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This week we're sticking with Donald Trump and turning our attention to what his presidency means for Europe historically after a revealing first week in office in which he has promised territorially to get Greenland off Denmark and demanded Europe up its defensive line.
spending to 5% of GDP, while threatening European countries with tariffs if we don't buy more American oil and gas. The question we're asking in this week's episode is, what does the history of the United States' relationship with Europe reveal about the Trump 2 shock?
We need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don't even know.
if Denmark has an illegal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world. So Helen, I think what's interesting when we think about this topic is, as you say in your question, in europe we're experiencing this second trump presidency as a shock in some fundamental sense although oddly one in which a lot of us were prepared and you speak to european diplomats and they were prepared
this and they're much more accepting this time round than they were the first time when there was a sense of kind of resistance to Trump and what he means. And this time there's almost an odd embrace of what he means. But I still think...
When you think about this question of Greenland or tariffs or 5% of GDP or the question of Ukraine, it really is much more of a shock this time in a structural sense than the first time round. So what we want to do in this episode... is to delve into the history to question whether it is a shock or how much of a shock the trump presidency is or how many parallels there are to previous presidents so we're going to do this over two episodes
Because we fundamentally think there's just too much to talk about in one episode. The first, this week, we're going to take the story from the late 19th century up until the end of the Cold War. And then in the second, which we hope to record next week, events. unless events intervene, will take us from the 1990s up until today. And in this episode, we're going to split the first half from the end of the 19th century up to 1945, and then we're going to take the story through the Cold War.
war in the second half. So I guess if that's the structure, Helen, the first question to answer is, why do we think it's important to start in the late 19th century? I think there's two things going on. Tom, that really focus European minds about the United States in the decades from, let's say, the beginning of the 1870s through to the very beginning of the 20th century.
The first of them is something that we've already talked about when we were talking about the United States as a territorially expansionist state, and that is the presence of the European imperial powers in the Western Hemisphere. And the second of them is the astonishing rise of the American economy as an industrial power in those decades and the realisation in Europe, or the fear at least, that they're going to get... dramatically left behind.
So if we take each of those in turn, be more brief, obviously, about the first because we've already spent some time discussing it. But I do think it is important for a number of reasons because it's the context in a way in which the Green Line question comes into play.
said before the americans have articulated back in 1823 this thing called the monroe doctrine which is that the european powers should not be intervening in any way in the western hemisphere but doesn't really become a meaningful political project for american presidents until the 1890s and that manifests in relation to Britain and what's going on in Venezuela which we talked about in relation to Guyana about six months or so ago and in relation to the war fought with Spain in 1898 which pushes
and the spanish out of the caribbean so from this point on the europeans can see that actually they're not welcome in the western hemisphere now If we look to this point today, you could say there's two things that's left over from this period. One, interestingly, is the Falklands, but the other is Greenland. And that is something now that Trump is saying, effectively applying the Monroe Doctrine.
to of saying actually this is a european territory in the western hemisphere that's not acceptable to the americans unless denmark is willing to do certain things in regard to security that we'll come to in relation to the nato question But this in that sense is unfinished business in Trump's mind from American domination of the Western Hemisphere. And we should say on that point that Greenland was formerly a colony.
until the 50s. I think it's until 1953. Yeah, I think, but that is quite a telling point, isn't it? Because when you're thinking about the Monroe Doctrine as European powers should not be in the Western Hemisphere, when we recorded the episode, was it last week or two? two weeks ago, about this question. And we were thinking about Cuba and those questions. Reading about Spanish history at the time, the defeat...
And the loss of Cuba was felt in Spanish politics as exactly what we're talking about now, as a shock, as a shock to the political system, because it was the sudden realization of American power and their own weakness, which is in some senses what...
we are now going through today. But the fact that what you had is a formal European... colony the ownership of territory essentially this this enormous island of greenland that then only changes formally in the in the 50s to become what it is today which is a kind of
you know, as the, I think some European diplomats are putting in today, it's like, this is European Union territory. This is part of our... Except the Greenland is not part of the European Union. That's interesting because that's what the, I think it was a French diplomat. That's the language that they were saying. Trump is attacking us
directly in this attempt to take Greenland. But that point is that it's not part of the EU. Yeah, the interesting point there is I think that its formal status is that it's an overseas country and territory in relation to the European Union, which is quite...
imperial language. Yes, it is. I mean, that's a kind of British language about, you know, the Falklands, you know, or those kind of territories. And I think what's interesting here is that what... is happening from Trump is actually returning us to seeing the contingency of Europe's territorial political arrangements.
in quite a number of ways. If we look at the second shock that the United States represents to Europe from the 1870s, I think it's fundamentally economic. And this is the one that i think is actually in the end the most important because what's happened in the aftermath of the of the united states civil war from 1861 to 1865 is that the united states has begun to industrialize pretty rapidly
And it has done so behind tariff barriers. And at the same time... as that westward expansion that we talked about a few weeks ago is continuing so by the time you get to the 1890s the united states will be a continental state from the atlantic to the pacific
And there's lots of things that are going on here that I think cause the fear in Europe. And one of them is the realisation of just how resource rich this new continental United States is. And if you think about it as a territory going from the Atlantic to the... Pacific, the really resource-rich and indeed most fertile agricultural lands are westwards rather than the original east coast seaboard United States.
