succession particularly, and the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when you have people saying, look, this is the hour of Europe. The European Union doesn't need the United States.
to deal with the disintegration of Yugoslavia. We can deal with it. And as we'll see, it turns out not to be the case, but also the very fact that there is a Yugoslav question actually... gets to the centre of something else, which is that this new map of Europe moving between Germany and Russia, but also going southwards as well, is not something that is politically secure. The post-Cold War borders are going to be contested very violently in the case.
of Yugoslavia. Yeah, and we kind of forget that central challenge of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is the question of borders. I mean, it was absolutely in the minds of those like Thatcher and Mitteron as well, at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse and the unification, this question of the unification of Germany.
The question that Cole had to answer to achieve German unification was this guarantee that the borders of Germany would not shift any further. You know, these were very much open questions at the time and clearly sort of still. I mean, I think that's in a sense the point of what we'll be talking about today, which is the questions that were raised at the gate by the...
collapse of the Soviet Union remain today. There are a few points I thought about there, Helen, when you got to the Yugoslav question. One is that the time, the hour of Europe to act and America's action in Yugoslavia, both then and if we sort of cast the story forward to the Kosovo intervention years later, none of that is possible in the Cold War.
situation. That couldn't have happened. The Soviet Union wouldn't have allowed it. The West wouldn't have dreamed of it. So already you're seeing the challenge, the nature of the challenge changing. I also think it's important to get into the minds of
Europe's leaders at this time and those in the United States. You know, it's not just that the Germans are sort of buying into the end of history analysis. You have people like George Bush in the States who also want to use this opportunity to reduce them.
America's commitment and it's also its financial liabilities. You want to see the Western European leaders, other than Germany, want to be able to make use of the peace dividend as they see it. You know, this is something that is being bought into across
the west and there is this sort of alternative view and i came across a note from Jimmy Goldsmith that was sent to Margaret Thatcher, when he sort of is warning and fearing this, he's warning this, and this note was endorsed by Henry Kissinger, and he's saying that... Be careful about the collapse of the Soviet Union that he is sort of predicting at this point. The note is written in July 89. And he is saying it's a honey trap to get the West to drop its guard.
by the Soviet Union pretending that they are no longer an enemy. He says that the pulling down of the Berlin Wall would be all part of Moscow's grand strategy to persuade the Americans to withdraw its forces from Western Europe. allowing Moscow, in quotes, to forge a Pax Sovietica with the demilitarized Western Europe. They are the kind of paranoia, that's the paranoia, that some of the Cold Warriors... are have sort of allowed to take over their imaginations at that point
In a sense, it's not a ridiculous thought. It is sort of saying the Russian threat remains. And this gets back to your point. Is it a question of the Soviet Union or fundamentally are we thinking about Russian power here? I think it fundamentally... becomes a question about Russian power. If we look at it in terms of NATO membership itself, because you have the East European states, particularly Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic.
like Slovakia, that want a NATO guarantee and that what you can see amongst the European members of NATO is very considerable reluctance to give that. and at the same time is pretty considerable reluctance, especially in France, to allow the European Union to be enlarged eastwards to include. these states and in a way what you can then see and this is where the americans really do come in the picture is the americans pressurizing
the European Union about both of these questions. One way of then reading that the Clinton administration is pushing for NATO accession for these states is saying, look, if you're not going to get your act together and get them into the European Union quickly, we are going to give them that. And there's a kind of framing of NATO enlargement around democratic values as if it's somehow detached from the actual security question in relation to Russia. And in that sense, then...
I think we can say that the purpose of NATO is somewhat being fudged, even though it's being directed against a Russia threat. But a Russia threat... that the European members of NATO or the West European members of NATO aren't taking particularly seriously. And meanwhile, if you look at the Yugoslav question, if we go back to that for a moment, as you've already said, Tom, the whole space in which...
NATO can get involved in the wars of Yugoslav succession, particularly in Bosnia, is the absence of Russia. And that will be true in Kosovo as well. But what's really notable then about... the NATO intervention in Bosnia, which begins with air intervention in February 1994, which is actually the first combat operation in NATO's history, is that it's pretty much entirely led by the United States. And if you then look at the...
settlement of the Bosnian war, the territorial division of Bosnia, it's done by the Americans. I mean, it's quite literally done in America, in Dayton, Ohio. So the Americans are using essentially their air power. to shape the map of Europe. And this is coming from a point in which the Europeans are trying to say, well, we don't need the Americans to deal with post Cold War America.
