Imperialism
United States
Fig. 1. “American Progress,” painting by John Gast, 1872, digital version 2006, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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One expert was pleasantly surprised with the understated nature of the responses from Defence Minister Bill Blair and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly — but others warned there can be no room for complacency and said important security arrangements beyond NATO could be thrown into chaos if [Donald] Trump returns to the Oval Office. . . .
Trump, who is running for re-election in November, said during a weekend campaign event that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines. He said he would not offer such a country U.S. protection.[1]
Much of the debate on [Donald] Trump’s comments so far has focused on the consensus among most right-thinking people that it would run counter to American interests. But for Europe at this stage, that’s almost irrelevant. Europe would be crazy to leave its security every four years up to the whims of about 50,000 American swing-state voters (the rough margin of victory in recent presidential elections).
The reality is that whoever wins in November, MAGA will remain a factor in American politics for some time to come. Whose [sic] to say Trump’s Republican heir doesn’t renew his anti-NATO bent? It’s a risk Europe can’t afford to ignore.[2]
Right now, it looks like any Republican victor of a U.S. presidential election for the foreseeable future will be anti-Ukraine and, nearly as likely, opposed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Western European institutions, including NATO, are globalist, favoring cosmopolitan values just like they do international trade. White Christian nationalists are, emphatically, not. The latter are, as Thomas Frank describes his ‘cons,’ suspicious even of people living in cities along the U.S. Atlantic or Pacific coasts.[3]
Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?[4]
Tucker Carlson’s rage in the foregoing is directed at an ‘other’ that includes not only migrants, people of color, and people of divergent sexual orientations or gender identities, but even native-born white cis U.S. citizens, really anybody who might dare to disagree with an ideology that is, by its very nature, exclusionary. This is an ideology—you might call it ‘fascist’—that in fact depends upon the presence of this ‘other’ to rage at. Institutions like NATO are targets for representing everything white Christian nationalists despise.
The crucial question—I cannot answer it—is how far that rage will go. If, hypothetically, we do not call a majority of white Christian nationalists fascists, we are nonetheless tumbling into that chasm.
Even if, as I do, you agree in some part with white Christian nationalists about trade, I hope you abhor any notion that other people are anything but people, sometimes better in some ways, sometimes worse in some ways, sometimes about the same in some ways. This abhorrence I expect lies at the heart of cosmopolitanism, which welcomes rather than fears intercultural contact and exchange, which welcomes rather than fears difference. Our conflict with white Christian nationalism is due to their absolute intolerance for us and our values, their insistence that we must conform to their ideology utterly regardless of, well, um, reality.
I remain absolutely gobsmacked by the question of how the hell either the fascist (Donald Trump) or the war criminal (Joe Biden) win this November and I am dumbfounded, even as I have warned that the result of voting for the lesser evil still yields evil, that we are reduced to such despicable choices. It’s far beyond my comprehension.
Murray Brewster, “Trump’s NATO comments aren’t cause for panic — but they should be taken seriously, experts warn,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 12, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-nato-canada-bill-blair-1.7113129
Matthew Karnitschnig, “Donald Trump just did Europe a favor,” Politico, February 13, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-just-did-europe-a-favor/
- [1]Murray Brewster, “Trump’s NATO comments aren’t cause for panic — but they should be taken seriously, experts warn,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 12, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-nato-canada-bill-blair-1.7113129↩
- [2]Matthew Karnitschnig, “Donald Trump just did Europe a favor,” Politico, February 13, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-just-did-europe-a-favor/↩
- [3]Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).↩
- [4]Tucker Carlson, quoted in Adam Gabbatt, “Tucker Carlson leads rightwing charge to blame everyone but Putin,” Guardian, February 26, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/25/tucker-carlson-fox-news-russia-putin↩