The European CONSERVATİVE - Realism Vindicated - Trump’s victory heralds the West’s return to realism after four years of chaos under Biden. - Rafael Pinto Borges December 13, 2024

 The European CONSERVATİVE 

Realism Vindicated

Trump’s victory heralds the West’s return to realism after four years of chaos under Biden.

Rafael Pinto Borges

December 13, 2024

 

 

Four years ago, the election of Joe Biden as America’s commander-in-chief was celebrated by the left-wing press as the return of sanity to the White House. Trump, it was broadly claimed by the professional commentariat, had placed the world a step away from World War III. The old establishment, aptly personified by a geriatric Biden, would now use its capital of experience to rebuild global tranquility.

The opposite happened—and dramatically so. Instead of a world pacified under the torch of Washington’s leadership, Biden’s inept presidency now appears to have been the final nail in the coffin of the Pax Americana. If the Democrats had wished to preserve the so-called ‘rules-based international order’—that is, the hegemony of the United States under the ideological cloak of liberal internationalism—they can, rather, pride themselves in accelerating its demise. Even the fiercest opponent of the Afghanistan war—as was this writer—will probably recognise that Biden’s disgraceful, Saigon-like evacuation of Kabul did little to reassure the world of the permanence of American power. 

That was the harbinger of disasters to come: a resurgent Russia soon saw an opening to act on its grievances in Ukraine; Beijing has now made its regular sea-and-air blockades of Formosa the new status quo; Hamas struck in Israel in October 2023, as have, repeatedly afterwards, Iran’s long-range missile forces; the Red Sea remains blocked by the Tehran-aligned Houthis, with the U.S. Navy apparently unable to stop them. With Ukraine’s defeat in the battlefield looming ominously near, Biden upped the ante by allowing Kyiv to hit internationally recognised, sovereign Russian territory with U.S.-made missiles—thus putting an already chaotic world one step closer to nuclear armageddon. Trump’s arrival at the White House can’t come soon enough.

Of course, not all of the world’s recent catastrophes can fairly be blamed on Biden and his clumsy entourage. Ultimately, the global order is determined by the balance of power, and that balance had been shifting against the West—and, crucially, America—long before the Democrats won the 2020 election. Back in the 1950s, the U.S. alone was responsible for about half of the world’s entire industrial output; today, China is the world’s first, at around 31% of all manufacturing, and the U.S. is second, with 15%. The People’s Republic is impatiently engaged in the largest naval buildup since the days of Gorshkov and Tirpitz, building the equivalent of Britain’s Royal Navy every 12 months. The nation’s shipyards produce 51% of all merchant shipping in the world; the U.S. produces 0.1%. In 2023, China’s scientists registered almost two million patents. America’s were second, with just over half a million. Indeed, it would have been unthinkable, just twenty years ago, that Europe would soon be begging the Chinese for technology transfers rather than the other way around—yet, as The Financial Times recently reported, that is exactly where we are today. Rumors of Russia’s economic death, too, have been greatly exaggerated—despite worries with inflation, the country’s economy has performed strongly in recent years and will likely achieve a growth rate of over 4% this year. 

It’s a new era of international politics—a new order. Of course, Biden can hardly be blamed for these general trends. But the blob he represents—the transnational, indeed anti-national, liberal establishment that has in recent decades ruled over us—has presided over an unprecedentedly fast transfer of power away from the West and towards its main geopolitical competitors. 

A large part of the process has been fueled by hubris. Even as they praised globalisation and, with it, the offshore-isation and desindustrialisation of the West, an exorbitant immodesty led the liberal elites to assume that the world longed to become like them: that the West’s political and economic institutions were so superb, so insuperable, that the ‘end of History’ was at hand—that there would be no more to the future of humanity than the uninspired imitation of Western (liberal) recipes. Enriched by Western investment, softened by modern comfort, their middle classes would surely rebel against their authoritarian apparatuses. China, it was frankly believed, could well be empowered at a neck-breaking pace, transformed from an isolated communist backwater into the globe’s primary industrial power in just a generation—it would soon become a democracy-loving, LGBT-friendly, latte-sipping, pacifist Denmark of East Asia. Turns out it hasn’t. 