And so if you then put those two things together in terms of like actual NATO membership and then what NATO is doing, you can see that it is turning out not only to be pretty difficult for the Europeans to find an alternative to NATO. But at the same time, the Americans are actually having significant influence over the security map of Europe. And in a way...
The issue that really shows how far the Americans are willing to pressurise the European Union about the nature of the European itself is when...
that they put pressure on the European Union in the late 1990s to stop, this is the Clinton administration, to start accession talks with Turkey. And that's very divisive within the European Union itself. So what looks... from the European point of view at the beginning of the decade is an opportunity essentially in a way to marginalize American influence.
in Europe, not to treat Russia as an ongoing threat. This is in Western European capitals, I obviously mean by that, kind of unravels as the decade has gone on. And then what you get by the time that the Americans are asking for military support from European states for an out-of-region move. Iraq, obviously the Europeans were willing in Afghanistan, but when it comes to Iraq, there's a deep division between the European...
Union States. So you have a block of them, Britain, Italy, Spain, willing to support, not only those, but Poland as well, but willing to support the American position and then a block. France and Germany that's not. And I think what's really interesting about that moment is that the more that the European state is likely to see Russia as a potentially still dangerous state, the more likely they are to side with the Americans about.
Iraq, but the French and the Germans in particular, who in a mindset where there is a European peace and Russia in some sense is still a peace partner, are not willing to get on side. with the Americans. The difference between then and now is that American administration is not in any way able to coerce a European state that doesn't want to get involved in the Iraq war. What we're into now is a space where
we're seeing much more attempt at direct coercion of European states. It's quite confusing to me, Helen, in a way, when I listen to that outline there. Is it... If you think of the difference in the attitude between, say, 1999, 2001, that kind of world where you have American leadership in Kosovo and Britain. being involved, Tony Blair sort of seeing Britain's role in Europe as a kind of martial leader of Europe alongside the United States. And then he sees that role in Afghanistan as well.
You don't have Russia as an enemy at that point or a clear adversary. Even in the months after 9-11, you have Putin offering... the US use of a base in Kyrgyzstan. And in fact, that becomes absolutely crucial to the war effort in Afghanistan. And I think that is really quite a remarkable moment. The base is called Manas, built in 2001.
And it's used for more than 5 million NATO troops who go on to serve in Afghanistan. And that, you know, Kyrgyzstan is a Central Asian Republic, former Soviet Republic. And there it is being used as a U.S. base. unthinkable today and yet sort of two years on from that you then start to have a division of Europe as you say among the powers who are
In some senses, it's how they think about Russia and how they think about geopolitics. And yet only two years earlier, you still had this sense that Russia... was a partner. It wasn't just a sense, in fact, it was a partner. And there was talk at some point of even Russia perhaps being a NATO member at some point. Well, it's in these partnership for peace arrangements, isn't it, is that there's this contradiction.
which runs through the heart of NATO, I'd say, in the late 90s, which is, why does it exist? It only makes sense if it exists in relation to Russia, but it's engaging in these formal structures of cooperation with Russia. I think the crucial turning point actually comes in 2008 because that's when the Ukraine-NATO question really comes to the fore. But there is a prelude to it and it begins in 2003.
with the Rose Revolution in Georgia and then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, 2005. And what's happening here is that we can see that there are... Governments that take power in these countries that want to move away from the Russian sphere of influence. And the rallying call of that project in some sense becomes joining Europe. But what does joining Europe mean in this? context. Because if you just take that moment in 2003 of the Iraq war, you've got Donald Rumsfeld.
the American Defence Secretary at the time, dividing Europe into old Europe and new Europe. They're saying the Americans prefer new Europe, meaning Poland and co, to old Europe, meaning France and Germany. And crucially, there is no enthusiasm. in France and Germany for thinking about Ukraine and Georgia, certainly as European Union or NATO members, and perhaps even really thinking about them as being part of Europe, as actually being European.