Given that one of the things that's happening that is to some extent part of the United States industrial rise, but will become much more significant in the beginning of the 20th century, is both the drilling of oil and the... refining of oil, think Standard Oil and John Rockefeller, again, character referred to a few episodes ago, as it becomes clear that actually that this continental territory is so resource rich.
in an energy source that some people are beginning to see may well be the significant energy source for the future. That leaves the European politicians thinking, what on earth are we going to do? And because it's such a... large state as well and creating a single market effectively across a continent, building a transport infrastructure to enhance, develop that single market is that... Europe divided into these much smaller
states not being a single market in any kind, not being resource rich except for coal and even then unevenly between the European states. You have European politicians starting to say, well, we have to be like... the United States to compete. And that means that we need to be like an empire.
There already are empires, but we need empires that are going to deliver us more land, more resources. And that is the context, I think, in which the European imperial scramble for Africa takes place from the 1880s. It's a context.
which there's a turn amongst a number of European states including Germany but interestingly not Britain to protectionism to trying to say actually we need a protected market like the united states but the overriding problem is is that the united states turns out to be able to do industrial production at a whole other level even than britain which at that point had been the dominant industrial power for a period of time. So if we go on to 14,
then the manufacturing capacity of the United States exceeded that of Britain, France and Germany combined. I think that's just remarkable. That is to sort of put your mind into the political leaders in Europe.
at that moment in the late 19th century and then the earlier 20th century, you can see how it is a complete shock to their understanding of the world, to go from supremacy and... you know global power to having this rival which is new it's an entirely new construct it's a and it's a contiguous empire effectively it's a european empire that is
much easier to manage than anything that the Europeans can come up with. And there's nothing that the Europeans can do in their own continent. But I do think it's quite interesting that... I think it's at this time as well that the first ideas of European unity start to bubble up. They're very marginal at this point. They won't come to fruition, as we'll see, until after the Second World War. But they are starting to...
emerge as ideas. And I think, and I hadn't really thought about this in this way, you can understand them as an answer to the reality of America. Oh, very much. I think there is, though, also that comes out of it and will manifest in later German. history, internal European conquest project, the Lebensraum project for Germany to the east that also has its roots in this.
And this is important, we can talk about it in the second half, that the ideas of, let's call it pan-Europeanism, as it was then, have got what gets called this Euro-Africa dimension to it, i.e. that...
Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, as a more resource-rich continent than Europe has to act in some sense as the economic hinterland for Europe in the same way in which West... of the united states has come to for the for the americans yeah and in that sense you might say that the idea of the monroe doctrine corollary becomes the African Imperial Empire in Africa project. Obviously, in terms of North Africa, it's already there in regard to the French. But...
There's a connection between the idea of pan-European unity and empire in Africa. that will absolutely run as a continuous thread into the Cold War world and the beginnings of what we now know as the West European Unity Project. Yeah, I mean, you could also think as a European, if your mind is turning to Rome and those kind of questions, you would say, well, this is also has historical parallels.
It's contingency, which means that, you know, Europe, in a sense, is north of the Mediterranean and stops there. There are other stories in European history. And, of course, again, that makes me think, Helen, of...
of Europe's attitude to the Middle East as well in the run-up to Suez as being, this is our backyard and not yours. Well, I think this is a really important thread that comes out in what you've just said, Tom, which is the Middle East question. I think that... in order to see why the British and initially the Germans were more systematic in their pursuit of oil in the Middle East.
prior to the first world war than the the french are get to the obsession that they have with the middle east and ultimately in britain's case the empire that they have in the middle east is because the response on the energy front as it becomes clear that oil will be capable of fueling naval warships is if we do not have the territory that the united states has then we do not want to be dependent
upon them selling oil to us. We need imperial territory where there is oil. And in that sense, there is a pretty considered, not unified European reaction.
to the fear that is there from the united states but a very divisive ultimately you might say catastrophically divided european reaction to that i think though the interesting thing about The First World War is that, on the one hand, it shows where that story goes, and it's incredibly difficult for the European states to break an oil dependency on the United States, so Britain and France.
have to rely on American oil through the course of the First World War. Britain and France also have to rely, as we've talked about a few episodes ago, in a different context on American finance to get through the First World War. But the First World War doesn't... actually, I think, lead to American dominance of Europe. Not in the way in which it's going to be the case after the Second World War as well.
come to in that sense is that the european states particularly britain and france do by gaining their empire in the middle east find what looks like it's going to be a resource base and what interestingly that because the americans haven't fought the ottomans in the first world war the americans are shut out of at a time in which they actually fear
that they haven't got as much oil going into the future as they thought they had at the beginning of the 20th century. And then as we know, in the 1920s and the 1930s, it's really rather difficult. for the Americans to influence the shape of European politics. They try.
through finance in particular, through their ability to provide loans to get European states back on the gold standard, effectively to finance Weimar Republic in the way in which they did. But then at that point when... the 1929 onwards when economic crisis and depression hits the United States is what we effectively see is the American retreat from Europe until we get to the second world.
