By Ann Higgins
Those wise words were taken from one of the speakers on the recent EM film shot in Ukraine, who despite the tremendous suffering going on all around him is still able to look at the bigger picture and see perhaps more clearly than many of us where our best interests lie.
It is not yet ten years since the 2016 Referendum yet the world has changed tremendously in that time, and many, not just Ukrainians, would argue not for the better. I am truly not one for conspiracy theories but it’s not hard to see the dead hand of Putin behind many of those changes – his annexation of Crimea, his support for the Leave campaign, his support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and his continued support for the rebels in Dombas, as well as his elimination of his “enemies” at home and abroad such as Litvinenko, Magnitsky, and Navalny as well as the poisonings in Salisbury which killed an innocent local person.
And now of course, with the second coming of President Trump, Putin again has an ally in the White House, the best about whom can be said is that he is fickle and capricious. While relations between the two of them appear to be cooling somewhat due to Putin’s failure to provide the immediate peace in Ukraine which Trump saw as the route to his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, nonetheless his influence is still very strong particularly when it comes to Trump’s attitude to NATO, which he clearly despises and fails to understand. He frequently disparages it as an institution, falsely suggesting that its members would be unlikely to come to the aid of the US if that were needed, whereas in fact the only time that Article 5 requiring the other members of NATO to come to the aid of another member was after the attacks on the US on 9/11 when the UK and many other members did just that.
But his own attitude is made clear by his extraordinary claims to Canada and Greenland. Even those who rightly warned of the dangers posed by a second Trump presidency could hardly have imagined that he would attack his closest ally with tariffs and threats to turn it into the 51st state. Many column inches have been written about what may be his real motives for these and the other bizarre land grabs he has in his sights but for our purposes it is these that are relevant to the theme of being stronger together. Canada of course is a fellow NATO member (as is Denmark which for international purposes includes Greenland) and also a member of the Commonwealth and shares our monarch. Did Trump really think that Canadians would simply roll over, elect a right wing pro-Trump Prime Minister, and jump at the idea of giving up their universal health care, gun control laws and swap a constitutional monarchy for a US President?
So it was no surprise that, faced with this threat to their sovereignty, Canadians opted to elect someone who could face down Trump. Nor that one of Mark Carney’s first acts as elected PM of Canada was to invite King Charles to open the Canadian Parliament at the end of this month – he cannot be unaware of how keen Trump was to receive his royal invitation after his inauguration, so having Charles there first is an additional tweak of his nose. Does Trump really think that the rest of NATO and the Commonwealth (assuming he is aware of it) will not support Canada should Trump ramp up the pressure?
As for Greenland, is this a dead cat? Or is Trump really serious about invading the sovereign territory of a NATO ally? If it is a security issue, the US could reopen some of the fifty or so bases it’s closed down since the end of the cold war. But whence comes this security threat? Russia? Surely not. And Denmark can surely count on the support of NATO and the EU should the US decide to go further than that – has Trump looked at a globe to see what country lies between it and Greenland? That’s right – Canada.
Turning closer to home it’s clear that whilst Starmer is sticking to his “no rejoin on my watch” stance he is seeking closer ties with the EU with both trade and defence as promised in the last Labour manifesto. And despite the all to predictable squeals of the never Rejoiners, it turns out to have been a pretty good deal that he has negotiated including a youth mobility scheme. Details of the deal so far as they are known so far here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz63d82z785o.amp
So far as Ukraine is concerned it is hard to follow what is happening from day to day, let alone week to week, but following Putin’s failure to put in place the 30 day unconditional ceasefire demanded last week, the UK and EU are presenting a united front with the UK imposing 100 more sanctions and a fresh package of EU sanctions to follow imminently. The reply? Watch this space.
(This is an updated version of a talk given to CfE members at Truro School on 11 May this year.)
