A Wasting Asset?

Europe turns away from America.

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I said I wouldn’t comment specifically on the recent US elections and I won’t: I have no desire to add to the piles of turgid and ill-informed political kludge cluttering up various parts of the Internet. Of course, that doesn’t stop me taking a (former) professional interest in the subject, and, like anyone who’s worked in a political environment, I feel a sense of malicious enjoyment watching a multi-vehicle political pile-up, as the incompetent, the arrogant, the stupid and the rapacious are crushed beneath the wheels of karma.

That said, I want to talk about something a bit different today, and to suggest that the events of the last week or so amount to a decisive, and quite possibly final, step in the alienation of European elites from the United States, and the end of a tradition going back thirty-odd years of internalising and reproducing American political strategies, innovations and even slogans, as though they were universally valid and effective everywhere. In turn, this is part of a wider alienation of European elites from the longer-term relationship with US itself. Attachment to American models has always been essentially pragmatic: they seemed to provide a very effective way for elites to gain and hold power, just as close political relations with the United States seemed to offer all sorts of practical benefits to European states. All this has been looking dubious for some time now, and the correlation of forces that led to Trump’s victory suggests that the model isn’t even working in America any more, just at a time when the practical benefits of the US link itself are looking increasingly questionable, when the lessons of the defeat in Ukraine are being painfully absorbed. .

Let’s go back a bit, and first ask why the modern American “model” of politics and gaining and holding power first took root in Europe, when the history and political cultures involved were so different, and what made European political parties adopt it. Since it started in Britain let’s begin there, but with references to other countries from time to time. Bear in mind that Left-wing parties in Europe were always a slightly uneasy mixture of middle-class intellectuals and a mass working-class base. In Britain, the Labour Party, as its name suggests, was always umbilically linked to the Trades Unions, and indeed began as the Labour Representation Committee, the political wing of the Trades Union movement.

By the 1970s this was starting to look problematic. With the massive post-1945 expansion of educational opportunities, and the university expansion programme of the 1960s, the average Labour Party militant was no longer a shop-steward in a factory but a teacher in a local school or university, a lawyer, a media worker or a local government employee. But party policy and the contents of the election manifesto were still determined by the Party Conference and the National Executive Committee, each controlled by the Trades Unions. The tensions between the leadership and the newer members on the one hand, and the Trades Unions on the other helped to tear the party apart in the late 1970s. Then, in the most disastrous initiative of post-1945 British politics, a group of middle-class, right-wing Labour Party figures broke away in 1981 and eventually formed the Social Democratic Party, which suffered the traditional fate of such groups in that it never took power itself, whilst it almost destroyed its parent party, and handed the Conservatives another fifteen years of power.

Yet for some in the Labour Party the Conservative triumph was not a question of treason and horrible electoral arithmetic, but of the irrelevance of traditional left-wing ideas. These ideas needed to be replaced by more “modern” market-centred ideas and policies similar to those of the Tories. The fact that this could seriously be said in the 1980s, as the Conservatives were increasingly  losing support and the country as a whole was moving leftwards politically, was the first indication of the growing elitist trend in left-wing thinking. (Recall that many new Labour Party members in the 1980s had been influenced by the various fringe Marxist groups at University that all claimed to know what the workers actually needed, even if they didn’t appear to want it.) Neil Kinnock, a miner’s son from Wales and a teacher for the Worker’s Educational Association, did an enormous amount to modernise the party in the late 1980s, and very nearly secured victory over the new Tory leader John Major in 1992. Labour was cheated of victory, against all expectations, just by a handful of seats. Had Labour won, the political history of Britain, and perhaps other countries, would have been significantly different.

But the 1992 defeat plunged the party into depression, and massively strengthened the hand of those who argued that the old mass-based political parties had outlived their time, and that the future of the Left (if they really had to use that word) was with small, urban, middle-class parties which the mass of the people would vote for (since they had nowhere else to go) but would not have any influence over. In effect, this amounted to the triumph of the vanguard concept of the party, which had been gaining ground since the 1960s. But would it work?

