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The unipolar world order is not being dismantled by what’s happening inside its center
Asking a lot of other people about what they think may be interesting. But the real fun starts when you make it all about your own opinion. That is, of course, the secret magic of politicized opinion polling. And sometimes you wonder if there is any other type. In any case, a major recent effort by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a gilt-edged Western establishment think tank, is no exception.
Published under the poetic title “Alone in a Trumpian World,” the study examines the “EU and Global Public Opinion after the US Elections,” that is, really, after the return of Donald Trump, bugaboo extraordinaire of mainstream Euro-centrists and their establishment nomenklatura throughout bureaucracies, media, academia, and, of course, think tanks.
Based on a large-scale opinion poll conducted with a total of 28,549 respondents last November, just after Trump’s US election triumph, in 16 European (including both Russia and Ukraine) and eight non-European countries, the resulting report mimics a simple commentary: summarizing some observations here, offering some conclusions there.
Among the observations, the most straightforward is that much of the world is optimistic about Trump, hoping that he will not only benefit America, but also promote international peace by making the US a more normal great power.
The main outliers to this pattern are the European Union and the even more splendidly self-isolated UK, where respondents stick to a pessimistic view.
In a way, the report’s authors themselves cannot stop illustrating that European isolation. Time and again, we read that the more positive opinion almost everyone else in the world has of Trump – whether rightly or wrongly – is “surprising” or “remarkable.” It’s ironic, but this tone of mildly puzzled perplexity is just what you would expect from a bunch of Western European elite representatives that find the world hard to grasp because Europe is so out of sync. Just imagine how different this report might look if it were based on the same polls but had been drafted by a group of Indian or Chinese intellectuals.
In any case, at its core, this is not even really a study of political moods. Instead, think of it, if you wish, as a manifesto wrapped in opinion polling. As you would expect from authors who are major public intellectuals – Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev, and Mark Leonard – this is not a shy policy memo, humbly submitted by bureaucrats who may even enjoy their anonymity. On the contrary, this is a brief, sometimes cursory, yet extremely ambitious statement of geopolitical advice. It is tied to a grand and anything-but-dispassionate ideology of world order, namely a greatly idealized vision of Western, in practice US, global dominance that, for believers, goes by the name of “liberal international order.”
For the authors, the significance of the second Trumpian moment for the EU – and, really, the world – lies in its catalysis of the ongoing end of that order. It is challenged from outside, and its core is not in good shape either, they recognize. The global, non-Western refusal to follow the West after the 2022 escalation of the Ukraine War showed that the West was isolated – “divided from the rest,” as the report delicately puts it – but now things are worse again.
The West itself is divided so badly that “indeed, it may no longer be possible to speak of ‘the West’ as a single geopolitical actor.” In that world, the authors’ key recommendation – and, really, the whole point of their report – is that the EU should behave like a traditional great power, acknowledging realist foreign policy precepts. Or, as they put it, it should stop “posing as a moral arbiter” and, instead, “build its own domestic strength” in pursuit of its own good abroad.
The fact that this is really a manifesto does not mean that it cannot be thought-provoking or that its underlying polling results are simply false or irrelevant – even if some are based on transparently disingenuous framing. For instance, a question probing respondents’ attitudes toward the destruction of Gaza by Israel simply does not feature either genocide or any other crime as an answer option. Instead, respondents are only permitted to choose between three different kinds of “war” and “conflict.”
In a similar if less egregious vein, a question about the nature of the Ukraine War offers no answer option including the term “proxy war.” Yet it is not a matter of opinion to acknowledge the fact that both views are widespread, for good reasons. To deprive the respondents of these obviously relevant options seems either elementarily flawed or crudely manipulative.
The study’s obvious political function means that the best, most rewarding manner to read it is as what it really is, namely a piece of ideology-in-action. Indeed, once we do so, things get much more intriguing, especially if we also ask another crucial question: What are the things that are obviously – and implausibly – avoided?