So the contradictions, I think, of the American view of Europe. And the Franco-German view of Europe really come together in that moment, which I think we've talked about a number of times in April 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit when the French and German government, so that's Merkel and Chirac. veto the proposed membership of Ukraine and Georgia. So this is a point where you can say that actually that there's a significant divergence.
of view about the nature of Russian power in Europe and the kind of threat that it poses. Now, Merkel, I think, might say in retrospect what she's been saying in her memoirs is it isn't that she... had a particularly benign view of russia by that point but she couldn't see any mechanism by which a security guarantee could be given to ukraine but even that in itself
really gets to the core of what's becoming clear at this point, which is that most European states have treated the post-Cold War era as an era of peace. And they have demilitarized. And yet... The question of the nature of Russian power is such that it's at the very least questionable whether that is a tenable view of what is happening in the continent. Now, obviously, some people would say, well, it's actually the way in which NATO reacts to these.
questions and the Americans in particular that reacts to these questions that reinforce the difficulties that Russia poses. I think it runs deeper than that. There was a kind of presumption going back to the end of the Cold War that it would be possible to have these independent states between Germany and Russia. without thinking through what the security implications of that and whether that really meant that Europe could be a peace continent or was likely to be.
A peace continent. Absolutely. I think it goes back to the note that I mentioned at the very beginning from Thatcher, which is perhaps we could end this half of the episode on this. You know, she is saying we have to build a new framework for the future. She writes at the top of this note. the Foreign Office, for defense and cooperation beyond Europe, and how we can bring the Soviet Union into a real Western democracy.
with economic as well as political freedom. And then she says, we must consider Central Europe and its minorities and how our security could be upset from the Middle East. I mean, they are all of the things that are going to come into question over the next 20 years. And as you say... in 2008, they seem to be sort of jutting up against the reality of Russian power and American power. And I guess then the thing we should turn to in the second half...
is that then you have the economic crash, which then starts to add a fresh challenge to Europe's ability to re-militarize itself into this new world. So let's turn to that after the break. Acast recommends. Hi, my name's Paloma Faith and this is my new show. One, two, three, four! I've been called mad and bad my whole life.
I've also had some real moments of sad, so I decided to make a podcast. This series, I'll be speaking to my favourite actors, comedians, musicians and thinkers to find out what makes them mad, sad and bad. Out now. This is like free therapy for you, isn't it? ACAST is the home of podcasting, including such shows as The Logbooks, The High Performance Podcast, and the one you're listening to right now.
Welcome back, everybody. So we ended the first half there talking about the financial crisis of 2007-2008. And I think this is a really important moment because not only is this the time of the geopolitical... challenges for Europe in terms of its own defence and the decisions that it's taken since the end of the Cold War, how they're starting to play into European politics, but also this is the moment we could probably...
time it to where Europe's economic divergence from the United States begins. And of course, it didn't feel like that at the very beginning. If you think about what President Sarkozy in France is saying, to power in in late 2008 you know he is saying this is an American crisis. You know, this is a chance for us to rid ourselves of this Anglo-Saxon economic model. And, you know, they are to blame for what is happening here.
If you cast yourself a few years forward from that moment, from into, say, 2011, 2012, where you're in the height of the Eurozone crisis, then the world starts to look very different at that point. It is interesting to just go back and think about... how the world looked at that moment, because I think he was reflecting a general sense in Europe at the time that this was...
The crisis for the United States. And of course, then if you look at how the economic performance since then, it has been remarkably different. And again, you can trace that back, can't you, to this period that we began this podcast with thinking. about why is it that Europe struggled to recover from the crash? And so at least part of that answer lies in the contradictions at the heart of the Euro and how it was constructed. And that was indeed constructed in the aftermath of the Cold War.
War of Maastricht in 1992. So I think you can trace this story all the way back to the 1990s. I think though there's something that really radically does change in the aftermath of the crash. In fact, I think there are multiple things that change that explain if we just... stick with this for the moment, the economic divergence. The first of them is that the big losers, if you like, of the crash, as it becomes clear, the European banks and not the American financial.
system in the same way secondly that the federal reserve the american central bank ends up being the international lender of last resort including to European banks via the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, the Bank of Switzerland.