News from across the Atlantic seemed to suggest it would. Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, and his re-election in 1996, seemed to show that a reconfiguration of the Left was not only possible, but actually effective. It’s hard to recall now the adoration lavished in Europe on Clinton and the Democrats generally in the 1990s. Whatever the reality may have been across the Atlantic, the perception in Europe was that Clintonism, and the technocratic, data-driven, value-free approach to politics it seemed to articulate, was the future, and that parties of the Left that wished to take back power needed to emulate it. The result of the British General Election of 1997 was accordingly seen not as a massive repudiation of the Conservative Party, but as a reward to the Labour Party for moving substantially in their direction. It seemed bizarre at the time and it seems incomprehensible now, but it suited the agenda of the middle-class Blairistas who had taken over the party.

From then on, European politicians carved a groove in the air to Washington, in an attempt to understand and replicate the success first of Clinton and then of Obama, both of whom were extravagantly worshipped in Europe. The concept of a “modern” left-wing party that could take the votes of the poor and immigrants for granted (since where else would they go?) and base itself around urban, educated elites, implementing their vaguely progressive and socially liberal ideology while leaving the economic system intact, spread through European political systems like an infectious disease. What a relief it must have been to no longer have to cultivate the ignorant working classes. Moreover, it was possible to clothe right-wing policies in the traditional vocabulary of the Left, so disarming criticism. It was even possible to evoke a “third way” and to claim that the whole “left-right” distinction was outdated anyway.

This was tried with great apparent success in France. The unpopular and squalid presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) resulted in progressive capture of the political system at all levels by the Socialists. In 2012 François Hollande (“my enemy is Finance”) scored a narrow victory in the Presidential elections, and the new-style, middle-class, urbanised Obamaesque Socialist party seemed to have the world at its feet. Except of course that, shorn of its mass base and its class orientation, the PS slid into irrelevance as various middle-class special interest groups fought each other, with Hollande unable to exercise any real discipline. The result was a catastrophe: the effective destruction of the party in the elections of 2017 and 2022. It’s only (just) still alive because in the elections of 2024 the “Left” in the widest sense for once presented a common slate of candidates in the second round, and did better than it otherwise would have. But surprisingly, the unwashed masses who had once constituted their electoral base went off to vote for the “extreme Right” Rassemblement national, whilst many of their immigrant voters, whose conservative social values were outraged by initiatives such as homosexual marriage, went to vote for traditional parties of the Right. Who could have predicted such a thing?

Yet it is characteristic of this mindset that the Party is never wrong. Electoral defeats don’t matter that much: they just show that the population has failed to understand how to vote, and needs to be hectored further. Through some fairly sordid political manoeuvring designed the keep the RN out of power, the “Left” managed to have the largest single group of deputies after the 2024 elections, although its share of the vote was much lower than the RN’s. It therefore claimed to have “won” the elections, and ever since, in true vanguard style, has been demanding to be allowed to form the government, because, after all, its policies are objectively right. It’s the people who are wrong.

To this (essentially European) Marxist intellectual heritage is added the Obama-era concept of the “coalition of the ascendant” since all political ideas from the US are deemed to be automatically applicable in Europe. In France, at least, little actual effort went into building such a coalition, it was just assumed to exist, and could be mobilised for elections by throwing a little red meat (homosexual marriage, anti-racist legislation) to the self-appointed leaders of the various factions. Yet not only did the numbers not add up (the “immigrant” population in most European countries is nowhere near as important as in the US) it turned out that different sets of “immigrants” didn’t like being treated the same, and many came from socially conservative societies anyway.

