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Can We Avoid Wasting the Unique Opportunity Offered to Us by Trump’s Presidency?

English Pages, 7. 3. 2025

I don’t intend to analyse and critically evaluate the details of Trump’s policies announced or introduced in the first days and weeks of his presidency. Their overall impact and their implicit side effects are much more relevant. And that is very positive, at least in my view.

Because Trump has been doing it in his special style, this style receives undue attention, much bigger than the content. Partly correctly, partly incorrectly. His way of doing politics is, of course, unimaginable in Europe, but we are not Americans, and we don’t have American traditions and a majoritarian electoral system. As I see it, Trump has started a new era of international politics which is much more important.

Some commentators see this as a return to the “concert of superpowers”, but they are wrong. Trump has “only” returned national interests into the substance of politics. He doesn’t like empty moralizing. As a businessman, he prefers negotiating and making deals rather than preaching good intentions. His approach has not been the way how international politics has been done since the Wilsonian era which started one hundred years ago. This era is over, however.

Such a change was much needed and will have huge consequences. It will, undoubtedly, sharpen the world’s insincere “we are all friends” way of doing politics. It will increase existing conflicts and enhance the risks of creating new ones. Nevertheless, Trump’s change was necessary after decades of the empty ideology of collective security based on United Nations non-efficient style of dealing with world problems. But the criticism of the past is not something I would like to devote to here now.

I am much more interested in discussing what it will mean for us, for our fates, for our chances to make necessary changes also here, in Europe, and especially in our Central Europe. This should interest us more than anything else. We should be frank and sharp in analysing our situation, something our politicians are not seriously doing.

I said “we”. The problem starts with what we mean by using the pronoun “we”. I am here as a Czech at an event organized in Slovakia by a Hungarian think tank. Both countries – Hungary and Slovakia – find themselves on an upward march, and both have leaders who know that they were elected to serve their own countries, not Brussels. They both refuse to accept all the absurdities of progressivism, multiculturalism, environmentalism and globalism. They feel obliged to do politics in the interest of the citizens of their own countries, not of Brussels bureaucracy, not of Soros-type NGOs, not of UN apparatchiks, and not of the international universalist media which speak to the people who belong anywhere but don’t understand that we, some of us, want to live somewhere. I want to live in the Czech Republic.

I am, partly, being held back in my statements here today because I principally disagree with doing politics from abroad – instead of at home. Unfortunately, this has become a fashionable but evidently counterproductive practice these days. I want to say very resolutely that Czech politicians don’t behave as their Slovakian and Hungarian colleagues do. This narrows the limits of my freedom to discuss relevant topics of today’s world here in Bratislava now. After three decades in high political functions, I am not an independent columnist.

Trump’s election victory and his radical entry into his office shook the world. He attacked many long-standing habits, traditions, and behavioural patterns, and by doing so he endangered the comfortable existence of many politicians who had been living in a world of irresponsibility and inefficiency made possible by the relatively quiet developments after the fall of communism.

By returning to national interests, Trump challenges globalism and main global institutions and organizations which have been for a long time opposing the idea of a nation state and its sovereign politics. He dared to attack several almost sacred ideas of the currently dominant and politically correct progressivist doctrines. His surprizing election victory proved to all sophisticated pessimists (including me) that something seemingly impossible is possible.

The usually very loud and excessively self-assured exponents and advocates of the pre-Trump world are silent now. To my great regret that won’t last for long. We must make use of the temporary chaos, confusion and shock of all those who feel offended in their self-perceived greatness. We must take advantage of the suddenly opened window of opportunity and start making resolute changes – resolute changes if we are in government and active preparations for elections if we are not. Such an opportunity will not return anytime soon.

Europe, or rather the European Union, has not done anything worth mentioning yet. Its politicians hesitate. They still believe they could return to their old ways of political behaviour when the storm is over. This is exactly what also the Czech politicians do. Many of them are convinced that the storm will be over soon.

I disagree. This daydreaming will come relatively rapidly to an end when Trump begins to move beyond mere rhetoric as regards the Ukraine war. Last Friday’s “incident” in Washington D.C. is a proof of that. Trump’s direct talks with Putin made European politicians nervous. They have invested – quite irrationally – so much in supporting Ukraine that they need to get tangible results and, last but not least, some benefits for themselves. That will be difficult to get. When Trump indicated that he wants to lick up all the cream, as we say in Czech, European politicians became nervous and unable to react rationally.

In spite of all my pessimism, I am convinced that the end of the Ukraine war will return some degree of freedom and democracy, both of which have been in Europe substantially weakened by the war. This will give us a chance for being more active, more open and more courageous.

Let me return to the question I put into the title of my address: “Can We Avoid Wasting the Opportunity Offered to Us by Trump’s Presidency?” To my great regret, I have to confess that I am not very optimistic in this regard:
1. We are indecisive, uncourageous, and spoilt by years of inactivity and comfortable life;
2. We are divided (both among countries and inside countries);
3. We, as states, have already lost an important part of our sovereignty (by handing it over to Brussels by Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties);
4. We don’t have a meaningful system of political parties. Existing parties are inconsistent in both their thinking and behaviour. They are not ideologically well-defined. Their members are motivated more to be in power than to politically lead the country;
5. All political parties are more or less accepting the tenets of contemporary dominant ideologies of environmentalism, multiculturalism, genderism, progressivism, and globalism, which makes them almost indistinguishable. They are all green, even though they don’t have this adjective explicitly engraved in their titles. We are returning to something like a National Front way of doing politics, which we experienced in the communist era.

These only sketched out, not fully developed “characteristics” of our situation indicate that Europe, and particularly Central Europe may very easily waste the opportunity offered by Trump’s victory and by his in many respects revolutionary way of starting his term. I am afraid we will stay divided, unwilling to oppose the Brussels’ decisions and directives, our political parties will continue to predominantly take care of their distinguished members and functionaries, instead of pushing for the long-overdue changes our countries need. (Political parties should stop functioning as quasi-social service agencies and instead become genuine proponents of new political ideas.)

We should be prepared for the desperate attempts of old political entities and structures to return the world before Trump’s victory. I expect the intensification of efforts and activities from both the EU politicians and bureaucracy (and nomenclatura) as well as from long-serving politicians in individual European states with their mutual almost fraternal relations, from influential celebrities of well-known political NGOs, from corporatist bosses of big business firms that have long lived from governments’ benefits, and last but not least from global media leaders, all working to turn the course of history backwards.

It is up to us whether we passively accept this sad fate or whether we try to move forward. I wish both Hungarian and Slovakian organizers of this gathering to be able to continue moving their countries in the right direction. In this respect, Donald Trump is a great source of inspiration.

Václav Klaus, Istropolis Summit, Primaciálny palác, Bratislava, March 7, 2025.