So this introduces a new kind of dependency into Europe, which has not been there before, which is the dependency on dollar swaps from the United States, particularly in crisis moments. That will be... clear in the eurozone crisis particularly in 2011 but it will also manifest in the pandemic crisis financial crisis of
2020 that monetary environment monetary and financial environment that comes out of the united states and fed policy in the aftermath of the crash so the push for quantitative easing or the rounds of quantitative easing and zero interest rates creates the credit environment that can support the u.s shale oil and gas boom so this is a story in which over the next decade the united states will end up with significantly lower energy costs not particularly oil but certainly
for gas and electricity than european countries the monetary and financial environment also supports the big tech boom in the united states they don't see any rivals coming out of Europe that can compete with the big American tech firms. And then you move into this kind of regulatory war in a way between the United States and the European Union. It starts off with... american regulators imposing big fines on european banks and then it moves into
And we can see this quite recently, the European Union imposing big fines on the big tech companies. And if we go back to what we were talking about, when we were talking about the oligarchic turn in American politics, you can see the fact that Trump is promising to be...
confrontational with the European Union on behalf of these companies, let's say like Meta, because Mark Zuckerberg's talked very explicitly about this, is part of the attraction for the big tech companies and the lining themselves. So you've got that economic.
divergence going on that i think has become in a way deeper and deeper as time has gone on since the beginning of the 2010s but the other thing that's going on as a result of the crash for the european states is the ones particularly with significant budget deficits respond to that by going into another round of defense cuts so the response in european capitals is to if you like double down on demilitarization at just that point
after the events of 2008 in the geopolitical sphere, have put the question of military commitments, security commitments back on the table. If you look immediately... in those immediate years after you have a Dutch government falling in 2010 over the withdrawing from Afghanistan You have the German government making significant cuts to the size of its armed forces. Sarkozy, when he becomes French president, returns France fully to unified NATO command. The British and the French.
looking to both economise in terms of their individual defence expenditure, sign the 50-year cooperation, Lancaster House treaties. And you have various members of the Obama administration openly commenting on the demilitarisation of Europe as they... see it in this fiscal space so this issue that trump is drawing attention to and is sometimes seen i think as something that's very trump about trump himself actually it has got structural origins the americans have been complaining
for decades really about European expenditure within NATO. But there is a point in which it moves to another level and the origins, if I think of it, are the way in which the European governments respond. to the fiscal pressures that they face after 2008. There's loads in that, isn't there? Because the more you think about it then, the more you think that the European reaction to the crisis really then exacerbates its...
weakness in terms of when compared to the United States on all these fronts. So I'm casting my mind back to the Eurozone crisis itself and the way that Merkel and others were reacting to it. And there was a choice very early on. I think it's detailed in. Adam Tooze's Crashed, where they talk about how do you then bail out
Greece, effectively. And what the question then becomes, do you do it by changing the European treaties and having a European bailout of a European state in Europe single currency? And Merkel rejects that. I think that push comes from her finance minister. Schäuble at the time. And I think that the French are supportive as well. But Merkel is keen to get the American involvement in this. I think that is key through the IMF. And that is indeed what happens. And the French call this a humiliation.
for europe at the time so on top of that then you have as you say heaven the the cuts to the military spending and i did have a look at this in terms of our own cuts here in the uk and they are extraordinary When you go back and think about what was happening at the time. So Liam Fox begin, he's the defense secretary at the time after Cameron.
becomes prime minister in 2010. And he begins the first comprehensive review into military defense in 12 years, resulting in cuts that reduces the army to its smallest size in a century. You know, this is part of cuts that are going on across the board, obviously. But this is, I mean, that is a major political decision to be cutting the size of the army. I think it was to 80,000 was the target from 120,000. So these are really quite significant.
And as you say, they begin to come under pressure quite quickly from the Obama administration. And then you have this sense, don't you? I don't know if we should think about this almost as like a kind of hangover from Europe's reaction to the collapse of the Cold War or the end of the Cold War. in that it starts to think of itself as a regulatory superpower at this time. And as you say, the Americans are finding European banks and the European Union starts to find American companies.
But that is the way it is framing itself as a geopolitical force. It's not a military power and accepts that it can't be. But then it says... or the idea behind Europe's influence at the time is that we don't need to be. That's not the world that is emerging. The globalized world that is emerging gives Europe this heft in terms of its ability to regulate itself into a position of...
strength and it can compete with the United States in this regard. I think there is this telling moment in 2012, because again, it gets to this point about divergence of power. And it's Jacques Delors. complaining to the European Union that the Europe that he was trying to build was being killed by the decisions that they are taking. That is the language that he uses, killed. He says that they are completely destroying the heritage.
