All normality induces and tolerates a certain type of extremism. Beyond a certain limit, either extremism is neutralized or extremism establishes a new normal. Normalcy in the US is compliance with the Constitution, and, as far as international relations are concerned, it is putting that compliance at the service of the interests of the US, the US's only unconditional ally. I mean unconditional in the strongest sense of the word: anyone who calls those interests into question will be neutralized, even if it's the President. Neutralization is the responsibility of the deep state, the deep state that governs the US as we know it.

The term deep state only began to be used about the US during Trump's first term, often invoked by himself as a scapegoat for his failures. It refers to the existence of very powerful and well-organized interests that, without any democratic scrutiny, decide the country's destiny at times of serious crisis. It is at these times that dramatic events occur or obscure decisions whose causes are never fully clarified. For example, the assassination of President John Kennedy (1963); Watergate (1972); Iran-Contra (1981-1986); the attack on the Twin Towers in New York known as 9/11 (2001); and the invasion of Iraq “justified” by non-existent weapons of mass destruction (2003).

Conceived in various ways, the deep state is now an inescapable theme, and its application is as pertinent in countries considered authoritarian as in countries considered democratic. (For the case of the USA, see, for example, Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil and the Struggle for Democracy, 2015; Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government, 2016.)1.

For now, Donald Trump's government is an authorized exception and the spectacle of extremism. Whether normality will succumb or prevail, and whether or not Trump's extremism remains within tolerable limits, are, for the time being, open questions. As is Trump's future. For now, legally, only the judicial system has any power to stop Trump. As for the Deep State, we won't know anything until its intervention takes place.

The spectacle generates a permanent feedback process: Donald Trump opens the news on almost every TV channel in the world on consecutive days. The world appears to be turned upside down. From one day to the next, the US is (or appears to be) Russia's ally against Ukraine and Europe. Who could have imagined that the US would vote alongside China, North Korea, and Iran at the UN on the resolution to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine? The biggest problem for the world is not Trump, but the way the world's leaders deal with his positions. On the other hand, contrary to what the froth of the days portrays, Trump's behavior is less erratic or unpredictable than one might think. The main axes of his policy in light of his first steps are as follows:

  • Business unites, and politics divides. Political division should be used to improve business, not destroy it. In this area, Russia is more promising than Europe.

  • Arms are crucial to the US economy, but they are to be sold, not used, and certainly not by the US.

  • In terms of economic rivalry, only China counts.

  • Capitalism must assert its colonialist DNA. Colonialism is the plundering of natural resources. Without it, there is no capitalism. The Palestinians are Indians. Just like the Congolese.

  • A new normal will emerge not only in the US but also in the world: oligarchic, authoritarian, and fascist in substance, democratic in form. It's the true end of history that only the naive (like Francis Fukuyama) saw in capitalist liberalism.

Europe's response

The “never before seen” confrontation with Zelensky in the Oval Office of the White House had little to do with Zelensky. With perfect staging, Trump wanted above all to humiliate Europe by humiliating its hero, the great champion of democracy. He also wanted to humiliate Joe Biden for having prevented the war from ending two months after it began and also for being convinced that Biden is dead in the US but alive in Europe. And Europe behaved as Trump expected of mediocre leaders who know nothing about business. Europe entered the war under pressure from the US via NATO. NATO is the US and little else.

The invasion by Russia was illegal and reprehensible, but it is now fully documented that it was provoked by the US, convinced that to weaken Russia was to weaken a key ally of China. Trump has the opposite view. On the one hand, for him, only a calibrated alliance with Russia can weaken China. On the other hand, Europe has characteristics that are contrary to what Trump envisions for the US and the world: it is too secular and liberal; it has robust public health and education systems (so far); “excessive” worker protection; “excessive” environmental protection; and “excessive” state regulation. In short, Europe is weak because it has a strong state, because it has no natural resources, and because it cannot defend itself against external attacks without US support.

What European leaders don't understand is that Europe's real weakness (not Trump's weakness) has been wanted and induced by the US since the end of the Soviet Union. From an early stage, the US feared that Europe would become a global player and thus feed multipolarism, forever feared by US, which cannot imagine (and fears) ceasing to be the only global player. When President Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany opposed the invasion of Iraq, the US took note that the European allies were future rivals in a multipolar world. This suspicion increased with the 2007 Lisbon Treaty, the inauguration in 2011 of the first Nord Stream gas pipeline to supply cheap Russian energy to Europe's largest economy (and to other European states), and the strengthening of the fiscal pact in the same year to strengthen European integration.

Germany's preference for Nord Stream and Italy's (Berlusconi's) preference for South Stream increased suspicion against these two countries, which were seen as Russia's strategic partners 2. The same suspicion against a multipolarism that would weaken the US is at the root of US support for Brexit (2016-2020). In other words, the mediocre European leaders of the last decade failed to understand that the US sought to weaken Europe so that it could now despise Europe ... for being weak.

Having withdrawn US support for the continuation of the war, European leaders, well-oiled by the US arms industry lobby, instead of feeling relieved to be rid of a war that has been imposed on them and will lead to financial ruin—and the destruction of Ukraine—have taken on the continuation of the war and the preparation for other wars as their historic mission and intend to sell this suicidal idea to Europeans by inventing a new danger: the Russian threat. In short, Europe has taken the bait set by Trump: it will rearm to continue disarming itself socially and politically.

The most complex and expensive weapons will be bought from the US military industry. Once again, Trump has achieved his goal: war material is crucial for doing business, not for waging war. By rearming, Europe is transferring investment in social policies and the energy transition to investment in weapons and, as a result, increasing social inequality and social polarization and ignoring the danger of ecological collapse. It opens up a fertile field where far-right ideas and policies graze. In other words, it is becoming a cheap replica of the US. Fascist authoritarianism with a democratic façade is on the horizon, just as Trump wants for Europe and the world.

