Churchill vs. Trump
Despite a life stained by cruel colonial military and political episodes, as well as the ignominious indirect support for Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War, today a politician like Winston Churchill would have many reasons to stand as the European of order, capable of curbing the histrionic, chaotic, and superficial rhetoric. He was a staunch defender of liberal democracy, a tenacious fighter, and a political beast who knew how to skillfully choose his enemies. He would be the leader we lack in the face of the urgent need to save Europe from the humiliating authoritarian pincer movement of Trump and Putin—the Europe that is a refuge of essential freedom.
After defeating Hitler in World War II, a lucid Churchill became increasingly fatalistic about what he considered an inevitable British and European subordination to American and Soviet global power. That subordination gave rise to the nuclear age of the Cold War (which Churchill unsuccessfully fought against) and to NATO, controlled by the US. We come from there.
With the fall of the USSR, the multilateral global order has fostered the strengthening of a one-party China with state capitalism. China is the predictable enemy, the great commercial competitor, the counter-model to liberal democracy. Trump is the disruptive and unpredictable internal enemy, and therefore more immediately lethal. He is a virus that destroys liberal democracy and has transformed American Western leadership into a threat to the values it is supposed to preserve. Thus, Trump, obsessed with China, is a danger to Europe and to freedom.
Like Trump, Churchill was also impulsive, a sumptuous warrior of words. But, unlike the US president, he was a brilliant reader and writer (as a friend joked, he spent a lot of time preparing "improvised speeches"; and in 1953 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his memoirs), and above all, he possessed a fundamental human quality that inoculated him against delusions of grandeur and temptation: As Simon Schama points out in the epilogue to the monumental biography Roy Jenkins dedicated to the English politician, he had the capacity to laugh at himself. Neither Trump nor Putin knows how to look at their own navel and laugh at their ridiculous excesses. That's why they are so frightening.
Power-obsessed, stubborn, and irascible, favoring aggressive and radical solutions, a conservative in both the best and worst senses, Churchill would certainly have the profile to curb the aggressive, ultranationalist, and technopopulist crudeness of the ultra-rich Trump. With his astute dialectical instinct, he would openly and unequivocally oppose European freedom to Trumpian tyranny. Democracy versus authoritarianism. He would not be intimidated. He would do so with determination and elegance, creating and catalyzing an essential new European pride.
Is there anyone today with a comparable vision and personality? We urgently need a leader of that caliber, of that combative humanity, with fundamental moral clarity. Someone of order who, like Churchill, ends up respecting and befriending those who fight for their freedom, however much they may ideologically disagree, as he did with the Irish IRA member Michael Collins.
After the Greenland episode—currently dormant: we cannot rule out a Trump bailout—Europe has begun to react. But there is no sufficiently prestigious voice, no humanly powerful leader. We lack many things—in the areas of governance, defense, fiscal unity, breaking down internal trade barriers, truly embracing our own values, etc.—but also a strong personality. A Churchill who can win the political war against Trump and the real war against Putin. Pedro Sánchez is a I want to, but I can't.He's making a case, but they don't want it... Macron's burned out. Isn't there anyone like the liberal, former banker, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney? Any ideas? Does Merz have enough backbone?