The relative fluidity of European political systems meant that the results of this misbegotten policy were more immediately apparent there than in the United States, with its rigid two-party structure. In particular, the abandonment of ordinary people and the contempt for them felt by the elites was, amazingly, reciprocated, and ordinary people went off to vote in large numbers for parties of the “extreme Right” such as the RN and AfD. As the legacy political parties grew closer together (and again this was more evident in Europe), politics switched through ninety degrees and Left vs. Right increasingly became the elites vs. the people.

Unfortunately, there were many more people than there were elites, a disadvantage in a democracy. The elite solution of course was to hector and harangue the people into doing their duty. As performed by Hilary Clinton in the US, this was judged to be an effective tactic, and was married to the European vanguard tradition I touched on above. The result today is an anti-populist discourse of a virulence that probably hasn’t been seen since the eighteenth century. In France, Emanuel Macron’s contempt for ordinary people is rivalled only by that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose La France Insoumise is coming to resemble less a political party than a not-very subtle right-wing satirist’s conception of one.

Against this background, the recent elections in the US were an existential moment for the European elite The media of the European Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) has been full for months now of dire warnings and apocalyptic imaginings of what would happen if Trump won, and endless anti-Trump stories, as though by turning hate up to 11 it might be possible to prevent disaster. You would seriously have thought from the PMC media that the election was taking place in Europe. And in a sense it was, because it was the final, acid test of whether the elite vanguard politics of the western PMC over the last thirty-odd years were going to keep working or not.

History will record not, and the reaction from the European PMC has been one of disbelief, hysteria and fury. Endless articles have appeared in the European PMC media (I don’t have the strength to read more than a few of them) demanding to know how American voters could be so stupid. How could they betray us? After all, an entire political philosophy and mode of operation is at stake here. Since the 90s European elites have taken inspiration from the Clinton/Obama value-free technocratic elitism, and built entire careers on it. So what can they do if everything seems to be turning to rats, apart from wail and gnash their teeth? What might the implications for European politics be?

It’s too early to say how the PMC in the United States will react to this defeat, and anyway I’m not the person to ask. But it may be beginning to dawn on European elites that in fact their US opposite numbers may not have all the answers: indeed they may have been asking the wrong questions all along. Winning elections by insulting voters was never a very coherent or sensible strategy, and it’s clear that, throughout the West, residual loyalties to parties of the Notional Left have been strained to breaking point and beyond. The future lies with political leaders who are able to comprehend what ordinary people want and need, but in Europe, even more than in the US, we have a political class which genuinely despises ordinary people, and it’s not clear that it would be able to change, even if it recognised the necessity.

So I think we’ll see fewer political apparatchiks from Europe rushing over to Washington now, to learn the finer arts of winning elections for the PMC. But that prompts the question of why they ever did, and indeed why what happens in the US is considered of such importance. For months, the European media has been consumed by the US elections, and everything from big media conglomerates through small-circulation weekly and monthly magazines and minor TV and radio channels to my local newspaper has been solemnly discussing the contest, almost always telling their audiences that it’s essential that Trump should not win. But where does all this come from?

A surprising proportion of the explanation is quite banal. One part is the spread of English as a world language: a Portuguese a Norwegian and a Greek will converse in English because it’s everybody’s second language. So huge numbers of educated people around the world can read and listen to the US media, which talks, of course, obsessively about its own country, and in its own terms. Although the international dominance of US media is now not unchallenged, it’s still very noticeable in airports and hotels and conference centres everywhere, and helps to create the impression that what is going on in the US, and how it is described, is a norm for the rest of the world. And it’s very easy to find and understand English-language (and in practice probably American) discussion of world issues on the Internet. American ways of thinking about the world became normalised, not because they were right but because they were everywhere, and, critically, because there was no organised alternative.