I think that's in 2012. This is at the time where Britain is reacting. to the crisis in europe the eurozone crisis in a way that will eventually see its exit. But for the Federalists in Europe, the most committed Europeans, what Europe is actually doing is weakening itself. It's not taking the decisions that it needs to assert its power. I think there's something even deeper there. Tom, which is that the Eurozone crisis in quite a number of ways exposes the power relationship in the...
monetary and macroeconomic sphere that now exists between Europe and the United States. So if you go to 2011 in particular, there's intense pressure being put by the Obama administration on Merkel. to allow the European Central Bank to act in a different way to end the Eurozone crisis. Because essentially, Merkel is acting as a German bloc, or she's articulating the German veto on the European Central Bank.
acting as a lender of last resort by using quantitative easing. Remember that the European Central Bank doesn't move to quantitative easing until 2015. And there's one occasion, I can't remember the exact context. of it, where Obama is reported as reducing Merkel to tears over this issue. And meanwhile, as you've already suggested, Tom, the Eurozone itself can't deal with the bailouts without the IMF. And Merkel is the one who's insisting.
The French really don't like it. There's one point where I think it's Sarkozy says to the Greek Prime Minister or Finance Minister, they're for African states, the IMF. And that there's something fundamentally... threatening to Europe about involving the IMF in this but on the other hand there isn't
a willingness amongst the eurozone states to do these bailouts by themselves and then if you say well why do they do the bailouts why do they need them in the way in which they did it's because the european central bank is hemmed in until the Germans give their consent to it. So there's a lot of conflict, I think, between the Eurozone, a bit of the European Union anyway, and the Obama administration played out through the Eurozone crisis. And then into this...
So at a point in which the Eurozone crisis hasn't entirely been solved because we're not at the quantitative easing moment yet comes Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. And that forces the, not just the Ukraine question, but the NATO defence expenditure question right to the surface of European politics. It's in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea that the NATO summit in Wales later in 2014 is held, where everybody has to commit that they will spend at least 2% of GDP on defence.
then this is the moment what Trump will pick up when he becomes president first time round and say, look, you all promised to do this and hardly any of you are. doing it and to compound matters it isn't just in 2014 that russia annexes crimea the war in the donbass breaks out so the attempted secession by the two breakaway republics in the donbass begins And this contains the prospect, which will come to fruition, obviously, in 2022, of actual direct Russian military action in Ukraine.
Again, you can see there's a serious divide in the response of France and Germany to that moment than the Obama administration and subsequently the Trump administration. The view in Washington is... we will start arming Ukraine to prepare for war. And what's happening in France and Germany is we will try to get peace. The Minx, particularly the Minx too, accords that...
Olaf Scholz is still trying to rescue in those last few weeks before Russia's invasion on the 24th of February of 2022. But you can see what the structural European problem or the structural Franco-German problem, I should say, is. here is they want peace with russia preserved but they don't have any geopolitical means to bring that about that the question of
how that plays out will ultimately be a matter of what Russia does, what the Ukrainian government itself does, and what the United States does. And yet, once the Franco-German position is blown away, then the really hard choices about what... to do about Ukraine are not actually in Washington. They're in European capitals. Although the decisions end up being in Washington. The decisions have been made in Washington.
If you then say, if you think like where Trump is now with this, it will be, I want this war to come to an end, whether we can do that as a whole other light matter. In terms of where that leaves Ukraine, in terms of trying to preserve its security, he's, well, that's a European problem. Which is almost the inverse, isn't it? So if we think about the moments in this mini-series that we've done on the United States in Europe, starting at the end of the Second World War and the creation of NATO.
as a way of keeping the united states in europe as a defense against the soviet union that being the beginning Then at the end of the Cold War, when you say, okay, well, the sort of raison d'etre of NATO has gone, so is everything else going to change? Now, you know, answer, no, it doesn't. And then the question is, well, what is NATO for? Is it a guard against the Soviet Union or actually the ideology of communism? Or is it a guard against Russia and the sort of...
you know, eternal Russia, elemental Russia, and its desire to expand. Is that the reason for NATO's existence? And then you get to today and you have an expansionist Russia. And then the answer is actually, well, Americans are not going to deal with it. They don't want to deal with it anymore. Europe has to deal with it. And that's kind of a, there's such a sort of historical irony there. We finally reach the answer at the end.
