Trump’s Transpolar Turn
With the public declaration of his new alliance with Putin, Trump has reversed the geopolitical turn that Nixon took in his visit to China in 1972. Nixon’s gambit was to normalise relations with Mao’s People’s Republic of China in order to aid the geopolitical struggle against the USSR, seen as the main opponent at that time. Today Trump clearly sees China as the greater threat to US superpower status. And therefore it’s a problem that Russia’s partial economic boycott by the West is pushing it to redirecting its fossil fuel reserves towards Chinese markets and pushing the two former communist powers closer together.
Trump’s new Washington/Moscow alliance bypasses the traditional Atlanticist alliance that united the US and Western Europe against Russia. Militarily Atlanticism took the shape of the confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Since the fall of the USSR and demise of the Warsaw Pact, many of the countries and territories subsumed under Russian rule in the immediate aftermath of WW2 aspired to NATO membership to guarantee their independence from any future resurgence of Russian imperialism. EU membership was seen as the economic counterpart to the military realignment. This extension of Atlanticism from Western to Central and Eastern Europe, up to Russia’s borders meant that Washington’s relations with Moscow, along the lines of the traditional alliance, were mediated by the alliance with Franco-German and Western EU powers.
With the ecological catastrophe of the melting of the Arctic icecap the access of previously impassable waters to global shipping and oil and gas exploration has opened up a new channel for US Russian relations, both logistically and politically. Today Trump’s new oil-hungry expansionism can go over the polar regions to form a newly direct “frenemy” relationship with Russia that bypasses the EU and Western Europe to divide the polar oil between them and make Atlanticism a thing of the past. And as an added bonus, for a defiantly East Coast president who remains obsessed with his hatred for his initial predecessor, it addresses the China “issue” in an entirely different way from Obama’s “Pacific pivot”.
The Russo-Ukrainian War presents Trump with an opportunity to enact this “Transpolar Turn” as a kind of “Reverse Nixon” (which sounds like a move from Trump’s favourite sport, WWE wrestling), luring Russia away from the siren calls of a Russo-Chinese geopolitical alliance. Trump’s expansionist eyes cast in Canada’s and above all Greenland’s direction show the attraction of this new Transpolar outlook for a different approach to the neocon’s failed “Project for a New American Century”, which was unable to think outside the legacy Atlanticist box.
These leaves not only Ukraine, but the EU with an existential problem. The EU political centre has long relied on Atlanticism in military and international relations affairs. But a new Washington/Moscow alliance that not only cuts out Brussels as mediator, but politically supports the centre’s rivals on the Moscow-aligned rising far right, poses the serious challenge of what to do next. The “play it safe” reaction will be to hunker down for the coming days and hope that Trump gets distracted by some other new shiny thing and is replaced in four years by a more “sane” candidate who will revert US foreign policy back to the Atlanticist norm.
That strategy of “actionless waiting” is no help to Ukraine in the immediacy of its current predicament. On the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, Zelensky might well be tempted to start sounding out the Chinese on how they feel about they feel about the new US-Russian love-in. So far the idea of any of the EU centre exploring the possible path of a “Sino-European” alternative to Atlanticism is still far too early to place any bets on. Apart from anything else, everyone is by now too conditioned to Trump changing his mind from one week to the next to take any new development at face value.
The European far right are already divided, at least nominally, on their geopolitical stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the pro-Putin “Eurasianists” either side openly with the Russian war effort, or call for the end of EU military support for Ukraine, the pro-Ukrainian wing, like Meloni’s ECR group, adopt the Azov Movement’s “Intermarium” position of defence of the old Polish-Lithuainian Commonwealth polities (Poland, Lithuania, Belorus, Ukraine, Moldova) from Russian neo-imperialism. Thus far the Intermarium-ists have, by default, been fellow travellers with the EU centrist’s Atlanticism. And conversely, Eurasianism has been the default position for anti-Atlanticists, both left and right. But if Trump’s move to embrace Putin persists into a permanent Transpolar re-alignment, the mutually-defining opposition between Atlanticism and Eurasianism dissolves. So will the EU radical right parties currently opposed to Orbán style Moscow-alignment simply knuckle under? A difficult proposition for Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS, Meloni’s Polish partners in the ECR group, given the existential threat Russian expansionism poses to them and their Baltic neighbours.
The situation for the EU far left is even more confused. Up until now the far left has been hegemonically anti-Atlanticist by default. In the post-WW2 period, particularly since the Vietnam War, it has been dogma that the US is the world’s predominant imperialist and therefore anti-imperialism is necessarily anti-American and anti-NATO and anti-Atlanticist by default. It is a tribute to the structural power of the synonymity of anti-Atlanticism and Eurasianism as geopolitical stances, that the bulk of the left has retained an instinctive defensive reflex to side with Russia in international affairs, even in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR and the rise of the current gangster capitalist regime. However the February 24 2023 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has sown disarray among the ranks of the far left. To the extent that the Nordic left was unable to put up a meaningful resistance to Finland and Sweden abrogating neutrality and joining NATO. Nonetheless, repeated accusations of NATO-apologism and Atlanticism against elements of the far left who condemned the Russian invasion and supported the rights of Ukrainian workers to resist their colonisation by a hostile foreign imperialist power, reveals how much Eurasian geopolitical campism still holds sway over significant segments of the European far left.
Now that even the figleaf of anti-Americanism and anti-Atlanticism is removed by Trump’s new alliance with Putin, the left has run out of excuses for not confronting the contradictions of their current geopolitical campism. Neither Washington nor Moscow is no longer a slogan in search of a “third camp”, it’s lost searching for even a second position. Not that a sudden anachronistic resurgence of Maoism seems likely any time soon. “Neither Washington, nor Moscow but Beijing!” is hardly a credible next step, currently. Perhaps its time for the far left to finally give up its addiction to geopolitical campism all together? Who can say.
But in any case, the European far left is hardly in the driving seat or a decisively influential position at the moment. What happens with the centre-right’s current struggle to avoid being swallowed up by the far right in the European context is more likely to shape our immediate future prospects. It may be that Trump gets bored with the attempt to end the Russo-Ukrainian war and forge a post-Atlanticist alliance. Or more likely that Putin is happy to forge new trade ties with the US, including splitting the Arctic oil reserves, but not at all interested in making an enemy of China. Whatever way it pans out, I doubt we’ve seen the last of Trump’s Northern vision. He doesn’t have ideas that often and the ones that he does have (Obama birtherism, stolen 2016 election) he doggedly refuses to let go.