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    The Guardian view on Ursula von der Leyen’s first 100 days: the steepest of learning curves | Editorial

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    In a press conference on Sunday to mark 100 days since the beginning of her second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen erred on the side of understatement when asked whether she still considered the US to be an ally. The answer was yes, she replied, before adding that “we have our discussion points without question”.Hard to argue with that. Regarding the war in Ukraine, international trade and existential questions concerning the future of European defence and security, the geopolitical landscape bears no resemblance to the one that Ms von der Leyen looked out upon on 1 December. As Mr Trump and his “America first” outriders have confounded cherished assumptions about the transatlantic alliance, they have also sought to encourage authoritarian nationalism in EU member states.In France and Germany, the fabled engine of European integration, this has been uncomfortably akin to knocking at an open door. In Paris, days after Ms von der Leyen reassumed office, Michel Barnier’s shortlived government collapsed when Marine Le Pen pulled the rug from under it. In Germany, well before Elon Musk and JD Vance championed its cause, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party had reached historically high levels of support that would see it finish comfortably second in February’s snap German election.As Ms von der Leyen put it on Sunday: “Our European values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law are under threat.” The response, from Brussels and in national capitals, needs to be both robust and more expeditious than is often the case in the labyrinthine world of EU policymaking. Happily, the initial signs are positive.The move last week by EU leaders to disapply the bloc’s fiscal rules to military spending, potentially freeing up £670bn, is a significant step towards achieving greater strategic autonomy from Washington. It followed the unveiling of extraordinarily radical proposals in the same week by Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz. Bypassing a constitutional restriction on state borrowing, these are designed to facilitate not only far greater spending on defence, but also on the modernisation of a stagnating economy.After decades in which EU economic policy has been skewed by Berlin’s traditional debt aversion – shared with other “frugal” member states such as the Netherlands and Denmark – this is a very different direction of travel. As Europe exits an era defined by an uncritical commitment to free trade and dependency on the US security umbrella, it is also the right one. Recognising the desire of many member states to formalise common borrowing arrangements introduced following Covid, Ms von der Leyen said “nothing is off the table” in relation to defence. But, as the Draghi report argued last autumn, the same kind of fiscal firepower is required to meet the challenge of the green transition and compete with the US and China for the jobs and future industries of the 21st century.Last month in Brussels, a different kind of centenary was marked when a bust of a former commission president, Jacques Delors, was unveiled. Born in 1925, Mr Delors became the preeminent champion of a “social” vision, in which common EU institutions would deploy pooled resources in order to build a Europe where solidarity and growth were intertwined. That perspective faded from view following the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. As Ms von der Leyen navigates the rest of her five-year term, its time has come again.

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      The founding fathers baked reason, truth and free speech into the US. That’s all gone now | Will Hutton