This was happening anyway after 1945, but it was given a push by the deregulation of television in most western countries from the 1980s onwards. This produced a massive influx of new channels,  all competing for the limited amount of advertising revenue available, and so seeking to fill their schedules with the cheapest programming they could find. Inevitably, most of this came from the US with its huge market and massive back catalogues. In the name of variety and choice, you could watch any of perhaps five or six imported US police series on different channels in a hotel room in Europe thirty years ago. It’s become worse since. To this of course is added the historic dominance of Hollywood and more recently of pay-TV series, again for essentially economic reasons: why commission a series of your own when you can just buy one in cheaply? But inevitably, these are American productions designed for American audiences, incorporating American assumptions about themselves and the world. China and India, with even more massive home markets, are starting to challenge this dominance, but only very slowly.

It would be wrong, of course, to believe that the PMC’s ideology (as opposed to wider cultural norms) is entirely an American construction: much of it isn’t, although in practice it has been taken up and disseminated mainly by the US. A mordantly amusing example is provided by the origin of the PMC’s social-liberal beliefs. They go back to the reception in the US of various French philosophers (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida etc.) who were poorly translated and misunderstood, but grouped together under something called “French theory” (which would not have meant anything to the authors concerned, who were very different.) Now, French exchange students spend a semester in the US, and come back with distorted versions of what now half-forgotten French philosophers once said, presented as the latest thing from the US, to then be introduced and enforced in French universities. I wonder what Foucault would have made of that.

Which reminds me: I suppose Foucault would have asked why Europeans were so quick to accept many of these evidently silly ideas and norms, apart from the convenience of doing so, and the work involved in finding alternatives. I think there are a number of different issues here, and a number of different reasons why Europeans, quite voluntarily, adopt US norms and ways of looking at the world, in spite of the obvious irrelevance of many of these norms and the failure, in practice, of attempts to apply them.

One, simply, is power worship. The impression, again heavily fortified by American cultural output, is of a powerful, determined and ruthless nation able to act decisively on the world stage. Now there is a type of personality that worships the strong and ruthless. Some western intellectuals and politicians famously grovelled at the feet of Stalin, a smaller number at the feet of the fascists and the Nazis. In modern times, ruthless states like apartheid South Africa and Israel have captured the same peoples’ attention, but for a certain type of European, the idea of an America capable and willing to invade, bomb or politically sabotage any country anywhere in the world is not worrying, but perversely exciting. When the sources you have for understanding this country are largely limited to those it produces itself, and you are essentially obliged to take it at its own valuation, such a state acquires a wish-fulfilment role: strong, ruthless and determined, it does things your own governments are too weak or fearful or unable to do. Worshipping and defending such a state means that some of the magic might rub off on you and increase your good opinion of yourself. Such delusions typically resist the discouraging effects of actual contact with the object of worship for quite some time.

Closely linked to this is the sense that resistance is pointless. Twenty years ago a surprising number of people fell for the Washington line that the US was now a “hegemon,” and an “Empire,” and this just had to be accepted. America was going to rule the world and that was it, the ramblings of Washington think-tanks were going to be implemented to the letter, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. In France, an important component of the governing and influencing classes decided that the US was a “hyper-power,” and all that France could do was to grovel at Washington’s feet and hope for crumbs. (Ironically, but not surprisingly, some of these people, or their parents, had been unconditional, faithful supporters of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.) This produced a strong neoconservative movement in Paris which allied itself faithfully not just with the US but with American views of the world, and which, when added to the increasing influence of the Brussels lobby, did a lot to neuter the traditional independence of French foreign and security policy. It’s not clear if that independence can now be recovered.

In its purest form this attitude did not last very long, given the failure in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq, but it remained, and remains, highly influential. It is at the root of the disastrous underestimation in Europe of Russian military power, and the belief that Russia, like all weak states, can just be kicked around without consequences. It is also at the root of unreasoning hatred of Iran, and fear that a rising China will do to the United States what that country has sought to do to the rest of the world. The realisation that the United States is not, in fact, a “hegemon” or an “Empire,” and has been misguided to behave as if it were, is only slowly dawning now on European elites: I return to this point below.

