TRUMP PUSHES AN UNJUST PEACE
In the 1960s, the Soviet writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel stood trial for anti-communist agitation. The British novelist Graham Greene tried to arrange for his royalties from book sales in the Soviet Union to be given in support of the two writers' wives. Greene called on an acquaintance, the Soviet verse-writer Korney Chukovsky, to help him navigate the state bureaucracy. Chukovsky refused to get involved in the Sinyavsky-Daniel case. Later, Greene said of Chukovsky: 'He has no thought that when we defend others we are defending ourselves, because one day, God knows, we shall need to be defended.'
As I watch the starkness of US President Donald Trump's policy towards Ukraine recently, those words of Greene's keep returning to my mind. Trump does not seem to believe that by defending Ukraine he might be defending America's interests, or the global order that the US steered into being after the second world war (contested though it may have been by the Soviets). For all the changes in the world over the past seventy years, a great many Democrats and Republicans in the US still grasp that the global order largely works in favour of US interests.
Trump's 'move fast and break things' approach to foreign policy seems hellbent on upending the status quo order. Still, we can but do our best to make sense of what's going on in US foreign policy thinking and what it means for Europeans. Suggestions that there could be a trilateral summit between the US, Russia and China imply a worrying trajectory.
'It would be nice if something made sense for a change'