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      The founding fathers of the USA – James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and more – were quintessential disciples of the European Enlightenment. Their intent was to embed Enlightenment values into the government and culture of the New World. America would be a republic of laws. Its constitution would ensure governance of the people, by the people, for the people. Through checked and balanced branches of government, it would expunge the possibility of monarchical discretionary power and inaugurate proper democracy.It would celebrate all liberties, from freedom of speech to freedom of worship. Their belief in science “for the benefit of mankind in general”, in Franklin’s words, would imbue the republic’s commitment to reason, the scientific method and the pursuit of truth. The dynamic economy and society that emerged, however imperfect, reflected those values. It has inspired billions and, for all its falls from grace, has been a force for good.Donald Trump’s presidency is widely deplored for everything from his unilateral imposition of swingeing tariffs to his public humiliation of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and siding with Russia over the war. He is guilty of all those things, and of an impulsiveness and unpredictability as he seeks retribution, respect and, as he would put it, reciprocity. But this misses the larger point: he draws not only on a constituency that shares his views but also on a well-developed body of thought that wants a decisive rupture with those Enlightenment values and all that spring from them.There is now genuine fear in US civil society – in business, finance, academia, the media and the Republican party – that to speak out will bring cruel retribution or even personal harm: this from the apostles of “free speech”. The US has gone mute. Its Enlightenment-based constitution and the accompanying values once held to be universal are being torched in near silence. Only fealty to Making America Great Again, by repudiating its notable traditions, is permitted – at home and abroad. The profundity of this is beginning to be recognised. Canada finds itself fighting for its life. Friedrich Merz, the incoming German chancellor, says for Europe it is “five to midnight”. He is driving through an extraordinary €1tn commitment to raise German defence and infrastructure spending over the next 10 years. The EU is bracing itself for attacks on its trade and its capacity to set standards and regulations for all goods EU citizens buy – so-called non tariff barriers – that Trump plans to launch “soon”. The EU’s high product standards, he argues, discriminate against lesser-regulated US exports. Even VAT is anti-American. The EU’s very being as a self-governing, multinational organisation is under threat.Multilateral organisations like the EU and the UN, expressing the same Enlightenment values as the US constitution, are in Trump’s crosshairs. The unashamed project is to reshape the world economic and political order so it serves only the interests of the US – as if it did not already. Can Britain really be a bridge between this vision and Europe, as Keir Starmer wants? These differences are unbridgeable.Trump’s court at Mar-a-Lago, high on power and much else, has reportedly worked on a draft contract for countries to sign that reverses the alleged rip-off of the US. Instead, they will have to agree to boost US industry by accepting one-sided trade deals and appreciating their currencies. In return, they will be offered degrees of US security. Countries are said to be colour coded green, yellow and red, depending on the degree to which they might wholly accept vassalage, bargain for a compromise or are deemed to be enemies – with China the number-one target, and also including Canada, Mexico and the EU. Nato and the World Trade Organization be damned.Stephen Miran, the new chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers, won his job as the author of an extraordinary paper – A User’s Guide to Restructuring the World Trading System. Trump can reshape the global economic and trade order, he argues, through creating targeted tariff policies aimed at countries to which the US objects. The tariff regime must be designed to maximise fear and uncertainty; last week’s imposition, then withdrawal, of car tariffs on Mexico and Canada was a prime example. The bulk of any economic costs will be displaced on to the countries at the receiving end by forcing them to raise their currencies against the dollar. He writes approvingly of Scott Bessent, now Trump’s treasury secretary, last year publicly arguing for putting countries into varying Mar-a-Lago style buckets corresponding to their readiness to comply with Washington’s will.Self-pity at the US’s alleged victimhood pervades Trumpite thinking. Even on Miran’s own numbers, the US still accounts for the same 25% of world GDP now as it did in 1980 – a phenomenal achievement. America is as great as it ever was. Only 19% of its GDP is imports, but these are blamed entirely for the fall in manufacturing employment as if robotisation, automation and the emergence of a service-based economy were irrelevant. Many working-class Americans have certainly suffered from these changes – but that needed an enlightened domestic policy response. China has re-industrialised by electrifying and decarbonising its economy. This is dismissed as woke.Adam Smith, the great Enlightenment economist, inspired the founding fathers as much as Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine. He praised the invisible hand of the market and open trade as pathways to the common good of greater prosperity – but none of that is for the Trumpites. They come from the mobster, cowboy, might-is-right, make-a-deal-on-my-terms strain of US culture and society. The humbling of Zelenskyy is the tip of this anti-Enlightenment iceberg. They are the masters now, and will gladly bend the US electoral system to stay that way. As some judges stir themselves, and political dissenters start to be braver, it’s an open question if they will succeed – but going back, if at all, is likely to be only partial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarmer’s tactics so far have been hard to fault. His level-headedness, decency and pragmatism have been assets. But he faces an unavoidable choice: Britain cannot achieve economic growth by remaining a vassal state to the US while abjuring closer trade relations with Europe. Trump does not want Britain to grow US-competitor great tech companies, which are essential to economic growth. Nor does he want to defend Ukraine and Europe. It is brutally stark. The UK must make common cause with Europe to defend not only our economic and defence interests but, more importantly, our values. They live only in Europe now. More

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      Europe can’t just hope for the best with Trump. Ukraine needs all the arms we can send | Frans Timmermans

