EEurope cannot bet on a post-Trump US turning back to sanity | Rafael Behr

Since the US is the world’s paramount power, the outcome of this contest has epic consequences for countries, such as the UK, that depend on Washington for security.

Trump’s spiteful denigrations of Keir Starmer and other European leaders for their reluctance to join the bombing of Iran demonstrate the impossibility of partial alignment with a leader who wants total submission. The US president’s only recognised source of authority is himself. When asked earlier this year if there is anything that might constrain his actions around the world, he said: “My own morality, my own mind.”

To go along with such a man is to set law aside and submit to his will. That is the choice the Republican party made in domestic US politics and it is the only offer on the table to allies abroad.

The European response has been a confused mix of acquiescence and evasive action. Flattery has been deployed to cajole Trump into renewing Nato vows of mutual assistance and to forestall a total betrayal of Ukraine. Defence budgets have been rewritten to prove that the continent can pay its way in the alliance and thereby dissuade him from withdrawing the lion’s share.

There is a strategic rationale here. Preparation for the nightmare scenario – Europe left to fend for itself against a belligerent Russia – makes that outcome less likely because the increased military spending deters Moscow and placates Trump. But fear and denial also play a part. European adaptation to the harsh new transatlantic relationship has been held up by hope that the old friendly one isn’t lost for ever.

There is a psychological need to believe that the havoc unleashed by Trump, while extreme, is exceptional – a singular event, like the Covid pandemic; painful and costly, but not a permanent change to the order of things. The president is mortal. His powers may be constrained if Democrats prevail in November’s midterm elections. Ceasefires can be brokered. Closed waterways can be reopened. Supply chains can be rewoven.

But the Trumpdemic is a more complex syndrome. The US was thoroughly exposed for a full term after the 2016 election, culminating in an acute anti-democratic seizure on 6 January 2021. That severe infection did not cultivate enough immunity in the body politic to prevent a second term that is already proving more virulent in its attacks on probity and basic human decency than the first one.

There is no guarantee that a successor to Trump will be able to restore the old constitutional norms, assuming it is even someone who cares to try. Former US allies would be grateful for a less deranged president, but they cannot be sure that sanity would endure longer than any single election cycle. Trust is gone.

American conservatism is steeped in the paranoid, apocalyptic thinking that equates European traditions of liberal democracy with civilisational decline and the erasure of white, Christian culture by Muslim immigration. Through that lens, any appeal to international institutions and multilateralism is understood as the pathetic whining of geopolitical weaklings.

European leaders have been familiar with that rhetoric for years. Their mistake was thinking they might yet operate in a special channel, reserved for historical allies, and that Trump’s extreme language and deference to dictators do not always define US foreign policy. When he signalled readiness to seize Greenland by force – an aggression against Danish sovereignty that would dissolve Nato as a functioning alliance – they understood they were dealing with someone who treats partners as prey and concedes only when faced with resistance.

Unified European pushback, coupled with market jitters at the prospect of a transatlantic trade war, steered Trump into a climbdown. That crisis was Starmer’s first foray into public dispute with the White House, describing the president’s threats over Greenland as “completely wrong” and insisting he would “not yield” to US pressure for a more accommodating stance. But even then the prime minister stuck to his formula of strategic equidistance between Europe and the US, with no obligation to express any preference.

The Iran crisis has exploded that fiction. The choice that Starmer insisted he did not have to make has been forced on him by Trump’s unmeetable demand for unconditional support in an illegal war. In refusing that call, and incurring wrathful recrimination from the White House, the prime minister has tilted Britain’s foreign policy towards the home continent. It helps that economic gravity and geography – the proximity of the single market – also pull in that direction.

The new imperative of solidarity doesn’t dissolve all the old obstacles to closer ties. Brexit is a dense thicket of prickly legal impediments to reintegration. Within the EU there are always competing priorities between 27 member states of varying size, economic complexion and historical experience. There is always tension between the demands of national electorates – for spending on things other than weapons, for example, or cheaper gas than might be sourced from Russia – and the gains to be made from supranational collective coordination.

Europe has not spoken with one voice in response to the Iran war. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, hardly spoke at all in an excruciating Oval Office appearance, staring mutely while Trump spat bilious judgment on the pacifist perfidies of Starmer and Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister. By contrast, Micheál Martin, the Irish taoiseach, rose to the same challenge with a dignified rebuff, defending his UK counterpart as a “very earnest, sound person”.

No democratic leader has fully mastered the art of Trump-whispering because the president doesn’t respect power when it is softly spoken. The EU is still figuring out how to project a unified message. The UK has wasted a decade muttering myths of immaculate Brexit sovereignty to itself when its interests are and always were better served bolstering the European chorus.

Continental solidarity is not an antidote to chaos amid the waves of a Trumpdemic, but it is the necessary condition for resilience. Europeans don’t get a vote when Americans decide whether or not to repudiate a tyrant and restore their constitution. The only democracies they can save are their own, which they must do together, always hoping but not assuming that they will have an ally across the Atlantic again one day.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist