Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 2

Trump’s return is terrible news for Ukraine. Europe should step into the breach – but will it? | Timothy Garton Ash

With Germany’s government collapsing and Europeans so divided in their response to Trump, unity is essential yet elusive

The first victim of Donald Trump’s second term as US president is likely to be Ukraine. The only people who can avert that disaster are us Europeans, yet our continent is in disarray. Germany’s coalition government chose the day we woke up to news of Trump’s triumph, of all days, to fall apart in bitter rancour. Unless Europe can somehow rise to the challenge, not just Ukraine but the whole continent will be left weak, divided and angry as we enter a new and dangerous period of European history.

In Ukraine itself, people have been trying to find a silver lining in that orange cloud rapidly approaching Washington. After all, they were increasingly frustrated with the self-deterrence of Joe Biden’s administration. This slender new hope was perfectly captured in a text message sent to me by a frontline Ukrainian commander. Trump, he wrote, “is a surprise-man, maybe things will get better”.

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

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Chances are high that Trump will try to impose a settlement on Ukraine. What can Europe do? | Timothy Garton Ash

With Germany’s government collapsing and Europeans so divided in their response to Trump, unity is essential yet elusive

The first victim of Donald Trump’s second term as US president is likely to be Ukraine. The only people who can avert that disaster are us Europeans, yet our continent is in disarray. Germany’s coalition government chose the day we woke up to news of Trump’s triumph, of all days, to fall apart in bitter rancour. Unless Europe can somehow rise to the challenge, not just Ukraine but the whole continent will be left weak, divided and angry as we enter a new and dangerous period of European history.

In Ukraine itself, people have been trying to find a silver lining in that orange cloud rapidly approaching Washington. After all, they were increasingly frustrated with the self-deterrence of Joe Biden’s administration. This slender new hope was perfectly captured in a text message sent to me by a frontline Ukrainian commander. Trump, he wrote, “is a surprise-man, maybe things will get better”.

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

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Zelenskyy has a gamechanging plan to win peace. For it to work, Biden must back it – fast | Timothy Garton Ash

In besieged Kharkiv, I saw how Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment. To turn the tide, it first needs to decisively knock back Russia

Earlier this week, I started a 3,000km, two-day journey back from the other end of Europe, where I witnessed Ukrainian resilience against Russian terror in the besieged city of Kharkiv. A university lecturer told me that from a 12th storey balcony in a north-eastern suburb she had actually seen the flashes of missiles taking off from launchpads just across the frontier, in the Russian city of Belgorod. An S-300 missile can reach Kharkiv from Belgorod in about 30 seconds, so you have no time to hide. If it’s not a missile, it’s a glide bomb launched from a Russian warplane – and so, day after day, death rains indifferently down.

After more than 900 days of the largest war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine is approaching a perilous moment of truth. The Ukrainian David has courage and innovation, but the Russian Goliath has ruthlessness and mass. In an underground location in Kharkiv, I was shown highly sophisticated, novel military uses of IT and drones. With its Cossack-style innovation, the country has developed more than 200 different kinds of drone.

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

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The future of the world may depend on what a few thousand Pennsylvania voters think about their grocery bills | Timothy Garton Ash

The Harris-Walz ticket has transformed the presidential race. But on the ground it’s clear: Trump could still win

On 5 November, people around the globe will tune in to watch the world election. It’s not a “world” election in the sense of the World Cup – a football championship in which many nations actively participate – but it’s much more than a World Series, the curiously named baseball championship that involves only teams from North America. This year has been called the biggest election year in history. By the end of it, something approaching half the world’s adult population will have had the possibility to put a cross against a name on a ballot paper. But the US presidential election is the year’s big match.

Why? Because this is a genuine democratic election that will result in a single person holding exceptionally concentrated executive power in what is still the world’s most powerful country. It’s a highly watchable soap opera, with a classic plot familiar to all. And one of this year’s two contenders, Donald Trump, is a danger to his own country and the world. If the “election” of the president of China, the world’s other superpower, were a genuine democratic choice, that event would perhaps be as consequential. But it isn’t, so it isn’t. Russia had a presidential “election” earlier this year, but at issue was only the size of Vladimir Putin’s declared majority.

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

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The old European order is fraying. We will soon find out whether Keir Starmer can help hold it together | Timothy Garton Ash

As its leaders gather in Britain, Europe faces challenges from inside and out – and JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate only dials up the pressure

An extraordinary new version of what used to be called the Concert of Europe will convene today at Blenheim Palace, in the heart of England. More than 40 European national leaders, together with top figures from our continent’s key international institutions, will meet for a day of talk. This is only the fourth meeting of the European Political Community (EPC), a brainchild of the French president, Emmanuel Macron. The exclusive away day will reach no collective conclusions, but it’s a good occasion to reflect on the fragile condition of our current European order.

First, this is a great opportunity for Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, to show that Britain is back as a leading player in the Concert of Europe, as it has been for centuries. The meeting place is called Blenheim because the land, and the money to build a palace on it, were granted to John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his leadership in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. While the English have traditionally remembered this as one of their great victories over the French, in reality this was a battle fought near the Bavarian village of Blindheim by British, Dutch, German, Austrian and Danish forces to defend what was still known as the Holy Roman empire against the French and Bavarians. In short, this was Britain acting as a European power, joining with one set of European allies against another.

