Watch out, Donald Trump – this is what a global liberal counterattack looks like

Source: The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Liberals of all lands, unite! As illiberal powers outside the West grow stronger than ever, the United States has joined the assault on everything we stand for. In the face of this organized assault by illiberal nationalists, we need a determined counterattack by liberal internationalists. The Canadian election this week could contribute a strong cavalry brigade.

One of the fundamental aspects of liberalism is that, if people are to live well together in freedom, power must always be distributed, challenged, and checked. In the face of pure and arrogant displays of force, whether from Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, we must create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the rule of law, labor unions, a business community separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions like universities, civil resistance, multilateral organizations, and international alliances have served—along with multiparty politics and free and fair elections—to constrain men who would like to be kings.

In calling for the unity of all who believe in equal individual liberty, we liberals have a problem of our own making. The policies that have been associated in many people’s minds with liberalism over the past 40 years have fed the reservoirs of popular discontent that nationalist populists continue to exploit. Neoliberalism, driven by global financial capitalism, has led to levels of inequality not seen in a hundred years. An identity politics that aimed to correct historical injustices against certain minorities has left many other members of our societies—particularly white working- and middle-class men—feeling both culturally and economically marginalized. Both approaches have betrayed the central promise of liberalism, succinctly summarized by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin as “equal respect and care” for all.

Neoliberalism has also turned the world’s most powerful democracy into something very close to an oligarchy. The separation of private wealth from public power—a precious and fragile innovation of modern liberal democracy—has been overturned. Greedy plutocrats like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg now prop up Donald Trump’s political power, while he promotes his own economic interests and those of his wealthy friends. With the help of media outlets and platforms controlled by these plutocrats, Trump convinces many ordinary Americans that their suffering is entirely due to foreigners (immigrants, China), when in reality it is mostly due to people like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.

So we must fight simultaneously on two fronts: with the enemies of liberalism and with the problems created by liberalism itself. Unity will be strength. If we try to negotiate separately with the bullies, whether in Washington, Moscow or Beijing, they will eliminate us one by one.

These counter-power coalitions will consist of states, but also of civil society actors and active citizens. At least half the population of the United States is with us. Even electorally authoritarian states like Turkey and Hungary have many citizens who want to be free. The world’s largest example of liberal internationalism in action, the 27-member European Union, will be vital to the counter-attack. So will large individual democracies like Britain, Canada, Japan, and Australia.

We need to do many things at once. Promoting free trade against Trump’s destructive protectionism is one starting point. However, this is easier said than done, as mutually beneficial trade agreements take time to build. However, there are some immediate wins within reach. A trade deal between the EU and the MERCOSUR group of Latin American states awaits ratification by all relevant parties. Britain and the EU should be more ambitious at their upcoming summit on 19 May. The EU does not need anyone else’s involvement to create a single digital space and unified capital markets, nor to develop European defence industries, which would also serve as a neo-Keynesian economic boost.

The monopolistic platforms and the staggering wealth of American oligarchs pose a threat to all other countries. If the EU were willing to use its regulatory power, coordinated with the efforts of other liberal democracies, we could do more to limit them. But regulation and taxation alone are not enough.

Whether in Europe, Canada, Australia or Japan, our entire digital infrastructure is effectively American. Imagine that one day iPhone-i and Your iPad stops working, along with your storage provider, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter (or X-itter). What would be left? TikTok-u! "And Bluesky", you might add, citing the liberal social platform of choice. But that too is American. This is not just about infrastructure. It's about how we create the digital public sphere, which is essential to the future of liberal democracy.

Civil society initiatives can also help. Why, for example, have we not yet seen a major statement of solidarity with American universities, which are under pressure, from universities around the liberal world?

Consumer protests can also help. The impact of a largely spontaneous car boycott Tesla is pushing Musk to return to his business activities, cutting into the free time he could spend undermining his country's administrative state. Canadians now have the app BuyBeaver on their phones, which helps them avoid buying products made in the US. (I hope they boycott Russian ones too.)

It is also a question of style of warfare. The illiberal nationalists use the stick, we use the sword. When they fall down, we climb up. When they become violent, we remain calm. When they shamelessly lie, we stand with the facts.

In foreign policy, the most urgent challenge is to save Ukraine, which Trump is sacrificing. The fact that he is pushing Ukrainians to give up even their legal claim to Crimea as part of Ukrainian sovereign territory shows that support for Ukraine is now essential to defending the fundamental principles of the liberal international order.

What emerges from this hurricane will not be the same as before. It will be transformed both by the lessons we learn from our mistakes to rebuild better, and by the revolutionary impact of Trump. A liberal-democratic constellation that does not fundamentally rely on the American “liberal leviathan,” in the striking phrase of Princeton scholar John Ikenberry, will be something very different from what we knew between 1945 and 2025.

Even the geography will change. Canada, for example, which once seemed – in the most pleasant way possible – somewhat peripheral in world affairs, nestled comfortably between a friendly America and a frozen Arctic, now suddenly looks like a front-line state. One of the world’s most liberal countries, along with Ukraine, is one of the most directly threatened by Trump’s illiberal onslaught. And the melting Arctic is turning it into a major new theater of international competition. Fortunately, it looks like Canada will have a government that is not only liberal in name but also militantly liberal in nature.

A quarter of a century ago, when the United States was attacked by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, the newspaper's editor Le Monde wrote a famous front-page headline: “We are all Americans”! Today, friends of freedom around the world should say: “We are all Canadians”!