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      After US vice-president JD Vance’s speech in Munich last month, most European leaders came to the conclusion that our world has fundamentally changed. The Pax Americana that long ensured peace, security and freedom in Europe is over. Anyone who still doubted this will hopefully now realise, after the disgraceful treatment Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy endured last Friday at the White House, that we can no longer rely on the Americans for our collective security.We must hope for the best, but hope is not a policy. We – the Netherlands, the EU, and all western countries standing with Ukraine – must prepare for the worst. The question is this: how do we keep Ukraine free and independent, and how do we protect our economy, our freedom and democracy, and our borders?This begins with the awareness that our security is already directly threatened by Russia. Trump wants to do business over our heads with this country. It appears that he and Vladimir Putin have divided Europe into spheres of influence like two mob bosses in a low-budget movie. As the saying goes: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.The Netherlands is not an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; we are fully exposed when geopolitical and economic storms brew on our continent. It is the Russian aggression in Ukraine that has made our energy prices rocket. We cannot batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass. We are a medium-sized country with significant European and international interests. It is high time we acted accordingly.But political divisions at the heart of our government are leaving us exposed. The biggest party in the coalition governing the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom (PVV), led by Geert Wilders, has a history of pro-Kremlin rhetoric. While other parties, such as the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), formerly led by Mark Rutte, are staunch advocates of unwavering support of Ukraine. Combined with an unelected prime minister, Dick Schoof, who serves no specific political party, the coalition government is rudderless and unstable.It is abundantly clear that our national scale is far too small to make a real difference. Today, we need the EU more than ever before. We must also work on closer ties with countries that share our sense of urgency and are not EU members, primarily the UK and Norway, but also Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The EU will also need to take a much firmer stance against member states such as Hungary that spare no effort in promoting Putin’s (and Trump’s) agenda.View image in fullscreenThe most urgent priority now is to support Ukraine. We must fill the gaps that Trump is leaving behind. Financially, this should not be too complicated, but in military terms, this is a different challenge. Russia will now intensify its attacks, so all available military equipment must be sent to Ukraine as quickly as possible. With additional financial support, we can also get the Ukrainian defence industry up and running at full capacity.The Russians are struggling more than it appears at first glance; sanctions are damaging the country, the losses are significant, and the war economy is creating large gaps elsewhere. Sanctions need to be scaled up much further, and all frozen Russian assets in the EU must be transferred to Ukraine immediately.EU member states must wake up and stop squabbling over trivial matters. The same goes for the Schoof cabinet. It is all hands on deck now. This means thinking creatively about European war bonds and finding the fastest possible way to bolster our defence in preparation for a confrontation in which the Americans may leave us to fend for ourselves. This requires investing in areas that the Americans currently cover within Nato. Moreover, it is vital for the overall resilience of Dutch society that defence investments do not come at the expense of our social safety net.In the longer term, we must first establish a partnership that provides the collective security guarantee of Nato without having to rely on the US. Crucial to this is the involvement of Britain and possibly Canada, and European countries that are not members of the EU. Therefore, it should go beyond the EU and perhaps also exclude countries, if these, such as Hungary or the nominally neutral Austria and Ireland, for example, do not want to participate.Second, it is of national security interest to make progress on a genuine energy union. High energy prices constitute the primary economic threat to this continent. This requires much more collective investment in energy networks, renewable energy, and also joint procurement of gas for as long as we need it.The Netherlands can play a leading role in all these areas, but it is not doing so. Because the coalition is deeply divided, the prime minister speaks too hesitantly, too late, and too ambiguously. Because the coalition is not allocating additional funds for Ukraine and is implementing utterly nonsensical cuts to the contributions to the EU, the words of support are literally and figuratively cheap. Because the largest coalition party is at best ambiguous and usually sides with Trump – who is now also siding with Putin – our government is adrift.Fortunately, there is still hope. The rudderless government may be on the brink of despair, but the people are not without hope, and our country is certainly not without prospects. The Dutch people see that the world order is changing. In such extraordinary, dangerous times, they deserve a decisive, united government.

      Frans Timmermans is the leader of the leftwing alliance of the Dutch Green party and the Labour party (GroenLinks/PvdA)

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      The US embrace of Russia is an existential threat to the EU. Germany must step up to save it | Catherine De Vries