So in that sense, I mean, the interwar years are so catastrophic for Europe and their consequences as we know, but it is in a way the last gasp of the European states trying to find a way and to some extent doing so. from this hierarchical relationship with the United States. Yeah, it's not that Europe remains more powerful than the United States. It's just that it hasn't yet become dependent or subservient to the United States in quite the way that...
We now understand it. It's interesting this moment, isn't it, to understand it as the last gasp, because you can see all of the threads. coming together in this, in the interwar period, where you have, you know, the Treaty of Versailles, you have Clémenceau and Lloyd George and these kind of titanic figures. You obviously have the Americans there as well, but they are not the...
total dominant orchestrators of that moment you know it's woodrow wilson is there and his his influence, the kind of disrupting influence of America starts to be felt and the ideas of America start to be imposed on Europe in ways that will be ultimately very disruptive. But it's not yet we are imposing an American plan on Europe or we are going to guide it into exactly the place that we want it to be. I don't think that's quite...
there in the 20s? Yeah, I think that part of it is because there isn't a really clear basis in American democratic politics for an American president being really... interventionist in European matters and obviously the symbol of that is the fact the Senate doesn't ratify the League of Nations and the blow that that is to Wilson. But even if you look at... Versailles itself in the terms of that treaty, many of which bits of it that Wilson was pretty unhappy with. I think what's notable is that
Wilson wasn't able to use the financial dependency of Britain and France to impose the peace terms upon them. And this was as much the US Congress really as any American president. What was the constraint was the fact that the american congress's insistence that british and french war debts had to be paid created hard choices all along the way for until the 1930s for British and French governments. But I think if you look at it in a big picture sense, that this sense that...
The British and the French had got themselves some kind of resource base in the Middle East. It's part of how that they think they can assert some autonomy against the Americans, even though they realize on the financial side how circumscribed. their options are. Yeah, it's almost, Helen, like there is this sort of looming presence of the superpower that is not yet, as I said before, sort of imposing its will, but it's there, its influences.
is unavoidable in European politics in a way that wasn't the case previously. I mean, just one moment is there is this figure of Jean Monnet, the future founder of Europe, who is...
placing a lot of hopes in the League of Nations at this point. His job had been to bring the Allies together in the First World War, the UK, France, and the United States, to sort of... economically bring them together to ensure that they weren't competing on things like arms sales so that they were you know they were working together and that would be in that that sort of experience would lodge in his mind all the way through the interwar years the collapse of the
failure of the League of Nations that he was intimately involved in. and then through the Second World War and into the formation of the European Union. So again, you can see how these things are coming together. And as you mentioned before, that sort of the economic power of America behind a tariff wall is the reality before you get Woodrow.
Wilson coming to power. So all of this is coming together. And then you see, even though the Europeans are still asserting their independence, their ability to act independently in this interwar period. that collapses in on itself under its own failure in the 1930s effectively. I think, yeah, it collapses in that sense under the intense intra-European competition.
including in relation to the empires. Which then plays in Monet's mind as well. Yeah, that this situation brings about. And one way of reading it, and obviously there's quite a number of different ways one could read the 1930s, is that... the crisis of Europe is accelerated by the fact that the Americans give up. on their financial support of the Weimar Republic. In that sense, American financial support is a necessary condition of Weimar surviving. Without it, the Nazis...
come to power, I mean, you obviously have got to have an account of that that ties in the economic crisis. In Germany, the weakness of the League of Nations comes to play when Italy invades Abyssinia in the middle of the...
decade and there is no way in which the european states themselves can find a way of stopping what has become the the road to war through the the 30s and in that sense is that the absence, you might say, of any kind of attempt at American leadership in Europe in the 1930s is part of the catastrophe.
Yeah, which then plays into American politics in the aftermath of the war. When you do have the same kind of ideas emerging that followed in the wake of the First World War, when you have American reticence to be involved. in European affairs, American reticence to be involved in the League of Nations. That is overwhelmed at the end of the Second World War. And then you have the establishment of the UN and you have the establishment of American formal power.
in in europe the crucial thing there tom isn't it is what happens in the in the second world war itself because there's similar dynamics at the beginning from the first world war they're just intensified so britain being completely financially dependent upon the united states yeah britain being completely dependent upon the united states where supply of oil to fight the the second world war is considered or near completely dependent any
way and then during the course of the war the way in which britain can fight the war the war objectives that britain can have the the concept of the peace the Churchill government can have are all fundamentally shaped by that dependency in every sense.
United States. Yeah, I mean, and this is formally signed up to with the Atlantic Charter, isn't it? I think in 41, no territorial aggrandisement, no territorial changes made against the wishes of the people, restoration of self-government to those deprived of it. But in some senses, this is the end of the British Empire, signed up to then as the price of American support in the Second World War. I mean, my...
The moment that I come to is a slightly obscure one, but I think it does get to the heart of this dependence. It happens with the first real American and British. operation in North Africa. And I came across this speech that Churchill gives to a closed session of Parliament where he's explaining
why Britain is quite unhappy with some of what is happening in North Africa at the time. But he essentially said, look, we have no choice. We have to lump this because the Americans are in charge. He says, literally, the question which we must ask ourselves... is not whether we like it or whether we do not like what is going on.
