International summits finish with a “family photo”. But the picture marking the end of the G7’s seaside get-together in Japan in May 2016 looks like the opening scene of a disaster movie. The assembled world leaders were mulling what seem by today’s standards minor and malleable problems, not the tsunamis that were racing towards them.
Cameron, Hollande, Juncker, Merkel, Renzi — all are gone now. True, Donald Tusk, then the EU Council President, is now Poland’s prime minister. Shinzo Abe of Japan was assassinated. The others’ political careers ended in greater or lesser degrees of failure. The last one, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, was the newly elected star in 2016, but a pariah at his resignation last week.
The tone of discussions now is fragile and panicky. As the Trump 2.0 era looms, the other big countries look leaderless. France and Germany are in political crisis. Britain flounders on the sidelines. Only Giorgia Meloni in Italy—a mere gadfly in 2016—displays sureness of touch. The line-up for the new era is quite different in the smaller countries too. Robert Fico in Slovakia, Victor Orbán in Hungary, and the incoming Austrian leader Herbert Kickl were all politically active in 2016. But they were anomalies. Now their heretical views look almost mainstream. Alice Weidel, leader of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), has just spent three hours chatting with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. It is hard to imagine that in 2016, when the uber-centrist Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates topped the rich-list.
Some nostalgia is forgivable. For all their faults, consensus politicians who strive to make the existing system work are comforting and familiar. Radical upstarts with bombastic rhetoric may eventually learn their lesson when they collide with reality. But in the meantime, we have to bear extra cost and risk.
Yet life under the old establishment involved plenty of cost and risk too. Those who worry about the incoming Trump presidency’s constancy on Ukraine, for example, should read Bob Woodward’s book “War”, in which he describes the Biden administration giving in to Kremlin nuclear blackmail in 2022. As a result, Ukraine had to allow 30,000 defeated Russian troops to leave Kherson, with their equipment. Similarly, the AfD’s Kremlin-friendly tendencies may be alarming. But it was the impeccably mainstream Merkel who forced through the Nord Stream 2 Russian-German gas pipeline—and still thinks she made the right decision.
As the British journalist Will Lloyd argues, the leaders of the 2016 summit did not just misread issues such as mass immigration, rapid technological change, media fracture and Russian and Chinese irredentism. Their hubris and complacency sowed the seeds of the destruction of the whole post-1991 liberal consensus. They came across as out of touch and arrogant. The economic and political system they ran worked brilliantly for some people, but dreadfully badly for others. Deplorable, perhaps. But they have votes too. Social, political and economic models will change, perhaps radically, as a result.
But that does not preclude a strong international security system. Highly progressive personal taxes, strong immigration controls, dirigiste economics and vigorously defended social norms were all features of life in Western countries during the Cold War. They became deeply unfashionable. But that can change. European allies repeatedly flinched at muscular US foreign policies, from wars in Indo-China to Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Panama. But they put up with it: being a voluntary part of the American empire was better than involuntary submission to the Soviet one.
In retrospect, the comforting era of 2016 may have been an aberration. We will survive what comes next if we want to.
Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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