Of all the explanations for Donald Trump’s attempt to occupy Greenland, the most superficially attractive is that the president has dementia. In that case, why not pretend to give it to her? Fly him somewhere that looks green, put on a military parade and tell him that’s it. Senile fantasy fulfilled.
Unfortunately, the rot goes much deeper. Trump is not angry, he is doing what America always does, just crazy and out in the open. This became clearer this week when I found a copy of Complaint for a Nation by Canadian philosopher George Grant, published in 1965.
Grant wrote at a turning point in his country’s history. In 1957, Canada had elected a Conservative Prime Minister named John Diefenbaker, not unlike Nigel Farage or, indeed, Trump: populist, nationalist, profoundly anti-left. But when the Americans asked to put their nuclear weapons on his soil, Diefenbaker – to my surprise – said no.
He believed he had the right to do so because NATO was, on paper, an alliance of equals—and a necessity, because once Canada became a missile base, any pretense of an independent foreign policy would cease.
The business and cultural elite turned against Diefenbaker, and the public voted him out of office.
America, basking in the glow of Jack Kennedy, was then admired as the embodiment of modernity: nationalism seemed outdated and eccentric. Thus, Grant argued, Canada’s nuclear surrender represented the final stage in a process of economic and cultural assimilation. A society so integrated into the American Way lacked not only the resources but, above all, the imagination to stand on its own two feet.
So it is with contemporary Europe, where American corporations dominate and profit, but also avoid paying many taxes. Ireland, for example, has rightly denounced Trump’s tariff war on nations that oppose his aggressive takeover of Greenland – yet the country is a model of globalist acquiescence at the cost of sovereignty. It has embraced free markets (low corporate taxes) and free movement (mass migration), so that Dublin is outwardly Irish – still beautiful – but inaccessible and mired in a violent identity crisis.
These are economic policies that its elites justify as essential to building a modern nation (“we need the money, we need the workers”), and it is striking that the SNP has proposed doing similar things should Scotland gain independence. As Grant observed in 1965, the modern nation-state can only develop by opening its arms to global capitalism, but global capitalism “brings about the disappearance of those indigenous differences which give substance to nationalism.”
In short, US capital has made us all rich, but it has also made us duplicates of the US. I am convinced that many Britons are desperately unhappy, even mentally ill, because they no longer feel like themselves.
It is evident in the way we now speak (badly) and emote (too often), but most evidently in our politics, which is imported and detached from our actual history. Identity politics was made in America: When federal agents shot and killed a protester in Minnesota (murder in my book), Labor mayors felt compelled to write a letter of support for the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis. Why?
Across the aisle, James Cleverly says his hero is Ronald Reagan, conservatives sell the good life in terms of Reaganite aspiration, and the infamous Jenrick memo, written to set up his defection to Reform, described him as “the new sheriff in town.” Its author wrote favorite without the “u”.
The party Rob joins has painted itself into a corner, having staked its credentials on access to Trump, and is now forced to pretend there is distance. Here, even Brexit has been colonized. Outside the European Union, its right-wing think-tankers said, the only hope is a deal with America, a logic that even Keir Starmer has swallowed as he seeks to align regulations on the future of AI.
One suspects that for all Labour’s hatred of Elon Musk, he will never ban Twitter because Trump will almost certainly impose sanctions.
We should not think of the president as un-American, as some embarrassed Americans call him, but the most American president ever, meaning the ultimate liberal.
Democrats and Republicans, even if they disagree on practical policies, are both drawn from the philosophical tradition of liberalism, rooted in a love of individual liberty, in the unleashing of personal passion. Trump wants something, so he makes it happen. This is liberalism and it has infected us too.
This is why in Britain marriage and childbirth are out of fashion, the banks are empty, and our top-rated TV show involves traitors killing believers for money (“play blind,” they say, as if human relations were a competitive sport).
If Britain is broken – and a country where the latest figures show 299,614 abortions a year, 40 for a cleft lip or palate, is certainly broken – it is because millions have chosen to maximize their freedom and wealth at the cost of social solidarity.
John Diefenbaker’s old Canada, Grant argued, was different because it combined the conservative paternalism of England with the ethics of French Catholicism, which held that “virtue must precede liberty.” But these disappeared, and Grant concluded that their demise was inevitable, for no nation could resist the power of America or the temptation of individualism.
Liberalism is ending, if not in world governance, then in the whole world it looks the same. What do the Japanese eat on Christmas Day? KFC.
This is why I view the trade war over Greenland with distress and, I fear, pessimism. Yes, Trump must be resisted. It is a matter of dignity.
But until we Europeans wean ourselves off America, not just militarily or economically, but also psychologically, we cannot function without it and will always surrender. He has dominated us for a long time; we’ve only noticed since the empire that pushed the investments has suddenly started absorbing them back, a phenomenon that, again, is not unique to Trump. Joe Biden used subsidies and tax breaks to relocate jobs to the US, away from the mainland.
The irony is that there are alternative, more benign American political traditions, but they have always been dismissed by Europeans as naïve or dangerous because they would not fund our defense: libertarians among Republicans, socialists among Democrats. If only we had President Ron Paul or President Bernie Sanders. Greenland would remain undisturbed.
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