If you’ve picked up a newspaper of late, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump has single-handedly destroyed Western unity. That his sniffiness about NATO and increasing hostility to Ukraine has brought us into new and frightening territory. But as Frank Furedi – author and executive director of MCC Brussels – explained on The Brendan O’Neill Show last week, this isn’t close to the full story. Western globalist institutions have been unravelling for decades – exposed as ineffectual at best, and reckless at worst. What follows is an edited extract from Frank and Brendan’s conversation. (Listen to the full thing here.)
Brendan O’Neill: What was your response when you saw the recent showdown between Zelensky, Trump and JD Vance?
Frank Furedi: I must be very naive, because I was shocked. I’ve never seen a spectacle like it – it was the antithesis of diplomacy.
I feel sorry for Zelensky, because regardless of whether he was set up or whether it came out of the blue, it was very much an act of humiliation.
O’Neill: What do you mean by ‘antithesis of diplomacy’?
Furedi: The word diplomacy, or being diplomatic, has very clear connotations. It’s being restrained. You wink, nod and send subliminal messages. In the end, you can only make a real, decisive, long-term arrangement behind the scenes.
Both Trump and Vance were talking to the camera as much as they were talking to Zelensky. When you do that, something very untoward can happen in geopolitics.
O’Neill: What do you make of the hostility towards Zelensky that exists in certain quarters?
Furedi: One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture wars has been that sections of the right have decided that they need to be the mirror image of their opponents. Given that Hollywood and the Democrats fawned all over Zelensky, he became an object of scorn to sections of the right. Unfortunately, that’s the way things are at the moment. There is an unhealthy, mindless polarisation.
Adopting this mirror image in diplomacy is particularly damaging, because what you’re then doing is reacting to personalities and allowing your prejudice to have sway. You can’t do geopolitics in such an immature, childish way.
O’Neill: What do you think the bust-up reveals about the state of the Western alliance?
Furedi: Ever since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been trying to find a means of justifying itself. It hasn’t really been succeeding. You could see that what was called the ‘Western alliance’ had become a paper organisation.
The war in Ukraine allowed NATO to reinvent itself as an important, credible organisation. It allowed the West to reinvent itself as the good guys, just like it had been against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There was a temporary respite, which hid the fact that, underneath the surface, the unravelling of a Western institution was taking place.
What the election of Trump did, and what the drama in the White House symbolised, was the fact that the alliance was no longer unravelling, but had ended.
O’Neill: Is globalist politics now dead in the water?
Furedi: The ideology of globalisation, which is very different from the fact we live in a global world, created a number of international organisations. It used this network of bodies to outsource political decision-making. Increasingly, Western governments opted to de-politicise their public sphere. Politics became entirely about economics, and economics was decided by the global order, and there was very little you could do as a nation state to mitigate against the global order.
They narrowed the political domain. In the course of that, they created a new, techno-managerial form of governance, which spared them a lot of responsibility. Governments could say they were the victims of circumstances as much as anyone else.
We now have a new dynamic. The world isn’t unipolar or multipolar, it’s not even polar. This has a good side and a bad side.
The good side is that all of the international organisations that usurped the role of the nation state have been marginalised. They are less legitimate than they were beforehand. It’s good that those international organisations disintegrate.
The bad side is that we have no roadmap, or clear rules, in a way that existed in the past. So everybody’s making things up as they go along. And that means accidents can happen.
O’Neill: You’ve written about the increase in defence spending among European countries – are we seeing a new arms race?
Furedi: Well, I think the military Keynesianism we’re witnessing is a response to the sluggish nature of the European economy. European leaders have finally realised that green technology and Net Zero aren’t going to restructure European capitalism, so they need to find another means. They’ve opted to rearm as a way of dealing with economic stagnation, and hope that by increasing defence spending they can deal with some of the industrial crises facing Germany, Italy and France.
Secondly, if you come across as militarily decisive, then you’re going to gain a bit of authority. That’s the card they’re playing, and I think it’s working to some extent. Macron’s position in the opinion polls has improved vastly since he’s been coming across as the new Bonaparte.
O’Neill: What do you think the recent lack of defence spending has told us about our society?
Furedi: I think we had a situation where the military, as an institution, was looked down on. The fact that British soldiers are told not to wear their uniform in public, in case they provoke negative reactions, tells you a lot about the way people feel about the military.
This isn’t anti-militarist. It’s institutional cowardice. By and large, we live in a world that’s meant to be post-heroic. The moral disarmament of our societies has reached such a point that elementary values, such as courage and loyalty, don’t exist.
O’Neill: Is the moral disarmament of our societies more serious than the military disarmament?
Furedi: Vance was right on this when he said that the real enemy is ‘within’. We’ve become a world emptied of moral imagination. Unless there is a vibrant spirit of solidarity, where people are prepared to look after one another, to watch one another’s back, it’s very difficult to have a secure political and military environment. There are some very good kids going into the army who are patriotic and want to do the right thing. But this is happening in an institutional context where strong commitments aren’t really taken seriously.
I think our job at the moment is to do what we can to morally rearm our societies, and to explain to people, in particular the very young, the importance of, for example, courage. That courage is about having a certain orientation towards the world, where you’re prepared to stand up and confront the challenges we face.
Frank Furedi was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:
