No one took the possibility of humanity being plunged into a new Cold War very seriously. While even those who did not rule it out considered a conflict between the West and Russia, or perhaps China, to be most likely.
But they were wrong… The Second Cold War broke out suddenly and unannounced between the US and Europe and as it expands to encompass ever more areas, there is little indication where it will go from here. From tariffs to Ukraine.
Even superficial or simply ill-considered interventions such as President Trump’s foolish politicking on democracy, or his tactless public reference to friendly and unfriendly European political parties, take on dimensions disproportionate to the facts of the clash.
Which usually fall somewhere between the banal and the absurd.
In any case, Washington’s scope for intervention in Europe’s democracy is limited.
You would have to be naive to believe that the European Union is at risk of being torn apart by the paranoid pleas of a cranky billionaire like Elon Musk. Or because the American leadership does not approve of the Vice-President of the Commission or the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy.
Besides, even those European parties Trump himself called ‘friendly’ have been wary of taking the White House’s side in the war of words.
Which is reasonable. The American President is not particularly popular (to keep the tone elegant…) on the Old Continent, and this may be the root cause of the entire show-down, and certainly a more important factor that some think.
Trump does not seem to grasp what the European elites are accusing him of, why they have rejected him, or why they treat him as a bogeyman.
At the same time that the European elites recognize that they are confronting a caricature of a political leader who brags and blows his own trumpet in a deafening crescendo of conceit and self-aggrandizement.
It is clear that communication across the Atlantic currently lacks anything resembling a shared mindset or mutual trust Still less a healthy climate of mutual understanding and cooperation.
But even so, the situation does not necessarily have to escalate to Cold War levels.
American Presidents come and go, but serious people on both sides of the Atlantic want to believe that the common ground shared by the Western world trumps whoever happens to be resident in the White House.
After all, NATO’s Secretary recently warned that Europe will be Russia’s next target. Which leaves precious little room for clashes within the Atlantic Alliance.
Conflicts that break out easily tend to escalate more easily and to be difficult to contain.
