Against the obscurantist international
*This article was previously published in El País.
“Here we are. The end of globalism. The end of Ukraine. The end of Canada. The End of EU. Enough. Let’s serious things happen. Big boy’s deal”. With these words Alexander Dugin, guru to Eurasianist ultras, hailed the telephone conversation between Trump and Putin. The Russian regime’s propagandists are beside themselves with joy as they imagine all the possibilities from hereon in if things continue down the path opened by the US president: one could bomb a European capital and “its vaunted” Article 5 would not be invoked. And what a slap in the face JD Vance has given them!
It is difficult to convey the explosion of rejoicing that Trump’s statement regarding his call with Putin has ignited in the Russian media. They knew things would be easier with Trump, but nobody was expecting so many compliments, such affinity. Suddenly, fortune is smiling on them, the Russians, proving how right they were, as the European bores and their Ukrainian minion are reduced to the insignificance of bit part players. This reaction ties in with a long-held perception of the European Union which in 2016 Andrey Kortunov, the then director of a think tank linked to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aptly described when he explained that “the European Union being a political dwarf and a security non-entity was almost exclusively looked upon from Moscow through the economic lens”.
It is truly striking to watch Trump and his court echo various elements of Russian disinformation, in total lockstep with the global far right, with the most obscurantist forces. Words that particularly delighted Moscow were those of Vice President Vance when he said in Munich: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America”. Vance would have been quite at home at a summit in Vienna in April 2014 that gathered the cream of every strand of the European far right. Leaders of the Russian Eurasia movement discussed with right-wing populists and businessmen from Western Europe about how to save our continent from liberalism and the “satanic gay lobby” and how to restore the old, God-given order. Dugin proposed making Europe a Russian protectorate through peaceful means, thereby saving it from same-sex marriage, from Pussy Riot and from itself: “We must conquer Europe and join it. ... A pro-Russian fifth column is supporting us in Europe. They are European intellectuals who want to reinforce their identity”.
Washington’s sudden insistence on calling for elections in Ukraine, questioning the legitimacy of President Zelenkskyy to the point of branding him a dictator, is another flagrant example of how the Kremlin appears to be dictating the White House’s talking points. Someone who in Washington set the mob on the Capitol and someone who, from Moscow, manipulates every election of his Georgian, Moldovan, Belarusian or Armenian neighbours are giving lessons to citizens who have freely elected their president and who know that – when conditions allow – they will hold democratic elections again.
The same applies to the arguments against a NATO that Ukraine could not join because it would jeopardise the security of none other than a nuclear power, failing to mention that Euromaidan erupted in 2014 not out of a desire to enter NATO but because the then pro-Russian president, Yanukovych, refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The Ukrainians at that time wanted more Europe. It was Putin who awakened in the Ukrainians the desire for more NATO. What the Kremlin pursues – and Washington appears to be ready to hand it to it on a plate – is a mutilated and “neutral” Ukraine, that is to say, at the mercy of Moscow. Are we Europeans going to allow that?
During the call, Putin will have swelled with pride at Trump’s mention of “the great history of our nations” and the fight together in the Second World War. Putinism’s glorification of Russia’s role in that war is no coincidence: it was the only episode in Soviet history that mobilised the population in a genuinely spontaneous way. That explains why Putin has adopted it as the mantra to justify the aggression against an alleged coup perpetrated by “Nazis in Kyiv”.
Furthermore, as the exiled Russian analyst Alexander Baunov rightly observes, this mutual recognition of greatness is what underpins an imperialist view of the world in which only “great nations” are true subjects of history, while the rest are mere objects. This view shared by Trump and Putin drags us back to the past, to a conception of relations between states and people that is precisely what European construction sought to leave behind, offering an alternative to the rest of the world.
This is why it has always struck me as contradictory that we should accept being called “old Europe” when in fact we are the new Europe, the one that has looked to learn from the mistakes of the past and build a new model of human relations. This is what we must defend, with weapons too. More than ever, to fight for Ukraine is to fight for that.
Keywords: Trump, Putin, far right, Ukraine, Russia, Dugin, propaganda, disinformation
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