By Ashish Singh
Donald Trump is going to be the 47th US president. He has defeated Democrat candidate Kamala Harris. People across the globe are expressing their opinions on various mainstream and alternate media platforms about what Trump’s presidency will look like. I spoke with Dr Johannes Wilm, a Danish-German-Swedish academic with a PhD in Anthropology, about what it means for Europe to see Trump in the Oval Office. Dr Wilm, apart from being the editor of RadicalPolitics.org, writes about international relations and social movements. His works have been published in various global outlets.
Here is what he said:
“Most of the leaders of Western Europe and those actively engaged in the European Union have supported Harris irrespective of party lines. The fear is that the United States under Trump will impose more tariffs on goods coming from abroad and that Trump will also impose these on European products and services. The social policies of Harris also seem more in line with those of European countries even if they are not as developed. Under Trump, a poorer US working class working for lower wages may compete with European labour and create problems for Europe that way.
The picture in some Eastern European countries is different in that Trump’s toughness on immigration, especially from Muslim countries, is more in line with the views of a large part of the population in Eastern Europe.
However, also, the policies of Biden have hurt Europe already. Policies that incentivised companies to build green new technologies in the US meant that companies building similar products in Europe could not compete. And while it was Russia that started the Ukraine-war, the US has done little to stop it, and the war has meant increased energy prices for Europe and a significant number of refugees to deal with. Especially in those places where Russian gas has been replaced by significantly more expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) imported from the US, it shifts wealth from Europe to the United States.
And while the war has not officially extended beyond Ukraine, there have been a number of incidents of sabotage that are potentially linked to the war such as the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines, fires at the offices of Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, sudden unexplained deaths of workers at the battery manufacturer North Volt and the burning down of a large shopping centre in Warsaw Poland.
Western European leaders have felt that their best ally is the Democratic party in the US since the first election of Trump in 2016, and the result under Biden has been that some of the policies coming out of this collaboration have hurt Europe in various ways. This also includes the trade war with China that the US is engaged in and that Europe seems to have partially signed up for seems to deliver little economic advantages for Europe.
Potentially, the election of Trump could therefore lead to European leaders being freer in their choices and collaborating with other countries as they will be less bound by the priorities of the White House.”
(Ashish Singh is a social and political scientist.)
