How Trump and Putin lost the midterms

There was much for Europe to cheer in Biden's success in the US elections

As the political classes in Washington get over their hopelessly awry forecasts of the midterm elections, America’s European allies are quietly celebrating the outcome. Every time the liberal-minded commentariat writes off Joe Biden, the president defies the received wisdom. The big losers this week were Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Europe feels a little bit safer.

Scanning the near horizon, Europeans have been contemplating two big threats to the continent’s security. The first, most obviously, is Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine - an unapologetic attempt to replace the post cold war European order with a might-is-right revanchism to re-establish Moscow’s writ in territories of the former Soviet Union. The second is the threat that the US could turn again to Trump in 2024 - foreshadowing fragmentation of the west and a ruinous breakdown of the Nato security alliance. The two, of course, are linked. Putin has had no better friend than Trump.

It is too early, of course, to say that Trump’s plans for another run for the White House have been decisively derailed. The signs are he will not go quietly. The most salient message of the midterm results, however,  is that that the spell has been broken. Even Rupert Murdoch, Trump’s most important media cheerleader, has turned. The Wall Street Journal now brands the former president the Republican party’s biggest loser. The Murdoch view is that if he does stand again he will lose.

Trump was banking on a midterm landslide for his Make-America-Great-Again populism. Instead, women turned out in large numbers to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v Wade judgment on abortion rights, and independent voters largely rejected the culture wars extremism of the Trump surrogates on the midterms ticket. Republicans may yet grab control of the House of Representatives and the Senate is still too close to call, but Biden’s losses are trivial against those faced by, say, Barack Obama in 2010. It seems that quite a lot of Americans really do care about the health of their democracy.

So there is no longer anything inevitable about a Trump candidacy, let alone victory, in 2024. Republican fears that Trump cannot appeal beyond his core Maga followers reach well beyond Murdoch’s media empire. Mike Pompeo is raising lots of cash for the primaries. And to the extent that America turned rightwards this week, the beneficiary was the 44-year-old Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who must now decide whether to take on Trump for the Republican nomination.

Of course, there are those who say that DeSantis’s prospectus of far-right populism shorn of Trumpian personal excesses is not much better. Beyond pocket autocrats such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and, possibly, Italy’s new prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the Florida governor would find few like-minded souls among leaders in Europe. But, as far as one can see, DeSantis does not include among his foreign policy goals wrecking Nato, dividing the European Union and cuddling up to Putin.

This has been a bad week for the Russian dictator. Moscow’s withdrawal from the southern city of Kherson - the only significant conurbation seized in the early stages of the Ukraine invasion - confirmed that the war has led Russia into a cul de sac. Putin’s war aims have necessarily been pared right back.

Until this week his best remaining hope looked to be that the economic hardship imposed by high energy prices and a military stalemate in eastern Ukraine would wear down the resolve of the west. A Trump second term would then deliver Moscow a measure of victory. The Kremlin now has to think again.

None of the above is cause for complacency. Biden has been a great friend of the transatlantic alliance, and Putin’s aggression has cemented its cohesion. The European Union, too, has surprised itself by holding together in the face of the inevitable strains between its western and eastern members.  But the end game in Ukraine - if there is one - remains far from obvious. Republicans in the House could yet seek to obstruct further US assistance to Kyiv.

There are broader tensions. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s recent visit to Beijing - with a clutch of German business leaders in tow - underscored the strains within the alliance about the balance of commercial and security interests in the west’s relationship with China. For all that Scholz had declared a Zeitenwende moment in his country’s foreign policy, Germany will not easily surrender its addiction to mercantilism. And Berlin is not alone in worrying that Biden’s sweeping restrictions on China’s access to semiconductors preface too severe a rupture in the economic relationship.

There are differences that can be managed. If the Ukraine war has done nothing else it has underlined Europe’s dependence on the United States and America’s national interest in preserving the alliance. Washington cannot be strong in the Pacific if it is weak in the Atlantic. For all that, the message for Europe from the midterms is far from unequivocal. The fading spectre of Trump cannot be taken as an excuse for business as usual. Many Europeans have yet to wake up to the fact that the world has changed irrevocably. Whoever takes the White House in 2024, Europe will have to take greater charge of its own security.