Timothy Garton Ash's Blog

Americans have 400 days to save their democracy | Timothy Garton Ash

I never thought I’d see fear spread so far and fast. Next year’s midterm elections are now crucial for the Democratic party – and for democrats everywhere

I return to Europe from the US with a clear conclusion: American democrats (lowercase d) have 400 days to start saving US democracy. If next autumn’s midterm elections produce a Congress that begins to constrain Donald Trump there will then be a further 700 days to prepare the peaceful transfer of executive power that alone will secure the future of this republic. Operation Save US Democracy, stages 1 and 2.

Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There’s a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it. Destruction is so much easier than construction.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

With Trump wreaking havoc, a question for the US Democrats: when will you ever learn? | Timothy Garton Ash

I see little sign here that the liberal establishment truly acknowledges the failures that led to the Biden election debacle. There must be a reckoning

Nothing is more insufferable than someone saying “I told you so”; so please forgive me for being insufferable. On 29 September 2023, after a couple of months spent in the US, I published a column that was well summarised in its Guardian headline: “Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never definitely say “what would have happened if …?”, but there’s a very good chance that had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.

“No use crying over spilt milk,” you may say. Yes, but it’s always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the US now, and a recent poll for the Wall Street Journal found that 63% of voters hold an unfavourable view of the Democratic party. To put it mildly, the Democrats have a way to go.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Britain is great at muddling through. But imagine if its leaders knew where they were heading | Timothy Garton Ash

Starmer’s successful ‘reset’ with Europe highlights an underlying incoherence. The only rational long-term strategy is to rejoin the EU, but our politics is far removed from that

Like a chronic ailment, strategic incoherence gnaws at everything Britain does in the world. Keir Starmer’s real achievement in resetting relations with mainland Europe – witness the recent visits of the French president Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor Friedrich Merz – does not obscure, and in a way even highlights, this deeper confusion.

After 1945, Winston Churchill envisioned Britain’s global role at the intersection of three circles: the British Commonwealth and (then still) empire; the Europe whose postwar recovery and unification he strongly supported; and the United States. As Commonwealth countries have formed stronger ties elsewhere, the first circle is no longer of strategic significance. Having committed itself in the 1970s to the most developed political and economic form of the second circle, now the European Union, Britain has withdrawn from it. With the revolutionary nationalism of President Donald Trump, the third circle is also fading fast. So here’s an 80-year countdown of Britain’s strategic circles: three … two … one, going on none.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

In Ukraine, I saw Trump’s ‘peace deal’ wouldn’t just trade away land – but lives, memories and homes | Timothy Garton Ash

Ukrainians I met in Kyiv and Lviv were grimly realistic about the end of the war. We should follow their example

The next time a breathless news anchor talks about the prospect of a war-ending “deal”, with Ukraine “ceding land for peace”, I want to sit them down with Adeline. In Lviv last week, Adeline showed me on her phone map her lost home in Russian-occupied Nova Kakhovka, just across the Dnipro River from the Ukrainian-liberated territory around Kherson. Look, she said, with tears welling up in her eyes, here on this satellite snapshot you can see the ecological disaster that followed Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam in 2023. And here’s the place where she dreamed of setting up a small art gallery. “Why should I give up on my home?” she cried. Why indeed.

The territory occupied by Russia is the size of Portugal and Slovenia combined. It’s difficult to get accurate figures, but perhaps some 5 million people live there, while at least another 2 million refugees from those territories are now elsewhere. Inside the occupied territories, Ukrainians face brutal repression and systematic Russification. Outside, refugees like Adeline are left with only their memories, old photographs and the keys to lost homes. We should not whitewash this monstrous ongoing crime of occupation with the soothing words “land for peace”.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Donald Trump, beware – this is what a global liberal fightback looks like | Timothy Garton Ash

From the Canadian elections to universities and civil society, the campaign to turn the tide against anti-liberal nationalists is at last underway

Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.

A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

As Trump and Putin menace Europe, I say this: vive le Churchillo-Gaullisme! | Timothy Garton Ash

Our continent must be prepared to defend itself, by combining the best of its two most influential traditions

Should we all be Gaullists now? In the language of France’s most important European partner, the answer is “Jein!” (a German word combining ja for yes and nein for no). Yes, Emmanuel Macron has been right to warn us ever since he became France’s president in 2017 that, discerning a long-term trend of US disengagement, Europe should be ready to defend itself. Now, confronted with Donald Trump, a rogue US president putting in question an 80-year-old American commitment to the defence of Europe against Russia, lifelong Euro-Atlanticists like me must acknowledge that we need not just a Europe with more hard power – something for which I have always argued – but also the real possibility of European “strategic autonomy”. Oui, Monsieur le Président, you were right.

