Trump's warning shot to Europe

It’s safe to say that Donald Trump is not a details man. He leaves it to the people around him to take care of details. As such, it’s best not to take any Trump speech at face value. Most of his speeches are self-aggrandising waffle with multiple factual inaccuracies. You have to listen to the song and not the lyrics. Trump’s speech to the WEF is really just the summary of the administration’s posture towards Europe.

While there are, no doubt, fact-checking scribblers at the FT looking to catch him out, the broad thrust of Trump’s position is exactly right. Europe’s crisis is existential, and mostly self-inflicted. Europe’s indifference to border control, its out of control welfare spending, its neglect of defence spending, and its insane Net Zero energy policies have weakened it to breaking point - to the advantage of the West’s enemies.

Europe has trashed its own auto industry and its chemicals industry, made itself over-reliant on energy imports and exported important strategic industries to China and India. Meanwhile, the EU’s bureaucratic approach to regulation has crushed European tech innovation. All the while, Europe is almost entirely dependent on the US taxpayer for its own defence. As such, we are poor allies to America.

This is very much in line with Trump’s Western hemisphere policy. America is displeased that Canada is so closely aligned with China, and the fact that Canada’s drug decriminalisation of drugs makes Vancouver the fentanyl capital of the world - with serious ramifications for the US.

Essentially, what we’re seeing right now is America’s Brexit from the international liberal consensus. Trumpism is a repudiation of managed decline and defeatism. The words “Make America Great Again” are the root command of his administration. Trump is removing all the self-imposed restrictions on growth, and is urging allies to do likewise.

This could not have come at a better time for Europe which is much in need of a wake up call. All of Britain's major problems are self inflicted. We could have safe streets, affordable energy and transport, and decent spacious homes, and we could have secure jobs with good wages, and we could have social cohesion and functioning borders. We could have a thriving economy. In a sense, we only really have one problem. Our political class doesn't want any of those things. Either through ignorance or malice, they're inflicting more damage on us than any of our enemies.

As someone who campaigned so long for Brexit, watching Trump these last few weeks makes me sad because this is the renaissance that Britain could and should have had in 2016. Britain could have completely reset its energy policy, dumping renewables while abolishing the idiotic habitats directive to get infrastructure planning back on track. We could have dumped the EU SPS system to rebuild local slaughterhouses. We could have rebooted agriculture.

We could have ended the recycling scam and binned the landfill directive, making our streets cleaner. We could have rebuilt our fishing fleet. We could have safeguarded our steel and fertiliser production. Right now we could be seeing new small modular reactors coming online, watching the cost of food and energy begin to plummet.

But we didn't do any of that. We doubled down on Net Zero, screwed our farmers, trashed our steel industry, closed down domestic fertiliser production, and crippled our chemicals industry. We banned car factories form making cars people actually want and we ramped up immigration and welfare. Because of that incompetence and betrayal we ended up with Keir Starmer and Labour in charge, who turn the screws even tighter, locking us into EU ETS, making our energy even more expensive, and now they're strangling the life out of every sector to death with additional taxes. They will deliberately make us poor and then tell us more socialism is the answer.

The worst part is that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Nobody is coming to the rescue. Trump’s message will fall on deaf ears - especially in the EU because Trump isn’t just repudiating EU policy, he is repudiating the entire basis of its existence. Meanwhile, the British psyche has a knee-jerk contrarianism when it comes to America. Trump’s brashness and lack of finesse is mistaken for stupidity. There is a certain sense of British superiority our elites cling on to, and admitting Trump has a point is simply too much for their fragile egos.

Thankfully, the (neo)liberal regime in Europe is living on borrowed time. It is exactly this self-inflicted decline that fuels AfD, FN, Reform and others - and with the exception of Reform, they’re becoming more radical. AfD leader Alice Weidel is calling for an EU referendum. Five years from now, the political terrain on this side of the Atlantic will look very different indeed.

With Trump setting a new example, that decline is not inevitable, America has found a spring in its step. Unshackled from the dogma of globalisation and liberal internationalism, America is showing us that a new way is possible, and that we’re not obliged to be slaves to the paranoias and superstitions of the twentieth century. If Trump can pull it off, Europe may follow. Let’s just hope it’s not too late.