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      In February 1945, three world leaders – Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin – met in Crimea for the Yalta conference, to discuss the new world order they would implement after the soon-to-end second world war.Smaller nations were given no say in deciding their fate. The Soviet sphere of influence would infest eastern Europe for decades and US foreign policy dominated the second half of the 20th century. Churchill resisted the end of the UK’s global empire and independence for Britain’s colonies came piecemeal; they were let go with bitterness.Eighty years on, the logic present at Yalta – that large states can impose their will on smaller states – is back. Might is once again right. But history is repeating itself with a striking difference – for this time, there is no European leader at the table. Russian and US delegations have sat down to discuss Ukraine’s future without Ukraine or the EU’s input. Eighty years down the line, Europe is no longer seen as relevant by the great powers.The urgency of Europe’s shifting geopolitical landscape was laid bare last Sunday in London, where European leaders gathered with their counterparts from the UK, Canada, Turkey, the EU and Nato for a high-level defence summit. That meeting came as a result of the very public collapse of White House talks between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump, and Trump’s suspension of military aid to Ukraine.Even if a reported reconciliation between Washington and Kyiv materialises, European officials are still reeling from the rapidity of the transatlantic rupture so early in Trump’s second term. Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, last month warned Europe it could no longer rely on US security guarantees. JD Vance, the US vice-president, went further at the Munich Security Conference, calling Europe – not Russia or China – the primary US threat.Pax Americana – the postwar period of relative peace in the western hemisphere, with the US as the dominant economic, cultural and military world power – is over. Europe will quickly have to adapt to the new reality, with the loss of its primary strategic and military partner. What part now will the EU’s largest member state, Germany, play?Despite large gains by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which doubled its support in the federal election on 23 February, Germany will be led by Friedrich Merz, head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The chancellor-in-waiting lost no time in declaring that Europe, faced with an increasingly adversarial US, must take its fate into its own hands.“It is my absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can actually become independent from the US step by step,” Merz said, hours after his election victory. Stark words from a politician who as recently as a few months ago was a bona fide Atlanticist.Merz wants to forge greater unity in Europe and establish an independent European defence capability. It remains to be seen how he will go about achieving this, but he clearly aims to put Germany back into the European driving seat.German leadership has been lacking in recent years. While Paris and Warsaw took increasingly assertive positions on European security, Berlin has remained cautious. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, spoke of a Zeitenwende – a turning point in German policy to reflect the new realities of the world. But, in the end, little but hot air was produced.Since the end of the second world war, Germany has invested relatively little in military capacity. Under the Nato umbrella, and with the close partnership with the US, this was not seen as a problem. But the world has fundamentally shifted, and Merz sees that Germany, finally, must change, too.However, an emboldened new Germany, at the head of the EU, faces a harsh world and an even harsher set of realities. The country will not only have to increase its military capacity, bring about bloc-wide military cooperation and perhaps even station troops in Ukraine, but it will also have to pay for all of this.This will require overhauling Germany’s strict ceiling on public borrowing, the so-called Schuldenbremse (debt brake) enshrined in the constitution. Merz has now begun that process; on Tuesday, his party struck agreement with its prospective coalition partners, the SPD, on the creation of a special €500bn (£390bn) fund to boost defence and infrastructure spending that would be exempt from the debt constraint. If approved by the German parliament, this would amount to a dramatic and some critics warn risky loosening of the budgetary straitjacket.Merz will also have to rally the EU (though Trump’s harrying of Europe and Zelenskyy is already pushing European leaders toward his vision), as well as face down Trump-friendly far-right parties, many of them in ascendence across the bloc.At a recent meeting in Madrid of the rightwing radical bloc of the European parliament, the Patriots for Europe, Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right PVV in the Netherlands, praised Trump as a “brother in arms”. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, expressed his support for Trump’s pro-Russian policy at the rightwing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last month. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has said that “Trump is implementing the policies that the AfD has been demanding for years”.These rightist politicians seem willing to risk Europe’s security and prosperity for political gain. The US turn toward Russia and away from democracy will be an existential test for the European project and Europe’s commitment to law and democracy. The art of European cooperation has long been to achieve the possible in unforeseen circumstances. Germany, under chancellor-elect Merz, has a steep learning curve ahead. But the task of stepping up to save Ukraine – and Europe – falls to Berlin.

      Catherine De Vries is professor of political science at Bocconi University in Milan More

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      Starmer is at his best right now – but he must accept there is no going back with Trump’s US | Martin Kettle