Let’s start by getting the single most glaring omission-with-a-message out of the way. One thing the authors acknowledge is that a new global order is replacing that sinking “post-Cold War liberal order.” No biggie, you would think, if a little obvious. Welcome to the club; we have all been thinking about this for about two decades at least. But to find this fact openly recognized by the ECFR – an ideological commanding height second perhaps only to its older cousin, the US Atlantic Council – is a modest historical data point in and of itself.
What’s truly odd, though, are the lengths to which the authors go to avoid one simple word: multipolarity. Search as much as you want, it’s just not there. Trying to come to terms with the new international order that they have noticed is emerging, the authors offer “a la carte,” (sure, my favorite restaurant is also about power and life and death, all the time, from starters to dessert), “polyamorous” (oh behave!), and the oldie-but-goldie “zero-sum.”
Usually, opinion polls are a little dry, but this one, once you know where to look, is entertaining. It’s just too amusing how much lexical-conceptual helplessness can be induced by simple jealousy. Can’t let the Russians, for instance, be having the right idea and using the correct word all the time, can we now?
Speaking of Russians, the second big omission from this report is, of course, the Ukraine War. Not, however, in the simple sense that it does not feature. It does. We learn, for instance, that, in a number of large and/or powerful countries, majorities of respondents believe that “achieving peace in Ukraine will be more likely” under Donald Trump: (in alphabetical order) China (60%), India (65%), Russia (61%), Saudi Arabia (62%), South Africa (53%), and the US (52%), too.
Even in countries where this expectation is not dominant, there are still pluralities or sizeable minorities who see Trump as promoting peace in Ukraine, for instance, Brazil (45%), the consolidated sample of 11 EU members (EU11) the study has used (34%), Indonesia (38%), Turkey (48%), and Ukraine (39%).
In addition, respondents were polled on a whole battery of questions related to the Ukraine War, ranging from, in essence, “Who is to blame?” via “What should we do now?” to “Who is going to win?” And then, there is a question for Ukrainians only regarding what outcomes they would be willing to support. The answers are not encouraging. As the authors note, “there is no consensus in Ukrainian society on the nature of an acceptable compromise” and “such disagreements could stoke political turmoil if and when negotiations begin.”
And you just wait for “the turmoil,” one is tempted to add, when they end with, in reality, a very costly – in lives, territory, and prosperity – Ukrainian defeat that could have been avoided if Ukraine’s false “friends” in the West had not provoked and then sustained their selfish as well as ill-conceived proxy war to take down Russia. But it is unsurprising that Garton Ash, Krastev, and Leonard miss an aspect of reality that would diverge from their own ideological predispositions all too painfully.
And yet, with so much polling about the Ukraine War, in one way or the other, the authors still miss the single most pertinent point about it. The most powerful factor now in further accelerating the demise of the so-called liberal order is not the second election of Donald Trump. That is the premise their whole study is built on, and it’s mistaken.
What is really speeding up the decline of the West is that it is losing its great proxy war in Ukraine. This, after all, has been the most hubristic proxy war/regime-change project that the West has ever undertaken, targeting Russia, a major great power that also happens to have the single largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The failure of this project was predictable. I know, because I did predict it. It is now the key fact of this moment in history. Even Donald Trump, ambitious and willful as he is, is merely reacting to this reality.
Try a thought experiment: What would Garton Ash, Krastev, and Leonard be writing about the “liberal international order” now, if the West had succeeded and Russia had lost. See? Yet, it is the West that is losing, while Russia is winning. In general, what has changed the world the most is not happening inside the West. It’s what’s happening outside it – most of all the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, and the self-reassertion of the Global South.
And that is the final irony of this report. At its center is an invitation to others – Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Russians, for instance – to share their opinions about the return of Trump and its consequences. That, in and of itself, is a strikingly self-centered approach. Yes, do please talk to us, the West – but about our new boss. Western Europe has a long way to go to find its place in a changing world.
