Com um mês de Trump, o mundo mudou, mas para pior - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu (CNN Meanwhile in America)

Com um mês de Trump, o mundo mudou, mas para pior 

 Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

CNN Meanwhile in America, Feb 20, 2025

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

How the world changed in a month

US Vice President JD Vance's anxious audience at the Munich Security Conference last week. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

President Donald Trump spent the first month of his second term on an extraordinary mission — dismantling the global system the United States spent the past 80 years building.   It was always theoretically possible that the West could lose its resonance as World War II and the Cold War became increasingly distant memories. But no one expected to see a US president wielding the ax.   When Trump won last year’s election, there was a sense among some Western diplomats in Washington that their governments knew how to handle a president who in his first term often made foreign policy by tweet. But the shock that drove European leaders to an emergency meeting in Paris this week suggests they underestimated just how destructive Trump’s second term would be.   Trump has reversed US policy on the war in Ukraine, taking the side of the invader rather than the invaded party.He’s parroting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points and is trying to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from power. His Vice President JD Vance traveled to Munich, where he castigated European leaders as “tyrants” suppressing conservative thought and pressured Germany to dismantle the political “firewall” that it set up to ensure that fascists could never again win power. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, told Europeans that they now need to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent,” casting immediate doubt on security alliance NATO’s foundational creed of mutual self-defense.   America’s repudiation of its traditional foreign policy is being driven by both Trump’s particular obsessions and wider geopolitical changes. The United States remains the world’s strongest power, but it no longer has the might that can force others — like China — to live by its rules. Indeed, it now has a president who has no intention of observing any economic, trade, and diplomatic rules at all and is threatening to annex Canada.   Not only that, but the new administration is actively seeking to destabilize friendly democracies and fuel a global movement of right-wing populism. Vance’s speech warned that European governments threatened their own security more than China or Russia because of their policies on free speech and immigration. He also met the leader of the AfD, a far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi roots, and sought to boost far-right parties elsewhere who are challenging governments in France and Britain for example. Trump would rather deal with fellow travelers in a Make Europe Great Again (MEGA) movement than centrist leaders now in office.   So, what can Europe do now that America — the country that rebuilt the continent from the ashes of World War II — seems to be becoming an openly hostile power?   French President Emmanuel Macron, acting on the experience of his dealings with Trump during their first terms, has been warning for years that Europe needed to realize that America had become an unreliable partner. With doubts about the US military commitment to its allies, other members of NATO now have no choice but to hike shriveled military spending.   This will be painful since many of Europe’s governments are already struggling to balance the books and are under extreme pressure to maintain their popular welfare states. And getting all members of the European Union to agree on a more independent path will be treacherous. Some nations in Moscow’s old neighborhood — like Poland and the Baltic states — understand the Russian threat all too well, but some smaller, Western European countries perceive the danger to be more distant. And the EU now includes some leaders who’d love to help Trump do Putin’s work for him in dividing the Western alliance — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for instance.   In only 31 days in office, Trump has already changed the world.

'They love Donald Trump' Meanwhile asked Wyoming Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman, a high-profile Trump supporter, to explain Vance’s speech in Munich, which is already being seen as a historic turning point.   “What I have seen with the leadership in England and in France and in Germany, it is very contrary to the interests of their citizens. And so I believe that American citizens, Americans, and even our leadership in America right now are very aligned with the citizenry in Europe, whether it is in Sweden or it is in Germany, France, Brussels, wherever it may be,” Hageman said after attending the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, a gathering of global center-right parties.   “When you adopt policies that the intentional outcome is to foist environmental poverty upon your citizenry, eventually, your citizenry is going to turn on you when you adopt policies that don't allow your citizenry to say ‘that was a stupid idea, or you shouldn't have done that, or I disagree with that, or I don't like the guy down the street. I don't like the way he looks’ — when you try to stop people from communicating and engaging in the public square, then eventually your citizenry is going to turn on you,” Hageman said.   “Being here at this event, I'm talking to my fellow citizens in these countries. They love Donald Trump, they love America, they love our freedoms, they love what we want. And so I think we're incredibly aligned with the citizens of these countries. I think the point that JD Vance was making was that their leadership has gone down the wrong road.”