In short, by rearming, Europe is disarming itself. In a few decades, the European economy as a whole will not be among the ten largest economies in the world. And social disarmament will only benefit the far right, which at the moment, at least through the voice of Viktor Orban, seems to be more in favor of peace and more resistant to the orgy of war preparations than other political forces on the right and left.

Is there a Russian threat?

Europe would only be a rival ally to respect if it remained united with Russia, the country with the largest surface area in the world and largely untapped natural resources. This was the proposal that dominated the Paris-Berlin axis in the first two decades of the 21st century. Is there a Russian threat against Europe today when Putin asks European businessmen to return to Russia? Is it a subliminal transfer from anti-communism to Russophobia? Russophobia is something much older and goes back at least to the end of the 19th century. True to his revolutionary project, Karl Marx himself can be considered a Russophobe in the letters he wrote in 1878 to Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Liebknecht's father.

At the time, it was a question of fighting the reactionary Russian Empire, which was at war with the no less reactionary Ottoman Empire. Faced with the passivity of England and Germany, Marx vented in French: “There is no more Europe.” 3 After the Second World War, Russophobia metamorphosed into anti-communism. The great pillar of anti-communism in Europe was conservative Catholicism 4, and, in the USA, McCarthyism. But Russophobia also fueled the communist ideology of Mao Zedong's China and the imperial ideology of Japan for decades.

In the West, the Yalta agreements kept the most extremist impulses in check. It should be remembered that in 1955 the Soviet army (belonging to the communist regime) withdrew from Austria in exchange for Austria's neutrality. The same kind of proposal was made by Gorbachev in 1990 when he accepted the reunification of Germany.

The idea of the Russian threat was particularly understandable in the countries of Northern and Eastern Europe. Let's remember that, for Lenin, the time of the Russian Revolution was conditioned by the need to end the war at all costs. The cost was high because Russia lost around 30% of the territory that had previously been part of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks accepted the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, the last five countries then occupied by Germany.

It was a short-lived treaty, given the outcome of the war, but the local wars that followed (between Ukraine and Poland, for example) and the Second World War once again changed the geopolitical map of this region, a region that, until the Ukrainian war, was considered peripheral, like the Balkans, and of little importance to major European projects (i.e., the Paris-Berlin axis). Russophobia is returning precisely because now the center of Europe seems to have shifted to Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic countries.

In my opinion, the biggest threat to Europe stems from its inability to get closer to Ukraine by distancing itself from Zelensky. Trump tried to show Europeans that Zelensky was part of the problem, not part of the solution. European leaders, showing their political indifference, turn a blind eye to the banned democratic parties, censorship, imprisoned democrats in Ukraine, and the strong Nazi presence in the Ukrainian army. By enthroning a president of dubious democratic credentials, they are practicing “regime change” in reverse, doing everything they can to prevent other leaders from emerging in Ukraine who, in free and fair elections not dominated by Russophobic paranoia, will rebuild the country and make democracy thrive. The martyred people of Ukraine deserve that and much more.

What future of Europe?

Until the war in Ukraine, Europe seemed like an oasis in a world in turmoil. To outsiders, Europe had three characteristics that were hard to find anywhere else in the world: individual freedom (a democracy that was considered robust), social solidarity, and peace. For those living in Europe, these characteristics were partly truth and partly fiction. Social inequalities were growing; Brussels was more a community of scandalously well-paid lobbyists and bureaucrats than of democrats focused on the interests of citizens; xenophobia was on the rise, both as a cause and a consequence of the polarization coming from the rising extreme right.

A malaise had set in after thirty years of criticism fueled above all by domestic and international neoliberalism, according to which the welfare state was unviable and the privatization of public policies (especially those most closely linked to the well-being of the population: health, education, and the pension system) was the solution.

The First World War saw the demise of four empires, three of which were European (Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman); the Second World War saw the collapse of the Japanese empire, the emergence of the Soviet empire, and the consolidation of the North American empire, while the European empires agonized in the global South (including the Caribbean). Just to mention the most prominent cases: the Dutch empire in Indonesia, the English Empire in India, the French Empire in Algeria and the Sahel countries, and the Portuguese empire in sub-Saharan Africa.

An old-new empire, China, was surreptitiously re-emerging. Europe is out of the inter-imperial game and has tragically decided to opt for the losing policy, both in the face of the US empire and the Chinese empire. While Europe's former colonies have learned to take advantage of inter-imperial rivalries, Europe, so addicted to the memory of its imperial past, refuses to learn from its former colonies and prefers a non-place, a kind of homeless subcontinent. Like homeless populations, it will be subject to all kinds of bad weather.

References

1 Another conception of the deep state can be read in Jon D. Michaels, 'The American Deep State' (2018) 93(4), Notre Dame Law Review 1653-1670.
2 In 2008, the White House was trying to organize an energy alternative from the US in the countries of Northern and Eastern Europe. These countries included Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic countries, and the Scandinavian countries. See Domenico Caccamo, “Europa 2005-2011: gli sviluppi istituzionali dell'eu visti da Washington,” Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali, April-June 2012, nuova serie, vol. 79, no. 2 (314) pp. 189-209. Perhaps this helps to understand what happened with Nord Stream in 2022.
3 Bruno Bongiovanni, “Marx, la Turchia, la Russia: due lettere,” Belfagor, vol. 33, no. 6, 1978, pp. 635-651.
4 Rosario Forlenza, “The Enemy Within: Catholic Anti-communism in Cold War Italy,” Past & Present, 235 (May 2017), pp. 207-242.