But what are we going to do about it? And then he says, you know, since 1776, we have not been in the position of being able to decide what the policy is of the United States. This is an American expedition in which they will ultimately have perhaps two or three times as large.
ground forces as we have and three times the air force the americans regard it as their expedition under the ultimate command of the president of the united states and they regard northwest africa as a war sphere which is is theirs. just as we regard the Eastern Mediterranean as the theatre which we are responsible. That is an interesting point as well, because that is foreshadowing what comes in Suez, you know, 15 years later.
all there he is essentially just admitting it to parliament behind a closed session in which he says i'm able to tell you this candidly because the americans aren't listening to what i'm telling you there's another churchill moment that i think is pretty revealing of the relationship during the war. And that is when Churchill is presented with the Morgantown plan by the Roosevelt administration. And this was the plan that
Roosevelt's then Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had drawn up essentially to smash Germany up and de-industrialize it. I mean, if you wanted a kind of vision of an American intervention in Europe. I mean, you'd have to point to this, isn't it? The project to de-industrialise a post-war Germany after Hitler had been defeated. And Churchill described himself...
as being violently opposed when first given the proposal. But he realises just how dependent Britain is for another round of economic aid, financial aid from... the United States, and he has to agree to it as a war aim. And then when he's signing the agreements, and I think he's presented with the Morgantown one first rather than the economic aid one, he turns to Roosevelt and says,
what do you want me to do? Get on my hind legs and beg like Fallat? And that's Roosevelt's dog. I mean, it's just the humiliation of it now. In the end, Roosevelt's successor drops the Morgantown plan. That is not American plan for... post-war Europe. And indeed, you might say the dropping of the Morgantown plan is testimony to just how hubristic the Roosevelt administration had become about what it could do.
in Europe in a post-war world. But I think the crucial point is that out of the Second World War, there isn't going to be any doubt that the United States is dominant in a very hierarchical relationship. with what is going actually to be Western Europe rather than the whole of Europe. And that in itself, I think, is a story in that it's really Roosevelt's decision making that is going to lead.
to the acceptance of the division of Europe. Unless the United States was willing to be confrontational with the Soviet Union about the domination of Eastern Europe in the post-1945 world, then Western Europe... was going to have to accept the division of Europe. Yeah, I think that's probably a good point to bring this first half to a close, Helen, because in a sense...
Yes, Roosevelt is being hubristic, clearly, but he probably did have the power to enact that policy if he wanted to after the Second World War, had he survived. But it was a question of the reality of Soviet power that in the end changes the US policy towards Germany. It's not that, you know, it's the emergence of something else that happens. And I think that's why we perhaps should... End this half now and turn to why the Cold War matters to American power in the second half.
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Extraordinary outcomes for our customers. Come and unleash your potential as a customer support expert at Sage. Meet John. Hello. It's Friday night and he's just dented his partner's new car. Now he's wondering if he can make a claim before she gets back home on Monday. Thankfully, John's got car insurance with Aviva. We're available for new claims around the clock, so John can sort this out right away.
Telling your partner is up to you though, John. Um, darling. Helping you put the pieces together to get you back on track. It takes Aviva. Get a quote today at aviva.co.uk. Welcome back, everybody. So in this half, we are going to take up the story of American power in Europe at the end of the Second World War and cover the Cold War period. We're going to split that up into thinking about two distinct phases. One, taking the story...
from 1945 up until the 70s, and then the 70s up until the end of the Cold War. And that is a period perhaps when American power over Europe is less pronounced than certainly in the first half. And I think that the thing that really fascinates me in this initial period, Helen, and we can reflect on this at the end of the episode and what it means today or why all of this.
history matters in today's understanding of Trump's power over Europe. Is this figure, as I mentioned in the first hour of half of Jean Monnet, And how he has lived through all of this experience of the First World War, trying to bring the Allied powers together, the collapse of the League of Nations, the collapse of interwar Europe, and then the collapse of France. You know, he is there in France at the collapse in 1940 and with de Gaulle comes to London. And for me, this...
This man is so fascinating because he then becomes effectively a British civil servant. He's the founding father of Europe, becomes a British civil servant. He is one of the men who drafts the formal application to unify.
with France and Britain, into one state that at the time is backed by de Gaulle, but then rejected by the French government before as a marriage to a corpse, as he put it. And then Monet... finds it asks to be dispatched by Churchill to Washington and then Monet finds himself in Washington as the man who's going to sort of unlock the the the american arsenal seen as the sort of arsenal of democracy from from that point and then monet's journey is to end up in north africa as
both an emissary of the president, Roosevelt, and a trusted advisor of the British, and Churchill in particular, and then Harold Macmillan. And so his power is as this representative of the Anglo-Saxon world. He's talked of as a mystery of the president with a French accent. And I think this is... A fascinating moment because at the end of the Second World War, he returns to France and it's his drive to rejuvenate the French economy.
which is extraordinarily effective under something called the Monet plan, and then into the creation of the forerunner to the European Union, the European coal and steel community. This is all being driven by Monet, but it is... totally dependent on the united states the monet plan itself for the recovery of the french economy is dependent like britain's on getting loans from the United States. And then, as we'll discuss, that American power is absolutely necessary.
in the creation of the of the european coal and steel community itself yeah i think that what we can see in the in the post second world war world if we just think about it for the moment in terms of the collective west european response is that in a way it's going back to you know the dreams or the dreams of some anyway from the 1870s onwards as a response if you're going to have a very powerful united states that you need a unified
except now it's a unified Western Europe because of the division of Europe. And as you say, Tom, is that any hope of West European unity, some kind of... association and indeed willingness really to try and find common remedies to share problems is dependent upon american finance and that is true in relation to the the projects of the European Coal and Steel Community, but it's also true for individual states in terms of the martial aid. And what's, I think, really notable about...