The solution then doubles back onto Europe, but it doesn't have any of the tools. It doesn't have the military capacity. It doesn't have the financial capacity. It doesn't have the energy capacity. Any of these things, it's gone because it was thinking. And so...
It's hard to know then what is the solution at that point. I mean, I guess in one sense, the solution is American power again. America will decide. But isn't this where we need to bring China into the story? Because in that sense, Europe's been... dealing with the legacy of its long history playing out in the present, particularly around the Russia question. And that's a return to the past in any number of ways.
The United States is dealing now with something from its point of view, which is entirely new, which is geopolitical competition with China. And from its point of view, or at least from the Trump administration's point of view, a situation where China poses threats in different ways at the United States borders. And again, this is not something that... it's dealt with before. You can say that the way in which the Monroe Doctrine, as we talked about in a number of
episodes over the last weeks was formulated was all about the presence of European powers in the Western Hemisphere. That has still got one direct legacy for what Trump's doing at the moment, which is the Greenland. question. But if we think beyond that, we can say that the focus is trying to push back Chinese influence in the Western hemisphere. That isn't a question that really...
affects Europe in anything like the same way. Now, you might say, well, it's the fact that the Western Hemisphere is the priority of the Trump administration this time round is why the tariffs are first of all. gone on Mexico, Canada and China. And then he's talking about the European Union second. You might also say perhaps they're not going to be...
as systematically directed against the European Union as they are on particularly perhaps Mexico and Canada. But it does raise the question I think of, well, is the United States... now in a position economically where Trump and the people around him believe that they can actually use the tariffs against the European Union to force a reckoning over the defence spending question. Now having said that
You've got to say, well, is it the case that the Trump administration has got any realistic expectation that European Union countries or European countries, because we shouldn't include the UK after this, could really most of them spend 5% on GDP? I mean, the Estonian and...
the lutheranian governments have said that they will but they're like directly on the front line so to speak one of the things that's really interesting i think and what's gone on just in this last week is that you have the italian government which as we know has been pretty supportive of Trump and Maloney was the one European Union in fact the one European leader at all who was invited to the to Trump's
inauguration. And you have the Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, saying, as I say, just last week, that if Europe wants to avoid the trade war with the Americans, then it needs to buy more American goods. It really means, I think, energy, and it needs to spend more on... defense but then he goes on to say i'm in favor of spending two percent but you must not force me to cut health care first we get to two and we talk about three so even
of the West European governments that is being the most sympathetic to the Trump administration. It can't deliver what Trump says that he wants. And in some sense, they must understand like that. in washington so then it raises like a bigger question is this actually push against the whole idea of nato yeah what's the fund what's the fundamentally going on here because if we think about it just europe and russia
And the United States essentially saying, look, that's not our main priority in the world anymore. That is gone with the fall of the Soviet Union. That world has shifted. Our main priority is China. And therefore, we order our priorities in that regard. So as you say, Canada and Mexico, why is he putting the tariffs on those places first? Is it because of NAFTA?
North American free trade area and that kind of easy backdoor way into the United States for China by having deals with Mexico or Canada and weakening the United States in that regard. That seems to be one way of understanding Trump's priorities here. He goes after China first, and then those two countries, and then he comes to Europe. For Europe, is it just a question of him saying, right, you just need to deal with your thing yourself. And if you do that...
then we're all good. That's fine. You deal with Ukraine. Or does Europe need to, in the end, decide whether it's going to... support the United States in its confrontation with China. So does it need to be more active in that regard? Does NATO need to shift as a...
ideologically about what its job is, to bind it into American politics, in a sense. I mean, is that fundamentally what's going on here? I think there's two different things that we can say here. The first of them is that if you look at the Biden administration, I think that there was a thread that ran through that to the Europeans, which was, we will give you some concessions compared to the way in which Trump was with you. But the corollary of that...
is that you get on side about our confrontation with China, including economically. And a good example of that would be the way in which the Biden administration pressurised. the dutch government to follow the ban on the ai chip so the dutch companies important part of that supply chain so i think that the biden put the u.s ban on
in October of 2022 and then early 2023 cajoled the Dutch to be on side. Now you can see that ask from the Biden administration was not easy for the European Union, not least as we've talked about a number of times given how divided. The European Union is in relation to approaching China and the singular position that Germany has in relation to that. But I think there's something else going on that makes it.
even more complicated in a way for the European Union countries and indeed for the UK in this respect as well. And that is the Arctic. And because the Arctic as a site of geopolitical competition puts the Russia question and the China question together. China isn't actually an Arctic power, but it has ambitions in the Arctic, not just in relation to like Greenland, but in terms of the trade route.