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      Keir Starmer, it turns out, is at his best in a crisis. He has faced two since he became prime minister last year, one domestic, the other international. The first came with the riots that followed the Southport killings, when Starmer’s response was impressive and effective. The second is Donald Trump’s attempt to stitch up Ukraine, where Starmer has been surefooted in trying to hold the line against a sellout to Russia. In both cases, he has looked like the right person in the right place at the right time.There was another example of this deftness on Wednesday in the Commons, when Starmer went out of his way to mark the anniversaries of the deaths of UK service personnel in 2007 and 2012. A total of 642 died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alongside their US allies. They would not be forgotten, he said. The name of JD Vance was not mentioned. Nor was the US vice-president’s contemptuous “some random country” insult this week. But Starmer’s reprimand was unerring.It is far too soon to say whether Starmer’s response to Trump’s embrace of Russia and to the US administration’s denunciations of Europe will be effective in the long run. What can be said is that, in public and private, the prime minister has so far led with tact and clarity and has scored one or two apparent successes against the run of play. Nevertheless, these are very early days. Trump boasted to Congress on Tuesday night that he was “just getting started”.Starmer’s ability in a crisis is an unexpected contrast with his leadership in the ordinary business of politics. Since July 2024, Starmer’s calm, methodical, long-game approach has succeeded only in squandering much of Labour’s election-winning goodwill, and in making him seem out of his political depth. But his deployment of these same unflashy tactics at moments of acute crisis, as in the case of Ukraine, could be gold dust. It has at least given the prime minister’s ratings a boost. There are echoes here of the rallying around Boris Johnson at the start of Covid. But remember where that ended up.It is useful to note that this low-key approach marks a notable break. Throughout the postwar period, British leaders faced with international crisis modelled themselves on Winston Churchill in 1940. Margaret Thatcher saw herself this way during the Falklands war. Tony Blair echoed it after 9/11 and over Iraq. Johnson pretended he was Churchill when Russia invaded Ukraine. Starmer’s calm approach evokes Clement Attlee more than Churchill. In every way he is unTrump.Yet Starmer has not got much to be calm about. The world of 2024 no longer exists. Trump has triggered a crisis in the North Atlantic alliance. At stake are two epochal things. First, whether Russia’s main western border will henceforward be with Ukraine, with Poland or with Germany. Second, whether the US accepts any role in ensuring future European stability. These are not small questions.There are three levels on which Starmer can try to deal with Trump, both now and for the coming four years. All of them tacitly and sometimes openly recognise the vast seriousness of the moment. All of them are predicated on the undesirability of what Trump is doing and the need to create alternatives. All of them, however, also rest on a determination not to make an enemy of the US.The first is to firefight the immediate problems that Trump creates. This involves constantly engaging with the US administration by whatever means are available to prevent or mitigate crises. It means building up defence spending. It means working with allies and so-called coalitions of the willing. It means using any leverage to earn a hearing. Essentially, it is an attempt to manoeuvre Trump to follow a different or less extreme course, while avoiding confrontation or denunciation. But it is all done under the pretence that nothing fundamental has changed.View image in fullscreenThis is essentially the strategy that Starmer is now pursuing on Ukraine. It is why he keeps talking to Trump – three times in the past week, perhaps contributing to Trump’s relatively polite mention of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the speech to Congress. It is why he deploys King Charles’s soft power. It is why, perhaps, he will soon return to Washington with Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron in an overwhelmingly important effort to restore military aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.The second approach is to decide to suck it all up for four years, in the hope that things will then get easier. This means accepting the likelihood, though never saying so publicly, that Trump is always going to be destructive and mean-spirited. At the same time, it means working to keep US links – especially military and intelligence links – strong enough to be revived more effectively after 2028, when Trump is due to step down.For Starmer, this could mean a lot of firefighting over the next four years, without any certainty of a post-Trump dividend or British public approval. Such fires could break out on any number of issues, including not just Ukraine but also the Middle East, bilateral trade, Nato, US-EU relations and, judging by this week’s speech, Canada, Greenland and the Panama canal. Much will depend on Friedrich Merz and on Macron’s 2027 successor, too. Starmer and his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, are also likely to have an intense under-the-radar interest in the candidates vying to succeed Trump.Which leaves the third strategy. This is to accept that Trump’s approach is now the US’s new normal and that there will be no comforting return to past arrangements. Whoever comes after Trump may be friendlier, more rational and less rude. Either way, US exceptionalism, isolationism and disengagement from Europe are likely to be here to stay. So too are the immensely tough consequences for countries like Britain, which can no longer rely on a US security and intelligence shield against Russia or any other hostile states. Rearmament is back. This will require something close to a war economy, and it cannot be created overnight.At present, Starmer has one foot in the first approach and another in the second. But it is the third approach that will loom largest as an option as the next four years unfold. None of these is a soft option, and all of them overlap. Starmer is right, for example, to oppose false binary choices between Europe and the US.Nevertheless, if Trump’s speech to Congress is to be taken seriously, this is a president who has changed sides in the battle of values between democracy and authoritarianism. Starmer may feel he has to tell Europe that Trump will still “have our backs”. But Trump could just as soon stab Europe in the back too. After all, that’s exactly what he just did.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly | Simon Tisdall

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      It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy harbinger.Take the issues one at a time. Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”. As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done. Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.It seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.Trump’s minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.Ukraine, despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds; and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and more honest defiance.To be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too, to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed further.Right now, the opposite is happening. Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders, meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan. Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer. He’s also a coward.Given Trump’s treachery and threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.Marco Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US, Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence. It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.Such a global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics: totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present, recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”. Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.

      Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator More

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      The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot

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      All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him. We know that Trump can brook no challenge to his hegemony. Russia is no threat to US dominance, but Europe, with a combined economy similar to that of the US, and a powerful diplomatic and global political presence, could be.Putin has long sought to break up the EU, using the European far right as his proxies: this is why he invested so heavily in Brexit. Now Trump, in turn, could use Putin as his proxy, to attack a rival centre of power. If Trump helps Russia sweep through Ukraine, Putin could then issue an ultimatum to other frontline and eastern European states: leave the EU, leave Nato and become a client state like Belarus, or you’re next. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán might agree to this. If Călin Georgescu wins in Romania in May, he might too.What form could US support for Putin in Ukraine take? It could involve intelligence sharing. It could involve permanently withdrawing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine, which is strategically crucial there, while making it available to the Russian armed forces. Already, the US government has threatened to nix the service if Ukraine doesn’t hand over its minerals, as reparations for being invaded. This is how Trump operates: blackmailing desperate people who are seeking to defend themselves against an imperial war, regardless of past alliances. In the extreme case, Trump’s support for Russia might involve military equipment and financial backing, or even joint US-Russian operations, in the Arctic or elsewhere.Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.All this is now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in charge of the CIA, NSA and 16 other agencies. After she recited conspiracy fictions seeded by the Syrian and Russian governments, she was widely accused of being a “Russian asset” or a “Russian puppet”. At what point do we conclude that by sharing intelligence with the US, the UK might as well be sharing it with Russia?View image in fullscreenDepending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK. They include the misnamed RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US air force base, from which it deploys F-35 jets; RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, in reality a US NSA base conducting military espionage and operational support; RAF Croughton, part-operated by the CIA, which allegedly used the base to spy on Angela Merkel among many others; and RAF Fylingdales, part of the US Space Surveillance Network. If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military? At the very least, the US will know better than any other power how to combat them, because our weapons are more or less the same as theirs. In other words, if the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.Much as I hate to admit it, the UK needs to rearm (though cutting the aid budget to find the money, as Keir Starmer intends, is astonishingly shortsighted). I reluctantly came to this conclusion as Trump’s numbers began to stack up last July. But, if they are fatally compromised by US penetration, rearmament might have to begin with the complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.This may need to start very soon. On 24 February, the UN general assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and other European nations, condemning Russia’s invasion. Unsurprisingly, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary and several small and easily cowed states voted against it. But so did the US andIsrael. This, more clearly than any other shift, exposes the new alignment. An axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronts nations committed (albeit to varying degrees) to democracy and international law.For many years, we have been urged to trust the UK’s oppressive “security state”. Yes, this security state is yanked around like a fish on a line by the US government, with such catastrophic outcomes as the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Yes, it is engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens. But, its defenders have long argued, we should suck all this up because the security state is essential to our defence from hostile foreign actors. In reality, our entanglement, as many of us have long warned, presents a major threat to national security. By tying our defence so closely to the US, our governments have created an insecurity state.I hope you can now see what a terrible mistake the UK has made, and how we should have followed France in creating more independent military and security systems. Disentangling from the US will be difficult and expensive. Failing to do so could carry a far higher price.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump’s bullshit blitz has Europe on its knees | Stewart Lee