Yet en mȇme temps (at the same time), to deploy Macron’s signature trope, we should answer “Non”. For De Gaulle, a great man of his time, believed that defence should be the exclusive province of the nation state; that the emerging European Community should be a Europe of states (a disunited version of the European Union to which today’s hard-right populist nationalist parties dream of returning); that Britain should be excluded from the European project (hence his famous “Non!” to British membership in that emerging community); and that Europe should be constructed as a counterweight to the US, having close relations with Russia and China.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Germany can turbocharge Europe’s renewal – if it will only seize this moment | Timothy Garton Ash

Three times in the postwar era Germany made strategic choices that benefited Europe – with the US at its side. Now it must do it in opposition to Trump

Three times in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its chancellors have made strategic choices that opened the door to a better future for Europe. Today there’s not just an opportunity but an urgent need for a fourth such historic moment. If the country’s new coalition government under Friedrich Merz manages to seize the chance of this crisis, both Germany and Europe will go forward. If it fails, then by the end of the 2020s both may have fallen backwards farther and faster than most of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.

The big difference with those three earlier pivotal moments is this: in 1949, 1969 and 1989 the Federal Republic’s policy was fundamentally aligned with that of the United States. This time, Germany has to build up a stronger, free, democratic and Ukraine-supporting Europe against the current policy of the US. The most staggering moment of Sunday’s election evening was when the lifelong Atlanticist Merz declared that Europe must “really achieve independence from the US”. (When compared with Emmanuel Macron’s almost British sycophancy in the White House the next day, Germany’s prospective chancellor is sounding more robustly Gaullist than the French president.)

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Trump’s senseless capitulation to Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine – and terrible dealmaking | Timothy Garton Ash

As the US and its European allies head to the Munich security conference, Europe must learn from its tragic history and oppose appeasement

Donald Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist. At least Chamberlain was trying to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one. Trump’s “Munich” (synonymous in English with the 1938 deal in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany) comes on the eve of the big security conference in today’s Bavarian capital, where his emissaries will meet western allies. That Munich security conference must be the beginning of a decisive European response, learning from our own tragic history in order to avoid repeating it.

The next step Trump proposes is in effect a new “Yalta” (referring to the February 1945 US-Soviet-UK summit in the Crimean resort of Yalta, which has become synonymous with superpowers deciding the fate of European countries over their heads). In this case, his proposal is that the US and Russia should decide the fate of Ukraine with marginal if any involvement of Ukraine or other European countries. But this time the occupants of the White House and the Kremlin should meet first in Saudi Arabia, then in their respective capitals, while it seems the actual Yalta, in the Crimea, is to be ceded to Russia. For in the brave new world of Trump and Putin, might is right and territorial expansion is what great powers do, be it Russia to Ukraine, the US to Canada and Greenland – or China to Taiwan.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

Continue reading...

In the new Trumpian era, liberal democracies must hold their noses – and engage with difficult partners | Timothy Garton Ash

New polling says much of the world will welcome Trump. Europe will need to be more transactional abroad – but less so at home

European jitters about Trump 2.0 not shared by much of world, poll finds

When returning US president Donald Trump eyes up Greenland, Panama and Canada, as Vladimir Putin once eyed Crimea and Xi Jinping eyes Taiwan, he is both symptom and cause of a new world disorder. Trumpism is just one variant of transactionalism, which is the leitmotif of this new disorder. Liberal democracies, especially those in Europe, need to wake up and smell the gunpowder.

Russia and China are now revisionist great powers, which aim to change or overthrow the existing order, while middle powers like Turkey, Brazil and South Africa are happy to play with all sides. This is also a world of wars – in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan. Most Europeans carry on pretty much as if we still lived in late 20th-century peacetime, but the world around us increasingly resembles the late 19th-century Europe of fiercely competing great powers and empires writ large. For the geopolitical stage is now planetary, and most of the players are non-western states. Trump’s United States is likely to behave more like those other transactional great powers than like, say, Germany or Sweden.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist. He co-authored the report on the ECFR global poll with Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard

Continue reading...

What if Russia wins in Ukraine? We can already see the shadows of a dark 2025 | Timothy Garton Ash

Instability is growing, Putin’s hybrid war in Europe is heating up and for fear of escalation we have encouraged global nuclear proliferation

There are human activities in which both sides can win. War is not one of them. Either Ukraine wins this war or Russia does. Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba says bluntly that unless the current trajectory is changed, “we will lose this war”.

To be clear: this is still avoidable. Suppose the roughly four-fifths of Ukrainian territory still controlled by Kyiv gets military commitments from the west strong enough to deter any further Russian advances, secure large-scale investment in economic reconstruction, encourage Ukrainians to return from abroad to rebuild their country, and allow for stable, pro-European politics and reform. In five years, the country joins the EU, and then, under a new US administration, starts the process of entering Nato. Most of Ukraine becomes a sovereign, independent, free country, firmly anchored in the west.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

Continue reading...