[Newsstand] ‘The bellicose frivolity of senile empires’ (2025)

A spokesperson for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization phrased it delicately. “Particularly these days, politics are so unpredictable.” She means the politics of Donald Trump. In the second week of April, when I and two other journalists from Asia visited with officials of the European Union and NATO, with policy experts in think tanks and with colleagues in European media, Trump was especially unpredictable about tariffs. He had also been unpredictable about Ukraine, about Taiwan, about NATO itself.

“Even the people within Trump’s inner circle don’t know what he’s thinking,” a global governance specialist based in Berlin said. Trump — the metaphor came readily to hand — is “like a child.”

The difficult questions converge on the same imponderable: the Trump factor. The future of NATO? Relying on the United States “is a concern at this time,” a Dutch official said. The fate of Taiwan? “The question is what would the U.S. do, which is of course hard to know right now,” a senior German journalist said. “Who knows where Trump stands on Taiwan?”

We are living in “very interesting times,” in “traumatic times,” said Mika Aaltola, a member of the European Parliament from Finland, representing the European People’s Party, the leading party in the EP. In the face of so much news about or purposefully generated by Trump, the political science PhD-turned-politician offered a bit of folksy wisdom: “Don’t read every headline. It’s not the waves but the ocean.”

The big-picture, oceanic view, I found, is the same in the many offices we visited in Brussels and Berlin: Through a combination of deliberation and caprice, Trump in his second term is upending the global order.

The day after we met Moritz Koch of Handelsblatt, the German business paper, he wrote about the challenges facing the German chancellor in waiting, Friedrich Merz. He used our visit, organized by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, to frame his thoughts, which included the following stocktaking: “Since the founding years of the republic, there has not been a government that has had to take office in such a serious situation. Donald Trump’s capers endanger our prosperity, the Russian army threatens our security. An era is ending and something new is beginning, something unknown and threatening, but also something that is open to political shaping.” (Note: I used DeepL to translate the German original.)

The official and expert consensus was solid except on the issue of Taiwan. To the senior German journalist’s view that nobody knows what Trump would do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a few others were equally certain that the United States would get involved. A Belgian military researcher said the United States, definitely, “will fight a war in Asia,” in part because of “geopolitical DNA.” A policy advisor to German’s Federal Ministry of Defense said “the U.S. doesn’t feel threatened by Russia. They do feel threatened by China.” To be sure, the journalist also had no doubt that the United States would have come to the aid of Taiwan — but that was “in the old world, when we had a stable ally in the White House.”

American sector

Have we entered the post-American order? “Definitely,” an analyst with the European Union Institute for Security Studies said. “I think there’s no longer any common ground with the U.S.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘end,’ but I definitely see a decline,” the specialist who compared Trump to a child said. It’s “the unraveling of the post-1945 world order.”

Still, even an imploding empire retains enough power to force the issue if it wants to. For instance, Markus Bickel of Table Media anticipates a US-brokered peace deal in Ukraine. But, “It will be an unjust peace, protected by French and British troops, not on the front line, but in the backyard of Ukraine.”

Among the Germans and the German-speaking, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s memorable use of the word “Zeitenwende” — literally, a turn in the times, or a turning point, signifying a change in historical eras — to describe the historical situation after Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has been updated and appropriated. This time, it means the coming end of American geopolitical dominance.

It’s not just the tariffs, although, as a foundation official told us, they “hit harder than expected.” Many in Europe simply “did not expect the violence of the tariffs.” It’s not just the undermining of Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia. “There’s a large war right now,” MEP Aaltola warned. “Wars usually don’t keep in isolation from other wars.” Many are worried about the consequences of the Ukraine domino falling. It’s not just the coddling of Putin; it’s also the hostility the Trump administration harbors toward NATO. And so on, ad nauseam.

A foreign policy expert of the Christian Democratic Union, the lead party in Germany’s new governing coalition, put it bluntly: “The U.S. is giving the Western alliance the finger.”

An analyst at Germany’s largest research organization was even more emphatic. “It’s really a stab in the back,” he said.

The famous sign at Checkpoint Charlie, the storied gate in the Berlin Wall, was a warning in the depths of the Cold War: “You are leaving the American sector.” Today, under Trump, it can be read as a directional sign in a rapidly changing map.

Ugly American

The NATO spokesperson made sure to dispel any notion of the so-called Ugly American: rude, overbearing, meddlesome. “The Americans, on the country level, are usually the last to speak, are not bullies, and are well-behaved.”

That this needed to be said at all! I understood it to mean that at the supranational or NATO level today, the American president and his administration speak boorishly and carry very big sticks.

I am reminded of a trenchant phrase from The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s influential account of the European powers sleepwalking into World War I. She described Austria-Hungary’s response to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, its decision to wage war on Serbia, as “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires.”

That strikes me as true of Trump and of MAGA America.

What can be more bellicose and at the same time frivolous as the schoolyard bully? Teresa Ribera, an executive vice president of the European Commission, described Trump last March in precisely those terms. “The problem we are facing is that of a kind of behavior of the bully boy in the school playground,” she said. This bully thinks, “I don’t realize what my problem is, I just attack directly, and clearly Europe can’t stand by and do nothing in the face of such aggression.”

But the degeneration of the elites (the Italian thinker Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of elite deterioration) has infected the United States too, in the second phase of the Trump presidency. The problem is also institutional.

How, then, do we deal with Trump and the United States? With a scholar’s sensitivity to nuance, MEP Aaltola proposed a way forward based on a necessary distinction. “We cannot trust Trump anymore, but we are democracies, and we are one in solidarity with the U.S.” – Rappler.com

Veteran journalist John Nery is a Rappler columnist and program host. In the Public Square with John Nery airs on Rappler platforms every Wednesday at 8 pm.