Shattered by the unexpected implosion of the ‘end of History’ Weltanschauung, the liberal elites have flatly refused any effort at exegesis or introspection. At home, they blame the wickedness and gullibility of the common man—and, with it, the great evil of ‘desinformation.’ Abroad, they blame their failures on the ‘malicious’ intentions of their competitors, as if there is no more complexity to great power politics than are found in Batman. A more mature, realist-minded political class would have understood that states act in accordance to their perceived interest, seeking to preserve and expand their power; that, as accurately predicted by men of note such as George Kennan, William Burns, or John Mearsheimer, Russia would  react energetically to Western attempts to vassalise its traditional sphere of interest—and, as Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1997 classic The Grand Chessboard: 

Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower. Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of U.S. geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.

If the avoidance of such a scenario necessitated “a display of U.S. geostrategic skill,” bringing it to life, too, is testament to the exceptional lack of foresight and talent that characterises the West’s foreign policy establishment. None of the three great Eurasian states alluded to by Brzezinski is the others’ natural friend: Iran has historically had little love for Russia, whose leaders, monarchical or communist, expelled Persia from Azerbaijan, threatened it during the Great Game, and invaded it during the Second World War. 

China and Russia, for their part, have overlapping imperial ambitions in central Asia and Siberia. Vladimir Putin once famously proclaimed, at the now distant beginnings of his reign, that China would be Moscow’s greatest threat in the future—suspicion towards Asia is deeply ingrained in the Russian spirit, ever mindful of what it remembers as ‘the Mongol Yoke.’ So is a fascination with Europe. Russia is a great peripheral state whose destiny has always been to model itself after some form of Western civilisation, whether with Vladimir the Great converting his realm to Greek Orthodoxy, Peter I adopting the Dutch flag as his own, or the Bolsheviks implementing, through unmatched means of human suffering, the ideas of one famous German resident of London—Karl Marx. All in all, keeping these countries closer to the West than to each other was far from an impossible task. Yet the blob failed miserably at it.

Even as Biden pompously mimicked Roosevelt by calling for a renewed “arsenal of democracy,” the practical consequence of his policies was to drain it. At the worst possible time, no less. Not only did neocon and neolib overextension help forge an otherwise unlikely anti-Western coalition, it continues, through its bungling, to weaken us to their advantage. While Russia’s army has ballooned from a pre-war 200,000 men-strong force that was ill-trained and in many ways stuck in the ’80s to a behemoth numbering 600,000 battle-hardened veterans proficient in drone warfare and other advanced technologies, Western militaries remain wholly untested in peer-to-peer conflict. Although we were repeatedly promised by the Biden team that war would militarily exhaust Russia, serious men in uniform warn, instead, that the Russian military is now larger and more capable than it has been in decades.

It gets worse. In recent times, Western militaries have reported a crippling lack of all sorts of materiel, from the British Army barely having any artillery left to the country’s overall stockpiles being essentially depleted. Indeed, the situation is so dramatic that two years ago, only a few months after the beginning of the hostilities, National Defense reported that U.S. stockpiles of ammunition and equipment had been left “significantly depleted” by the transfers to Ukraine. What Trump will find when he returns to the Oval Office, after three years of massive handouts, is anyone’s guess. How he will be supposed to properly dissuade the Chinese from mounting an assault on Taiwan, the Iranians from engaging in further regional adventurism or, indeed, the Russians from expanding their ambitions in eastern Europe is surely one of the darkest questions of our time. One thing is certain, however: Biden’s legacy is dire. 

Realism is vindicated, its urgency even more eloquently exposed by its detractors than by its proponents. The outgoing U.S. President’s strategy of speaking loudly and carrying a small stick has failed to deter; it has emboldened and solidified anti-Western coalitions. It has brought Europe—and, indeed, the entire human species—to the brink of thermonuclear war. 

Trumpism 2.0. offers the hope of a different path. Trump’s second term in office might yet usher in what could be described as a neo-Kissingerism: a program of peace through strength, but also through balance and intelligent consideration. As Western muscle has weakened, at least in relative terms, Western strategy must become sharper. Like the great diplomat and the admirable president whom Kissinger served, Richard Nixon, so too must the new America have the courage to spare itself the burdens that threaten to weaken it—in the ’60s and ’70s, Vietnam; today, Ukraine—to choose the path of clever diplomacy, drive Moscow away from Beijing, and direct its industrial and military resources towards realistic, attainable goals. Only these steps will allow the West to rebuild a balance of power that lowers global tension and safeguards its most crucial interests. Only by implementing them can Western strength and prosperity be protected, reinforced, and rejuvenated. But for that we must hurry—the clock is ticking.

Rafael Pinto Borges is the founder and chairman of Nova Portugalidade, a Lisbon-based, conservative and patriotically-minded think tank. A political scientist and a historian, he has written on numerous national and international publications. You might find him on Twitter as @rpintoborges.