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      Was it really only a month ago that the pole-dancer patron, fridge explorer, Brexit get-doer, model bus maker, sofa-strainer, wall-spaffer, current Daily Mail columnist and former British prime minister Boris Johnson eulogised the inauguration of Donald Trump in the Mail, recounting how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the hand of Trump: “I saw the moment the world’s wokerati had worked so hard to prevent.”I hope Johnson is pleased with the way things have worked out. Because now the foolish wokerati have been schooled beyond Johnson’s wettest dreams. It’s the Trump-Putin-bin Salman party! An adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster, and a man who sanctioned a chemical warfare hit, killing a British citizen on British soil, have met at the luxury Saudia Arabian hotel of another man, who, according to the US, reportedly approved the murder and subsequent dismemberment of a journalist, to discuss the similarly brutal dismemberment of Ukraine, without consulting either Ukraine itself or the countries most directly affected by the legitimisation of Putin’s territorial anxieties. Don’t worry, Poland! Stable genius Trump has got this covered, so break out the bone saws, pop the cork on the novichok and grab the girls by the pussy! There are 1970s Italian slasher films with less gruesome plotlines. Well said, Boris Johnson! That’s certainly stuck it to the wokerati!If only Johnson, and Trump’s other cheerleaders in the rightwing press and on the right of the house, could be brave enough to call out Trump for what he is. If only Johnson had the moral courage of Ed Davey from the Liberal Democrats. In what newly warped reality does that sentence even exist? But, on balance, the whitewashing of the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians is a small price to pay for the delight Trump has bought to the smiling faces of people who hate the transgender community, wild swimming enthusiasts and Guardian readers. Sniffing mineral rights in the air, like the smell of napalm in the morning, Trump has grabbed Ukraine by the pussy and he ain’t gonna let go. Trump is, unequivocally, the worst thing to happen to human civilisation since Hitler. And Ricky Gervais’s After Life.European politicians more rational and less self-serving than Johnson are trying to formulate the correct response to Trump’s rapid and reckless redrawing of the postwar world disorder in his own, and Russia’s, interests. The correct response is to shit your pants. On Tuesday, Trump even blamed Ukraine itself for being invaded, which is a bit like blaming E Jean Carroll herself for being sexually abused in a department store changing room. Couldn’t she have cut a pre-emptive deal before things escalated? Victims! Always blaming someone else. But Trump has put the idea that the invasion of Ukraine is Ukraine’s fault out there now, on the world stage, amplified by his collaborators in the tech bro media, and it will gradually calcify into one of those persistent alternative facts. By Wednesday he’d called Zelenskyy a dictator (and a mediocre comedian, which in my opinion is even worse).And it’s that kind of reshaping of reality that needs a coherent European response. Recently, the US vice-president, JD Vance, who has the exact same face-beard as the main male oppressor in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, came and told the Munich security conference that Scotland had made it illegal to pray silently in your own home. Many things are illegal in Scotland. Fruit, for example, and cushions, which are deemed too soft by the Scottish Cushion Committee. But not silent private prayer. Largely ignoring dead-in-the-water Ukraine, Vance also told Europe we had some kind of moral duty to allow unchecked, factually inaccurate bullshit to clog our infosphere via Trump’s tech bro acolytes’ social media platforms, his inflammatory comments about illegal Scottish prayer in the same speech proving exactly why such regulation is required. And I think he knows this.Predictably, Vancewas one of the three main early investors in Rumble, the social media site for all the people whose conspiratorial untruths and borderline criminality make them too toxic for other social media sites – Russell Brand, Alex Jones and Darth Vader etc – so he personally stood to profit from this sort of popularisation of inflammatory actionable crap. As did fellow Rumble original main investor Peter Thiel, the man behind Palantir, the big tech company Wriggling Wes Streeting is keen to hand all our NHS data to, revealing an interlocking and endless web of bad influence that only “cat woman” Carole Cadwalladr had the persistence of vision to apprehend, and she’s currently shunting off to a subscription Substack site, a crowdfunded Cassandra in an era busy eating its own brainstem.For a brief period around teatime on Monday, Keir Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present” delusionally imagined he could be some kind of go-between twixt observable reality and Trump. But did West Yorkshire jangle-pop pioneers the Wedding Present radically retool their signature sound for 1991’s Seamonsters album just so Starmer could become a Neville Chamberlain for the cover-mounted fanzine flexidisc generation?We have staved off outright fascism throughout most of Europe pretty well for 80 years now, but outright fascism in Europe was never quite so well funded and promoted as it is now, since the US government and the social media platforms that do its bidding decided backing outright fascism was a good way to smash the EU. Think what Hitler could have achieved if he’d had Twitter, currently X, and Google at his disposal. He wouldn’t have needed the V2 rocket, Lord Haw-Haw and Hugo Boss. He could have razed half of Europe with a Hulk Hogan meme, some persuasive online misinformation and a dozen jauntily askew baseball caps.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. He appears in a benefit show for Just Stop Oil at Walthamstow Trades Hall, London, on 8 April More

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      Keir Starmer lays down Ukraine peace demand ahead of Trump talks