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

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Britain is suddenly a beacon of stability in Europe – now it’s France that’s in turmoil | Timothy Garton Ash

Sunday’s surprising election result prompted an international sigh of relief, but Emmanuel Macron’s gamble has weakened him and Europe

It was a good week for Europe. It was a bad week for Europe. Good because Britain now has a strong, stable centrist government keen to reset relations with the EU, and voters in France rallied to keep the hard-right National Rally (RN) out of power. Bad because France looks set for a period of weak, unstable, divided government that will hamper the whole EU. This in a crucial year for our continent, with Vladimir Putin still pummelling Ukraine and Donald Trump again likely to become president of the US, unless Joe Biden steps aside as he should.

Let’s start with the good news, before getting depressed again. Britain has a responsible, pragmatic government of the centre-left, elected for up to five years. It’s led by a former human rights lawyer determined to defend the rule of law at home and internationally; embraces a judicious mix of market economy, state intervention and social justice; strongly supports Ukraine and is committed to pursuing good relations with other European countries. In fact, it’s a much better match to the values proclaimed in article 2 of the Treaty on European Union than the government of the EU member state Hungary, whose anti-liberal nationalist leader, Viktor Orbán, has been sitting down with Putin in Moscow to see how they can compel Ukraine to capitulate in the name of “peace”.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. He was awarded the Charlemagne prize for services to European unity in 2017, the year before Emmanuel Macron

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Wake up! After these elections, Europe is again in danger | Timothy Garton Ash

Don’t let anyone tell you the results are ‘not so bad’. The hard-right vote can pull the entire EU to the right, and imperil Ukraine

A Europe that just celebrated on the beaches of Normandy the 80-year-old D-day beginning of its liberation from war, nationalism and fascism now again faces fascism, nationalism and war.

Please don’t be reassured by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s complacent statement that “the centre is holding” during what we might call E-day – 9 June 2024, when the results of 27 different national elections to the European parliament were announced. That’s true in the aggregate distribution of seats between the main party groups in the European parliament, with her own centre-right European People’s party group coming out comfortably on top. But the EU is run by national governments even more than by its directly elected parliament, and E-Day produced hard-right successes in core member states that range from the significant to the shocking.

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Ukraine can still recover with bolder western support – but right now it’s on the ropes | Timothy Garton Ash

The Ukrainian world heavyweight boxing champion beat back a giant opponent, but his country can’t defeat Russia on its own

As I contemplate a forest of small Ukrainian flags on the Maidan in central Kyiv, placed there by bereaved relatives as a memorial to the war dead, I’m accosted by a burly Ukrainian soldier in combat uniform. He’s with the elite 95th Air Assault Brigade and he has been fighting Russian aggression for more than a decade. “At the moment of victory,” he tells me, “please pour the first glass on to the ground for those who have fallen.”

Gesturing to the seemingly normal life around us in the Ukrainian capital, with young people drinking at nice cafes, almost as though this were Paris or Vienna, he says, “Every peaceful day here costs a lot of lives at the front.” But he chokes up on the last words and his eyes fill with tears. “Sorry, sorry!” he exclaims, embarrassed by this moment of weakness. Then he grips my hand one more time, grasps the straps of his khaki rucksack, and marches off through the civilian crowd like a ghost from the trenches of the first world war.

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A new cold war? World war three? How do we navigate this age of confusion? | Timothy Garton Ash

In history, as in romance, beginnings matter – so what we do now will be crucial in shaping the future

In these times of planetary polycrisis, we try to get our bearings by looking to the past. Are we perhaps in The New Cold War, as Robin Niblett, the former director of the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, proposes in a new book? Is this bringing us towards the brink of a third world war, as the historian Niall Ferguson has argued? Or, as I have found myself suggesting on occasion, is the world beginning to resemble the late 19th-century Europe of competing empires and great powers writ large?

Another way of trying to put our travails into historically comprehensible shape is to label them as an “age of …”, with the words that follow suggesting either a parallel with or a sharp contrast to an earlier age. So the CNN foreign affairs guru Fareed Zakaria suggests in his latest book that we are in a new Age of Revolutions, meaning that we can learn something from the French, Industrial and American revolutions. Or is it rather The Age of the Strongman, as proposed by the Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman? No, it’s The Age of Unpeace, says Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, since “connectivity causes conflict”.

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This ‘election’ won’t kickstart any change in Russia – but a defeat for Putin in Ukraine can | Timothy Garton Ash

The countless individual tributes to Alexei Navalny show there is another Russia, and it’s one the west must support

By next Monday, Vladimir Putin will have been “re-elected” president of Russia. In truth, Russian voters have no genuine choice this weekend, since Putin has killed his most formidable opponent, Alexei Navalny, and ordered the disqualification of any other candidate who presented even a small chance of genuine competition. This plebiscitary legitimating procedure – quite familiar from the history of other dictatorships – will also be implemented in some parts of eastern Ukraine, which Russian official sources describe as the New Territories. Large percentages for turnout and the vote for Putin must be expected, and will be no more accurate than his historical essays on Russo-Ukrainian relations.

Encouraged by signs of western weakness such as the refusal of the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine and Pope Francis’s recommendation for Ukraine to hoist the white flag, Russia’s brutal dictator will continue to try to conquer more of Ukraine. Not only does Putin believe that Ukraine belongs historically to a Russia whose manifest destiny it is to be a great, imperial power. Unlike western governments, his regime is both politically and economically committed to continue this war, with as much as 40% of its budget devoted to military, intelligence, disinformation and internal security spending, and a war economy that can’t easily be switched back to peacetime mode.

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