By Tom McTague
When Donald Trump first visited Paris when President in 2017, he appeared as something of a passing curiosity; the apparent manifestation of America’s inexorable decline, captured in all its spray-tanned vulgarity. Seven years later he has returned to Paris as emperor, crowned by his client kings in none other than the spiritual home of modern Christendom: Notre-Dame. “It was a coronation,” as one European diplomat put it to me, laughing with incredulity at the spectacle.
What is so striking about this second coming of Trump is not just that the world appears to have accepted his victory this time, but to have actively embraced him as the harbinger of a new age, no longer seeking to protect the old one that has been discredited. The visual proof of this diplomatic embrace was captured in the image of Europe’s leaders in Paris, one after the other, moving to submit themselves at the feet of the new imperator.
Yet it was not the symbolism of the ceremony in Notre-Dame on Saturday which came closest to capturing the revolutionary spirit of Trump’s coming presidency, but the events unfolding at the same time thousands of miles away in Syria. While in one sense the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus has little to do with Trump, it is impossible to understand the speed and timing of the revolution without considering the impact that his impending presidency is already having on world affairs.
Think about the events that have already since Trump’s election victory in November. First, there was the collapse of the German government and the sacking of Israel’s defence secretary, Yoav Gallant, on the day of the American election. Then came Netanyahu’s ceasefire-deal with a dazed and confused Hezbollah, followed by the authorisation of the firing of long-range American missiles into Russia, the publication of Zelensky’s peace plan, the collapse in the value of the Russian rouble under fresh American sanctions and, finally, the sudden implosion of the Syrian regime. The French government also collapsed.
“In many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence.”
“Everyone has taken his mantra that all is transactional and is positioning themselves to open the way for a bargain with Trump,” explained one French official reflecting on this extraordinary cascade of events. Even before taking power, then, Trump is the catalyst for a new age.
In Syria, he sparked a revolution. Frustrated with a diplomatic impasse as the clock ticked down to Trump’s inauguration and the ambitions of the American-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s north east, Turkey’s President Erdogan appears to have authorised the advance of his own client rebels first. Erdogan, it seems, wanted to ensure the Turkish-backed militias were in the strongest possible position to deal with Trump after January 20, only to have triggered the sudden and complete collapse of the Assad regime. Russia, meanwhile, bogged down in Ukraine and already having paid a large price for little reward in Syria, was also caught off guard and now faces the loss of key military bases on the Arab-Mediterranean coast, further entrenching Erdogan’s power in the region.
Across the Middle East, all the major powers are jockeying for position. Already, Benjamin Netanyahu has taken advantage of the vacuum of power in Syria and in Washington to grab new territory in the Golan Heights and try to impose a new political dominance at home. Saudi Arabia, too, sees opportunities under Trump. Even Iran, the great loser in world affairs since October 7 last year, may feel it now has no choice but to sue for peace and reach a deal.
For Ukraine, meanwhile, it is President Biden (or his officials) who is accelerating events by rushing to do all he can before Trump’s inauguration, with new weapons transfers and sanctions that are causing Russia fresh economic pain. Yet, once again, it is Trump who stands to gain as each side plays out their cards in expectation of his attempt to impose a new order on the world once in power.
It is striking how open so many diplomats and officials are to Trump’s approach, telling me that they see in it a degree of brutal honesty if not morality. During his first term there was a hope that his Hobbesian outlook on life would not, in the end, last. Today, there is no such hope — or even desire. Meanwhile, the comprehensive nature of Trump’s victory coupled with European rolling political and economic crises, seems to have robbed the continent’s leaders of any last delusion of superiority. Only Emmanuel Macron’s departing Prime Minister, Michael Barnier, showed any real distaste at Trump’s presence at Notre Dame, which is itself rather telling. If there was a figure who appeared out of touch in this scene, it was not Trump; Barnier’s instinct that of an older age revealing his own anachronism. In today’s world, Trump no longer represents good or bad, but simply power. He has it and Europe does not.
It is for this reason that in many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence, forcing leaders to address the fundamentals of their position. Europe is weak — economically and militarily — and made weaker by the leaders it has chosen. In Paris, Macron has destroyed his presidency in his desperate and doomed attempts to save the country from the Le Pennist fate he seems only to succeed in making more likely. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz is drifting towards defeat, a listless chancellor atop a listless Germany at the heart of a listless continent. In London, meanwhile, there is the odd spectacle of an all-powerful government that already feels adrift. Can these three powers really find it in them to step into a void left by Trump in Ukraine? And if they can, at what cost to an electorate already raging against the deteriorating state of their public services.
None of this means Trump’s clarifying presence will be either good, bad or in any sense successful at finding solutions to problems that have defeated his predecessors. In an important sense, in fact, Trump represents the end to all such teleological notions of progress or decline. Power is the point.
In Syria, the fall of Assad cannot be squeezed into any such narrative of progress or decline. It is a story of order and who has the power to impose it. Trump doesn’t want it. Iran has lost it. And Turkey may find it is no more successful in its attempts to control its foreign clients than Pakistan was in controlling the Taliban. And just like Afghanistan, in Syria a gruesome regime has evaporated after being abandoned by its foreign protectors. What comes next may be just as dangerous — and far closer to home.
Syria’s new warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was 20 when he joined the jihad in Iraq. Perhaps he has mellowed and forgiven — but it would be a brave analyst after the past 20 years to believe that Syria has reached its nadir: modernity may yet have some new horrors for it to endure. What comes in its place may be no better or worse than what it replaced, merely a new epoch symbolised not by the beauty of Notre-Dame but the hellish anarchy of America’s Iraq.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.