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Last month’s Davos World Economic Forum will be remembered primarily for two things: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s historic speech about the end of Pax Americana, and then President Trump making Carney’s point the next day by sounding like a fascist dictator with a concussion while he threatened our Western allies over Greenland.
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Although Trump quickly TACO’d and tried to smooth things over, his speech was the latest indication that Europe needs to rethink its security alliances. America is not only unreliable, but we’ll be governed foreseeably an aspiring dictator who if he could would happily divide the world up into authoritarian spheres of influence, with Europe left to be preyed upon by Putin.
So as a weekend bonus for subscribers, we connected with Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer for The Atlantic, to discuss Europe’s perspective on Trump’s unhinged showing at Davos and his broader betrayal of our democratic allies. (Applebaum has a front row seat to these developments — she’s based out of Poland these days.)
“Trump for Europeans conjures up the pre-war era when what we now call populism but then was called fascism engulfed country after country and led to a continent-wide catastrophe that killed millions of people,” she said. “He’s a figure from a previous era they thought was over.”