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      Keir Starmer has raised the stakes before a crucial meeting in Washington with the US president, Donald Trump this week, by insisting that Ukraine must be “at the heart of any negotiations” on a peace deal with Russia.The prime minister made the remarks – which run directly contrary to comments by the US president last week – in a phone call on Saturdaywith Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he also said that “safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty was essential to deter future aggression from Russia”.Downing Street made clear that the prime minister would carry the same tough messages into his meeting with Trump in the White House on Thursday.Starmer is likely to tell the US president that the UK will raise its defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product, in line with Labour’s election manifesto commitment.The prime minister is also expected to extend an invitation to Trump from King Charles for a second state visit to the UK.But the meeting is also expected to represent the biggest test of Starmer’s diplomatic and negotiating skills in his prime ministership by far, as he tries to retain good relations with Trump while making clear the UK and Europe’s red lines on Ukraine and Russia.View image in fullscreenSources said Starmer may speak to Emmanuel Macron on Sunday before the French president’s talks with Trump on Monday. The aim would be to agree a broad European position on the Trump-led effort to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.Starmer also spoke yesterday to the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, and agreed that Europe must “step up” to ensure Ukraine’s security.Starmer’s meeting with Trump is being described in Westminster as possibly career-defining for the prime minister. Former UK foreign secretary William Hague said it was the most important first bilateral between a prime minister and a president since the start of the second world war.After a week of extraordinary anti-Zelenskyy and pro-Russian rhetoric from Trump and his team, the US president issued another dismissive assault on Zelenskyy’s leadership and relevance to a peace deal on Friday, saying: “I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you. When Zelenskyy said: ‘Oh, he wasn’t invited to a meeting,’ I mean, it wasn’t a priority because he did such a bad job in negotiating so far.”View image in fullscreenAs well as dismissing the democratically elected Zelenskyy as a dictator, the White House has been pressuring Ukraine’s president to sign a $500bn minerals deal in which he would give the US half of his country’s mineral resources. The Trump administration says this is “payback” for earlier US military assistance.Zelenskyy has so far refused to sign, arguing that the agreement lacks clear US security guarantees.Reuters reported that the US was also threatening to disconnect Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system if Zelenskyy does not accept the Trump administration’s sweeping terms.Ukrainian officials characterised the threat as “blackmail”, saying to do so would have a catastrophic impact on the ability of frontline Ukrainian combat units to contain Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe news agency said the US envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, raised the possibility of a shut-off during talks on Thursday with Zelenskyy in Kyiv. An under-pressure Zelenskyy has signalled his willingness to accommodate Washington’s demand, but he has stressed he cannot “sell out” his country.Ukrainian officials are scrambling to find alternatives to Starlink in the event that Trump’s threat is carried out. Ukraine’s armed forces depend on the system to provide real-time video drone footage of the battlefield and to conduct accurate strikes against Russian targets.The Russian military uses Starlink too. Ukrainian commanders are now contemplating a nightmare scenario, in which Musk’s SpaceX company switches off Ukrainian access while continuing to offer it to the Russians – with the White House in effect helping Moscow to win the war.A senior Ukrainian official said his country’s armed forces need American satellite intelligence data. If intelligence sharing were to stop, Ukraine would struggle to continue its successful campaign of long-range strikes against targets deep inside Russia, he said.Asked if the US threat to turn off Starlink was blackmail, he replied: “Yes. If it happens, it’s going to be pretty bad. Of that we can be sure.” Frontline troops used the internet system continuously and it was fitted on advanced naval drones used to sink Russian ships in the Black Sea, he noted.Speaking on Friday, Trump rowed back on some of his earlier comments, which included a false claim that Zelenskyy was deeply unpopular, with a “4%” rating. Trump told Fox News that Russia did invade Ukraine but said Zelenskyy and the then US president Joe Biden should have averted it. “They shouldn’t have let him [Putin] attack,” he declared.Trump’s aggressive remarks have consolidated support for Zelenskyy among Ukrainians, with 63% now approving of him, according to the latest opinion poll before the third anniversary on Monday of Russia’s full-scale invasion.An Opinium poll for the Observer finds more than three times as many UK voters (56%) disapprove of the Trump’s administration handling of Ukraine as approve (17%).About 55% think it likely the UK will need to participate in a large military conflict over the next five years, compared with a fifth (20%) who think it unlikely. A majority (60%) of people believe the UK should increase defence spending. More