In one of those opening lines at which he excelled, WH Auden caught the temper of his time, and our time too: “The earth turns over, our side feels the cold.” China is an increasingly assertive power whose rival economic system is throwing off great riches. Russia acts with apparent impunity on its borders. Illiberal anti-democrats rule Hungary and Turkey and are a threat all over Europe. Protests are greeted by repression in Iran. The president of the United States proclaims that he will run Venezuela but then backs away. A once reliable ally, the core of the Nato alliance, is leading the shift to disorder based on the proclamation of might over right. Everywhere, the rule-bound nations are feeling the cold.
Keir Starmer’s speech on British foreign policy on 19th January was a rather callow effort in this respect. It is not dishonourable to hope to influence a close ally but it needs to be said that the US has become a threat to the order it once guaranteed. In the intriguing and dangerous person of Donald Trump all the vital predicaments to which Prospect will now regularly return are embodied. Trump is the most conspicuous of those populists who believe themselves the true tribunes of the people, above the laws and procedures that apply to political mortals. His repeated attacks on Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, show that Trump has no regard for the independence of institutions that do not do exactly as they are bid.
When Renee Nicole Good was shot dead in Minneapolis by a federal agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Trump’s draconian response to the movement of people—mass deportation and military deployments on the streets of American cities—came into sharper focus. Human migration in search of a better life, and in flight from persecution, demands an approach that is at once more compassionate and more serious than this.
The erratic president veers from the demand that Greenland be put up for sale to the concession that he will not use force. This is not the rhetoric of a man who even acknowledges the existence of the rules, let alone plays by them. In Davos, the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney signalled the time for pretence is over. Citing Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”, Carney demanded that the world face up to a new and brutal reality. Havel had written of a greengrocer who made his peace with the Soviet regime by displaying a sign proclaiming his fake allegiance to it. It is now time, Carney said, “for companies and countries to take their signs down”.
There is more to the world than Trump, and there will be a world beyond him
On the climate crisis, Trump’s obscurantism on the evidence and his intention to postpone action until some distant tomorrow must be countered. Trump has little faith in science when it tells him things he does not want to hear, but he has happily enlisted the high priests of technology into his court. There is no sign of the policies needed to maintain the virtues of global communication while taming its excesses. What is true of technology in particular is true of capitalism in general. An inclusive capitalism, committed to the public good, is the necessary companion of liberal democratic politics but, announcing random tariffs as he goes, it is clear the president believes in neither. Trump’s designs on Greenland are his own form of imperial plunder. Everything is a potential deal; everything is up for sale. This is power politics as estate agency.
Prospect exists to define liberal answers to all these troubling questions. The approach of the US president is creating what Havel once called, in his New Year address of 1990, “a contaminated moral environment”. When Trump turns, our side feels the cold. But there is more to the world than Trump, and there will be a world beyond him. Carney’s is the first serious voice on the other side, and it will now be the mission of Prospect to amplify optimists like him. This is the world in prospect, and this will be the world in Prospect too.