This aspect of it is that the Americans insist on pretty strict conditions for West European states taking this economic help from. the United States. Absolutely. Is that in terms of domestic politics, it means a communist out of power, out of power in France in 1946, made very clear to the Italians in the 1948 election that if they elect...
the communists rather than the christian democrats it's not going to be any martial aid so the condition in that sense of american support for italian democracy in the post-war world is to circumscribe it it's true in relation to the empires of the European states that have got empires so
to the Dutch. If they want martial aid, they have to be out of the East Indies. There's some pressure on France to withdraw from Vietnam. And it's pretty notable that in a way, strongest proponents of the west european states actually organizing themselves into a customs union so having a a common external tariff to doing something that looks like the economic union of the united states in a trade
sense, the drivers of that in 1947, 1948, the Americans themselves. It's actually the British and the French governments who say, in a way, their one act of resistance is to say, we are not going to accept having a customs union as the price of martial aid.
Yeah, absolutely. The French at this point as well, I think, and it's interesting to raise this sort of specter of communist takeover in Western Europe, because that is clearly not a sort of mad panic of the Americans. It's a very real potential crisis. for them. And the French economy, I thought it was remarkable when I read this. Inflation in the second half of 1946 in France was running at 60%, and in 1947 at 70%.
I mean, these are the conditions of a revolution in effect, 60% or 70% inflation, economic crisis. And the Monet plan is essentially saying, the key to French re-industrialization and economic recovery is, one, the money... from the united states and the supply of industrial equipment that is necessary for us to to recover and then access to secure supplies of coke and coking coal from the rule. And so then this collides with the American realisation.
at the end of the Second World War, that it can't smash to pieces the German economy. It needs to resurrect Germany because it can't afford to have a hole, a German-sized hole in the middle of Western Europe. if Western Europe is going to be its bulwark against the Soviet Union. So suddenly the American position, the American foreign policy, changes and creates a total panic, a psychological shock in the French establishment. Because suddenly the Americans are saying, we're going to resurrect...
German economic power. And then in time, they say, we're going to resurrect German military power. So I think it's Aschersen at one point says, look, it's a choice between you either come together. in some kind of European army, essentially under American control. Well, not just essentially under American control, directly under American control with a British kind of number two in place. Or it is the German army.
brought back with a German general staff. I mean, this is the quote, the choice was between a European defence community and a national German army general staff and all of the rest. So, you know, they put it... putting it in stark relief there. I mean, I've skipped forward a couple of years there because I think the important thing is the economics. Germany...
in 47-48, is asking whether it is allowed to increase its output of steel from 10 to 14 million tonnes. French output at this time was 9 million tonnes. And the French are saying... we will refuse to allow Germany to increase its output. Obviously, that is dependent as well on Germany's access to coal in the Ruhr. But Monet says, look, our problem is the Americans will insist on Germany being allowed to increase its output.
its production of steel. We will then give way, because we're not strong enough, to resist the Americans because we're dependent on their finances. The consequences, in Monet's words, will be German export dumping, the revival of pre-
war cartels, France back in the rut of limited protected production. And the Americans are essentially saying, we're not going to let that happen. We're not going to allow Europe to descend back into national rivalries, protectionism, economic crisis. We've been here before. We're not allowing it. We're certainly not allowing it when we have to pay for your reconstruction, pay for your defence and face off against the Soviet Union.
And so you have this situation where Monet and the French establishment are being told by the Americans directly, you have, you know, a matter of weeks or months in late 1949 to come up with a plan, a policy to deal with your... Germany problem. And the result is the Schumann Declaration, which is essentially Monet's idea of placing coal and steel under a supranational authority.
I think the absolutely key point in this is that for the French it is a leap into the dark. They have never considered doing this. Their axiomatic foreign policy was to... to an alliance with Britain. And they decide that they can not only junk the alliance with Britain to move to an alliance with Germany. That's not the key point. The key point is that they are swapping Britain as an insurance for America.
They can afford to jump in with Germany or they have to because they're being prodded to do so by the Americans and they can do so because the Americans will always have their back security wise. There's no doubt that the depth. of the economic dependency that the West European states have in the second half of the 1940s and into the early 1950s is shaping their choices in a very profound way.
way, not least their relations with each other. I think there's just a couple of other things we should bring out at this point because they're the ongoing threads through the story. The first is that the Americans where resources are concerned particularly where energy is concerned are making a really different choice than they did for european states in the first decades of the 20th century which is to say we don't actually want to export our energy
our oil to you this time round we are going to say you need to use the middle east as your energy base we're saving our oil and western hemisphere oil for the western hemisphere we're only going to supply it to you in an emergency and then so as it turns out they're not going to do that either and in a way that reinforces then this idea
that the British have that empire is the only way of dealing with the resource, the energy resource problem. But we're not allowed one at that point. But at the same time is that the French are realizing or going back, if you like, to that idea, okay. Africa, North Africa, in this case, Algeria is going to be our oil base in this world. And in that sense, it's not a coincidence at all.