Finally, and more generally, there is just a sense of almost-infinite American power and expertise, which comes essentially from the quasi-monopoly of information and opinion about that country that I discussed above. The United States is a country not known for its excessive modesty, and its self-image, in politics, in war and in diplomacy, is projected throughout the world, and frequently accepted without question, as much by those bitterly opposed to the United States as by those who think warmly of it.

As a result, it’s easy to fall into the belief that in many parts of the world the United States is the principal, if not the only important actor. Every excretion from some think-tank in Washington on, say, the Middle East, is aimed at directly influencing policy, and thus respects the accepted convention that only what the United States does matters, and that other countries have little or no influence or importance. They are either puppets, nuisances or bystanders. In seeking to play the game of influence and secure funding and jobs, organisations and media of all kinds, inside and outside government, agree to pretend that the United States is the single decisive actor, and the key to the resolution of whatever crisis is being discussed. An actor who says “well, actually there’s not a lot we can do here,” will simply be ignored. The same logic extends to the media, which faithfully report every twist and turn of bureaucratic struggles in Washington as though that were all that mattered, because it’s what they know, and it’s easy to find out information. And curiously, even the bitterest critics of Washington, and the “alt-media,” unhesitatingly take the influence of the United States at its own evaluation.

It is therefore natural and tempting for Europeans (and others) confronted by this overwhelmingly self-confident presentation of US power and influence to take it for realty. Once you get your hands dirty with the subject-matter, especially when you get on the ground, you realise that of course this isn’t true. Indeed, I’ve met US officials in the field who have despaired of ever convincing anyone in Washington just how complicated and multifaceted most crises are, and how many different actors are usually involved.

But the problem, of course, is that once you accept that the US doesn’t always know what it’s doing, frequently makes mistakes and often doesn’t control the situation, then you are obliged to find out what other actors think, and what their objectives are. But this involves knowledge and knowledge involves research. If you are a junior tank-thinker or an all-purpose media pundit, who may never have visited the region you are writing about and are limited to easily-available English-language sources, well, it’s simply easier to let the rest of the world go. You can work in a few references to “pro-western moderates” and to “interference” by Russia, Iran, China, or whoever, and that takes care of the non-US dimension. And when things go wrong, you can write reams and reams about institutional blame-casting in Washington and lack of “coordination,” without needing to explain why Washington didn’t understand what it was doing and why it was outsmarted by others.

The obsession with the Washington Myth, that the US is competent, organised, all-powerful and has a long-term plan for everything, has a pervasive effect on all writing and thinking about the US and its involvement in crises around the world, as much for its enemies as for its friends. Nothing else, I think, can explain the almost hallucinatory confidence with which the West seems to assume that Washington can, by itself, bring an end to the war in Ukraine, just by agreeing that negotiations should start. All that really matters, it seems, is that Washington should decide what is going to happen and what Ukraine should do: US military “power” will do the persuading. This is so far removed from reality, and so far from any conceivable development of the crisis based on what we know now, that it sounds like the product of disordered minds. But in fact, it is just the Washington Myth in its full flowering, and acceptance of it is the price of admission to the discussion.   

The Myth works backwards, of course. So insistent is the stress on omnipotence, omniscience and omnicompetence, and so complete is the exclusion of the interests and opinions of other nations, that we are inevitably required to conclude that Washington had decided everything in every crisis. So when the war in Ukraine started and it was expected that Russia would be defeated and Putin overthrown within days, that was assumed to be part of the plan all along. When that didn’t happen and sanctions were imposed to strangle the Russian economy, that was assumed to be the plan all along. When the Ukrainian forces were wiped put and had to be rebuilt with NATO stocks, the plan all along was assumed to be more order for defence manufacturers, although in fact much of the equipment sent was obsolescent or surplus and would not be replaced. Then when the war went into its second and third years it was assumed that the plan all along had been for a sustained war exhausting Russia militarily. Now that it is clear that the West, rather than Russia, will be left exhausted and militarily weak, someone is no doubt trying to fit that into the long-term plan, ignoring the fact that “Washington “ and “long-term” don’t really belong  in the same sentence together.

