THE GUARDIAN: The EU must be more robust in order to stem the tide of international disorder, or it risks falling to authoritarian imperialism
Donald Trump is threatening to take over Greenland, the territory of a Nato ally, possibly by military force, as Vladimir Putin is trying to take over Ukraine. Even if he doesn’t actually do it, this is a new era: a post-western world of illiberal international disorder.
The task now for liberal democracies in general, and Europe in particular, is twofold: to see this world as it is and to work out what the hell we’re going to do about it.
A global public opinion poll published today is a useful starting point. It was conducted last November in 21 countries for the European Council on Foreign Relations, in partnership with our Europe in a Changing World research project at the University of Oxford (and do please read the full report, which I have written with Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard). This is the fourth in a series of polls we’ve done every year since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so we can see how things have evolved from very bad then to critical now.
Back in 2022, we found a transatlantic west united in outrage at the full-scale invasion of Ukraine but divided from other great and middle powers, such as China, India and Turkey, who were quite happy to go on doing business as usual with Russia. The Russian economy was surviving unprecedented western sanctions because those other states now had sufficient wealth and power between them to counterbalance even a united west. So this was already a post-western world, but still with a west acting in it.
Trump 2.0 has changed all that. Now we have a post-western world, but with no coherent geopolitical west acting in it. To the extent that any strategic coherence should be attributed to the erratic narcissism of Trump, his approach is closer to that of Putin than it is to that of any US president since 1945. As his right-hand man Stephen Miller frankly explains, they believe the world is “governed by strength … by force … by power”. » | Timothy Garton Ash | Thursday, January 15, 2026
Trump has vandalized the western world! That will be his legacy in the history books. — © Mark Alexander