that by the time that we get to the European Economic Community Project, the European Atomic Energy Community Project in 1957, that there is not a, we are doing this because the Americans want it.
bent to it but we are doing this because we have to find another way around not on our resource dependency upon the united states or energy dependency on the united states but the united states circumscribing our energy choices i think though the other thing that we should bring out at this point comes out of that period that you're talking about tom the late 1940s is obviously nato itself like formed in in 1949
And not with all the members it would end up with even by the end of the 1950s, because obviously West Germany is not joining at that point and neither is Turkey. But this is, I think, a transformative moment in US.
europe relations that is coming in a way to an existential head like right now because the americans are making a commitment to have permanent military presence in western europe and just to give a sense of the scale of that you know the peak of the cold war they were between so like late 50s early 60s they were between 250 000 and 300 000 us troops in in west germany as a point of comparison The British military presence in West Germany peaked at about 70,000. So this was saying European...
There was, with de Gaulle, we'll come to it in a moment, not resistance to this. It was wanted of saying, we in Western Europe cannot deal with this security. issues that the Soviet Union poses to us by ourselves, you will have to do the heavy lifting for us. And this is a continuity that's going to run all the way through to the present and is now in some fundamental way being questioned by Trump. And I think in that sense, what is interesting about where French policy goes under de Gaulle.
is that there is a short period of time when there was an attempt at a challenge. to this domination of Europe by the United States. But it doesn't actually turn out to be particularly successful. It has moments of gesture, if you like. So de Gaulle withdrawing France from their unified... military command of NATO in the middle of the 1960s. But it doesn't lead to anything that changes the military hierarchy between the United States.
and Western Europe. Yeah, I think some of these strands are really formative for obviously the world we live in today, but psychologically the way we think about the issues of our dependence on the United States or questions of European unity. If you think... What was agreed in 1950 and 51 with Schumann and then in the European economic community later on, I think in 57, 58, is it's all economic. What they cannot do is come up with a European...
defense agreement. Psychologically, it just proves too much to be able to do that. And that is the context for the expansion of NATO to include West Germany in 1955. So West Germany comes into NATO at that point and then expands beyond us, as you were saying. So it's formally saying. The Americans take responsibility on defence matters because while we can come together economically in Europe, we're not prepared to do so.
And all of this time, you have Britain, who is sort of struggling to know what to do about on both questions, encouraging. the European unity in some senses under Eden, but not for Britain. And so if we think, Helen, that that is the essence of European policy is set from that point on, from say like 1955, 1958. have west germany brought in to the alliance you have this the crisis of suez which reveals
Europe's weakness. It's an attempt to act independently of the United States. The United States then says, no, you're not allowed to act independently. And then you have the creation of the European Economic Community, which Adenauer in Germany is saying to France. specifically, this will be your revenge for Suez. And that is the moment that Britain says we are never going to depart from America's side on questions of core national policy or foreign policy.
And that is really the position that we are in up until the sort of the 1970s, essentially. Yeah, I think the reason why the 70s is interesting, Tom, we should think about it as a juncture.
Because this is when the Cold War lets up for a decade or so. This is the years of détente. And it's also a decade in which the United States itself... starts to be seen, maybe wrongly in retrospect, but it starts to be seen as a declining power economically, even to some extent technologically, reached the moon in 1969 and then that. project that space project doesn't really go anywhere for quite a long time we've recently talked about until after that it's also a decade when
The United States no longer has the resource security, energy security, that it had known for the whole period really in which we've been talking about. The United States through the 70s is on a trajectory.
to being the world's largest oil importer and would stay like that until the shale-like revolution. And I think the one thing that I think is really noticeable about the 70s and then... survives the return of the Cold War in the 1980s, is these are decades when West European states and West Germany in particular really do succeed in asserting some energy autonomy against.
the united states and that the united states without having the same energy security it once had is not able to pressurize in any meaningful way the West Germans, against a deepening energy relationship and energy trade with the Soviet Union. And I think that if you think about a sequence of things as points of comparison, you go back to 1956 and the Suez Crisis, if you mention... when Britain and France try to look after Western European energy.
interest in the Middle East as they see it. Eisenhower says no. If you go to the early 1960s, 1962, the Kennedy administration effectively sanctions most consequentially West Germany. into not proceeding with helping the Soviets build an oil pipeline. You go there to the 1980s when the Reagan administration tries to do the same thing in terms of the gas pipeline, the Trans-Siberian pipeline, in response.
to Soviets pressurizing the Polish government to declare martial law is the Europeans withstand the pressure and indeed that the whole European community. does even the british and the margot thatcher are on side in like resisting that so there's this one thread if you like where you can see that actually Europe has succeeded in asserting some autonomy for itself against the Americans, but the continuity...
that runs through both the detourne period and the Second Cold War period is there is no way out from the military dependency upon the United States. Energy autonomy to some extent comes in the 70s, but it doesn't have a corollary. in terms of we will take responsibility ourselves for collective European.
security in relation to the Soviet Union. And indeed, you might say, well, that's partly because the West Germans in particular are no longer really thinking about the Soviet Union as a security threat. But nonetheless, the Cold War was going to come back in the The 1980s is going to be the question about US, Pershing and cruise missiles on European soil. And it's not like the Europeans are collectively providing any kind of security alternative to the American military guarantee.