So also it is assumed that an omnipotent etc. US is behind the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, in spite of clear evidence that Washington is desperately running to catch up, and has little influence over the Israeli government. It is assumed that Washington could “end” the slaughter in Gaza with a phone call, yet, whilst an arms embargo would progressively degrade Israel’s ability to carry out its bombing campaign, it wouldn’t even begin to address a whole range of other highly complex issues. And it’s necessarily assumed that there must be some kind of long-term (sic) strategy to use Israel to destroy Iran, although in practice the result would be roughly the opposite, and lead in turn to the destruction of the US presence in the region. In desperation, when things slide into total chaos, some who are under the spell of the Washington Myth claim that Washington must have planned the chaos: something no “Empire” has ever done, and which could bring no conceivable benefit anyway.

All these misunderstandings are a result of taking the Washington Myth at face value, and the US at its own evaluation; Things become much clearer if we recognise that the US is a powerful nation, but not an all-powerful one, that (without going full Andrei Martyanov) its military has quite serious structural and doctrinal problems that limit its effectiveness, and that its vast and conflictual government system makes it very hard to apply any kind of long-term strategy that takes account of reality on the ground. It’s also true that there is a tendency to confuse vague aspirations with actual plans. This what I call the Rain-Dance Fallacy: I want it to rain, I do a dance, it rains, therefore I have caused the rain. All over Washington there are stones where, if you turn them over, someone will crawl out with a long-lasting obsession about something or other which they will write and speak about incessantly, and for which they try to get support. Occasionally these correspond roughly to real things that happen in the world later, but there is seldom any kind of causal relationship.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Washington Myth is just that: a myth. The immediate occasion will be Ukraine, where the US is about to be relegated to second-tier status: it’s improbable that Moscow is greatly worried what Washington (or for that matter NATO) thinks it can or cannot “accept.” But this conceals a wider problem. Since the late 1940s, the transatlantic link has served the Europeans as a useful strategic counter to Soviet and then Russian power. It was never a question of the US “defending” Europe, of course—the vast majority of NATO forces were European—but the US link did provide a plausible strategic counterweight in any major security crisis. (At various intervals since the end of the Cold War Europe elites have panicked that the US was losing interest.) But that’s gone now, and US combat forces in Europe amount in practice to something like those of Belgium or Greece, without much prospect of the situation improving. The reality is that a disarmed Europe, with or without a token US presence, will be at a severe political disadvantage to Russia. This is how international politics works, not in the crude sense of military threats, but in the parlaying of military power into political advantage.

So it’s not clear that continuing with the US link will do Europe very much good, and might actually hold up the grim but necessary process of carving out a new relationship with Russia. The US link has been a wasting asset for some time, and in many ways the tragic farce of the recent elections simply confirms that the US has nothing to teach Europe. All the clever data-driven, salami-sliced, consultant-originated, focus-group tested clever ideas completely failed. Running Biden, then not running Biden, then imposing Harris, then running a campaign based on vibes and joy, then insulting half of the voting population proves in the end not too be seven-dimensional chess, but just plain amateurism and incompetence, and it does seem as if people in Europe are beginning to notice.

The domination of the elite European mind by US examples and ways of thinking over the last few generations was not obvious or automatic at the beginning, and was the product of some of the cultural, political and economic factors described above. But it was also the product of chance: no other well-articulated and large-scale system of thought was available to challenge it, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, still less in a language that everyone more-or-less spoke. It’s probably these contingent factors that have done the most to keep US intellectual dominance intact, in the absence of any obvious alternative. The problem is, it’s not clear what the alternative actually is now, or where it might come from.