And we can see that from the point of view of the European members of NATO, that the outcome in terms of NATO itself of the Ukraine war in bringing... sweden and finland into nato was to give it a more arctic centered focus nato than than it had and so in that sense there's not a coincidence at all that greenland has become
such a structural point of pressure in this. And in that sense is that the European problem is just completely double-sided it's not just about ukraine in the in the trump world it's about the arctic and this gets back to the point that i was trying to make last week about why the greenland question raises such a
existential question I think not just ultimately for Denmark but for all of Europe because the mindset we in Europe have come to have is that we are sovereign states and as sovereign states we delegate part of our security to others. De Gaulle was the one person in Europe's post-war history who could see, in a historical sense, what an anomaly that was. And the European Union position now...
over Greenland is to say, well, we want to separate out the sovereign territory aspect of this from the security aspect of this and get the Americans to do the security aspect of it. That is the mindset that we got wired into in Europe during the Cold War. And in some sense, we haven't liked that.
left it behind and yet now it's completely having a more than hammer taken to it's just an assumption that that won't hold any longer and it doesn't in a sense it's not really clear what the answer to that question about what to do about it is. But the Trump administration is not going to allow European countries to stay in that old mindset. If you were to think about what would somebody like Jean Monnet say as the answer to that question, I think it's quite obvious, you know.
He would say, right back from the beginning, you know, back to the 1950s again, he would say, you need... more than just, you know, a structure. You need an idea behind the structure. You kind of need an elemental sense of what is the purpose of Europe. You know, and de Gaulle had that. You know, de Gaulle says openly, what is the idea of Europe? What is the purpose?
point of Europe is to not be dependent on the United States or Russia. But the point is that in reality, no European project can possibly succeed without power. Exactly, yeah. And that's not what's been an answer to. And the only way in which that 90s bet made any sense in the particular economically driven idea of Europe that came out of it was if there was peace. It had to be a peace project. But European states do not have the ability themselves.
to maintain peace. Well, Europe needs to reimagine itself. If it wants the kind of sovereignty or independence it says it wants from the United States or from anybody else, it needs to think of itself more as a geopolitical power. That's got to be the conclusion. I think that then goes back to the inability of European states, though, to spend money to project military power. And that's where there's...
I think it becomes such a hard question as like what to do about it because you can talk about, oh, we should stand up to this bullying from the United States and we should do this, that and the other. But if you're not actually got the capability to spend money to do this, that and the... Yeah.
then it's all talk. Absolutely. And the willingness. And this comes back to that point, you know, where Merkel is saying, you know, oh, no, let's get the IMF in. We don't want to do this ourselves as Europeans. And it's no coincidence that the European Union has not had a, you know, a market. or a Lisbon, you know, moment for, well, since Lisbon, you know, it hasn't had, it hasn't been able to come together and say, we need a new treaty. We need a major structural change to the treaties.
to bring us into this new world because it can't. Because it has decided, and Merkel decided, and others decided that it wasn't prepared to do this because it would just open up questions of referendums in France, in the Netherlands, in Ireland, all of this. But I think that's the, you know, what did Monet say, that Europe would be built, would be made in.
crises. I think that was the idea. But it's had plenty of crises since 2008. It hasn't really made much of them in terms of developing its own geopolitical power. I think we've run out of time, haven't we, again? So we better bring this episode to a close. said at the start, I think there's a lot that's going on.
which is linked to what we've been discussing today in terms of China, in terms of Canada and Mexico that Helen and I are really keen to turn to in the coming weeks. Obviously, we'll see what happens over the next few days before we decide. what we can talk about next week. But please do tune in then because I'm sure a lot of these themes will be coming back up. So thanks very much for listening and see you next time.
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