In reading up this episode, Helen, that is fascinating to think psychologically about the 70s and the 80s, the moments that... the Europeans start to think that they are powerful enough to assert themselves. Because it plays into my understanding, at least, of the politics that are happening in the UK at this time around Eton and Margaret Thatcher sort of representing.
the rejection of Dayton as a kind of, as an ideology and trying to be more assertive, you know, the Iron Lady and all of that. I think that speech is in...
76 so that is the kind of trying to break the first attempt to try and break with detente and because beforehand you had this figure of of ted heath who is i mean i i find this moment fascinating because he is saying actively rejecting the the special relationship and and sees europe as a way of being able to resist american power and not successfully you know we should we should say but thinking about
the story, as you've put it there, Helen, in the 70s and the 80s, as being key when Europe feels more confident. I came across this quote from... to call helen which is in the in the mid-60s where europe is just sort of being blown away by the scale of american power still and he he talks about witnessing
almost a physical phenomenon, like a tidal wave or the eruption of a volcano. And he's talking about the United States here. American power is so crushing. They are so in advance in cutting edge technologies. They are so rich. They're expanding. has something almost elemental about it and I think that is almost how America is seen again today or starting to be seen in that regard but there is that curious that period isn't there of the 70s where that
slightly falls away and you have this attempt to resist it through Heath and others. And actually, in some senses, de Gaulle is the icon of that. He says, what is the point of Europe? The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians.
or the Americans. I think the crucial thing, Tom, about these periods, if you look at it as the de Gaulle project and then, let's call it for the moment, the interlude of what looks like American weakness, is even de Gaulle... who's the one who goes about it in the most systematic way doesn't actually achieve anything even in his own terms let alone anything that's like lasting into like the 70s and the and the 80s and what you can see like from from heath is a good example of this is is that
On the one hand, he doesn't sort of pay homage, if you like, to American power and the special relationship. And he does put up some initial resistance to American policy at the beginning of the...
Arab-Israeli war in 1973. But very quickly, he's back absolutely on side in terms of relations with the Nixon administration about the energy questions. And the essential point here is that there is no, I think... basis on which any European government can challenge the Americans about the military power. issues because they're not willing to spend anything like the amount of money on defense and this is obviously part of what's going on now that would mean that
they could do military security themselves. And so everything's a bit performative when they want to be confrontational because they can't actually change. course. I think that what's interesting in terms of the 70s and 80s, there is a contrast to what de Gaulle's seeing at the end of the, or the middle of the 1960s, is these are years when the United States isn't necessarily seen as so technologically.
like dominant, certainly in terms of the higher end of manufacturing, for instance. These are years in which West Germany and Japan are seen as significant economic competitors to the United States. But what I think is interesting is that through this point where the America question doesn't seem America is the future.
the European security question or the West European security question just remains like completely intact. And there's just one last thing on this period I think we should draw out before we move to some of... gathering together some reflections and that is there is that one little moment in the 80s which is the falklands war when this western hemisphere question comes into play uh initial reluctance from the
Reagan administration really to back a European power using military force in the Western Hemisphere and then actually being quite relatively supportive. of it and i think though that it's interesting because it just shows how while all the attention in the cold war period has been on the american presence in europe
symbolised by NATO. They're still just like ticking away these questions of European presence in the Western Hemisphere and what is the American attitude to it. And I think that what's then... Striking, so striking about the political moment that we're in now and that Trump is articulating is the way in which the Western Hemisphere question fundamentally about.
Greenland and the NATO question have come together. Because if you look at what the Danish government is saying in response to Trump's pressure. over Greenland it is we can take care of the security of Greenland but if you look at what Denmark actually does in terms of the security of Greenland and kind of money that the
Danish government, like any other European government, is willing to spend on defence, you can see something quite different. So the idea of Danish Greenland, and that's leaving aside the views of the people living in Greenland, is dependent upon...
The Americans providing the security for that because they're the ones with the significant still like military base there. And in a way, what Trump is doing here, I think, is bringing together the Western Hemisphere question and the NATO question. And that's what's really...
That's what's really interesting about it, because in order to deliver for Greenland still staying Danish in that respect, then it requires European... countries as a whole not actually i think just nato but say the united kingdom given the uk greenland gap in in the atlantic to do what trump says in terms of spending something like five percent of gdp on defense
It's interesting, if this is the kind of moment where we're going to reflect, because we want to take the story up, don't we, from the end of the Cold War up until today in a second episode. But it certainly feels as if there's a sort of... element of living through an interlude since the end of the cold war i don't know whether it's equivalent to the you know the interwar periods in this respect but you have these
sort of great shifts that take place and then the attempts to respond to that geopolitically. Europe's attempts to respond to this extraordinary rise of America as a... continental economic whose geopolitical power is then realized throughout the first half of the 20th century and europe has to figure a way of responding to that and ultimately it ends up just accepting this position of being dominated by the united states and then you have the cold war which is which is key because that is when
The world that we live in is created by the United States as an attempt to balance global power against the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that world kind of just carried on. living. It just, it expanded.
beyond its original borders, you know, its Western European borders. It expanded up to the Russian borders. But effectively, the elements of it stayed in place, you know, NATO and the European Union. And in some senses, they accelerated But you have these existential fears in France at the end of the Cold War about the unification.
of germany that are very similar to the fears that it has about the resurrection of the german economy at the end of the second world war these these these kind of elemental fears in in french politics that are shaping it but you have you've lost The Soviet Union, it's gone. You have something else that has emerged. And I think today what's fascinating is that if there is an equivalent to the rise of American power at the end of the 19th century...
It is the rise of Chinese power today that is then having this effect on Russia and then it's all blowing back through Europe. And it's almost like we're kind of catching up with the reality. It's just taken, what, 30 years? I think the crucial thing here... Tom, which makes in a way the comparisons so much harder actually than we've been making them through this entire episode, is China as a shock to the United States.
and it's not the same as the the european shock at the end of the 19th century because china's not a territorially expanding state in the way in which the united states is china has got actually a set of like resource constraints that are quite difficult for it
rather than having all the advantages that the United States had. But there is, I think, a point in which the comparison does work and that is the fear in the United States that actually in certain technologies, including perhaps in AI, that China is...
doing much, much better than Americans would have wanted them to believe. That the kind of view was that the Chinese couldn't really compete technologically with the United States, but perhaps they can. And then the way in which the... american european relationship like works out has to go through the china shock
that the United States is experiencing. And in a way, that may well be the thing that's destabilizing quite a lot of the US-Europe relationship. I think that that's particularly true in relation to the Arctic.
Because it's not just Russian power that the Americans are worried about there. It's Chinese power. I think there's a whole set of questions about Ukraine that we'll come to next week. But I think that the underlying... if you like, now shock for Europe is that the geopolitical assumptions that they had in relation to their own relationship with the United States geopolitically, but also...
how that played in the US-China geopolitical competition have just unraveled. And they've unraveled quite dramatically. And what they're then left with is the fact that the United States can use its raw power. including threats of tariffs, including now the desire to export.
energy, which was there at the beginning of the 20th century, was not there during the Cold War period to try to get the Europeans into line and to do those things that actually helped the United States in its geopolitical competition with China. In a sense, we're just much less relevant, aren't we, in this regard than we were when the United States' preoccupation is to balance Soviet power. If its preoccupation is to balance Chinese power, Europe on the other side of the Eurasian.
Incontinent is just less. less important in that respect. I'm not saying we are of no importance, but Trump clearly doesn't feel the need for America to be based in Europe in any way near the same levels that has once existed and he has other preoccupations. And it's hard to see what we bring to the table in this regard. You know, he's reacting to something else. Well, I think there is something that...
that Europeans do bring to the table, and that does make this fundamentally different than Trump won, and that is the Ukraine issue. We can save for talking about that in the next episode, because what is breaking down, pretty clearly gone.
is the assumption that any issue in terms of the territorial position of an East European state will be dealt with by the Americans, either in terms of the Americans saying, look, we're accepting Soviet control there, which is the position that they adopted through the entirety of the Cold War period and began to show to some extent in the latter part of the Second World War, all saying we are sufficiently worried about.
West Germany that will keep several hundred thousand troops there. What Trump is saying with this 5% demand and what he is saying in terms of the likelihood that any peace in ukraine such that it should come or peace settlement in ukraine if it comes will depend upon european soldiers acting as the peacekeepers and not
That is, I think, a point in which is fundamentally different than anything that we've seen before and actually makes Europe actually pretty weighty in this situation because the Americans are saying when it comes to Russia... the Europeans have got to do something. And that is a really different world than what the Cold War world was. I also think it's transformative.
If it ever happens, I mean, I'm pretty doubtful that it will happen. You know, I think that the front page of The Times on Monday, we're recording this on Monday morning. is that Keir Starmer is going to resist Trump's pressure to increase British defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, let alone... 5%. So Britain is supposed to be one of the more sort of hawkish military powers in Europe and can't get to 2.5%. What will play out in France and Germany?
As we've discussed in previous episodes, I think it's likely to follow a similar pattern. But I do think there are kind of historic ironies at play here about... What will happen to European power? How will Europe react psychologically to the shock of a Trump presidency and the emergence of Chinese power? What ideas will be forming?
they are likely to be different to what came before. But as we've discussed in this episode, the shock of American power began this process of, or the ideas of European unity started to form in the light. late 19th century, certainly ones that we can understand that eventually came to fruition in the late 1940s or the 50s.
So I think, you know, what is going to happen and what is going to happen to British politics in that? How are we going to process this new power dynamic? I think that those are questions perhaps we can hopefully turn to in the second episode that we record on American power in Europe, hopefully next week.
But we are going to see what happens with world affairs because we tend to talk to each other towards the end of a week and the world is upended yet again that week. But hopefully we'll return to this next week. So please do tune in for that. And thanks very much. for listening again we really appreciate it Ready for a career change? One way you can truly be yourself, gain valuable training and shine with your customer service skills? Then listen up.
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