Opinion | America has betrayed Eastern Europe

The world stage seems completely different from a small town. The great global powers can set in motion the tectonic changes of geopolitics, but the other players have always had to understand how to survive in the cracks in the middle.

In two months, the Trump administration threatened the allies with rates and commercial wars, has dismantled foreign aid e silent Voice of America. President Trump has replied the president of Ukraine in the oval office and has retained military aid and sharing of intelligence. America has joined Russia, North Korea and Belarus in opposition to a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly which required Russia retire immediately his forces from Ukraine and Mr. Trump edited President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a reliable partner for the discussion.

A doctrine of Trump’s foreign policy is becoming clear, at least in a side dish. Mr. Trump’s America tries to guide a world in which great nuclear powers take what they can. They choose their spheres of influence, the size of their territories and the shape of their boundaries. To other great powers, Mr. Trump’s approach can be understood as transactional or realist. But for many of the smallest democracies of Eastern Europe and Southern and Eastern Asia, who for decades attacked their destiny of a America who thought they would allow them to continue existing near the border between Russia or China, Trump’s doctrine is the foreign policy of betrayal.

From the fall of communism, many small and medium -sized countries in Eastern Europe, including Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, have adapted to satisfy the demanding commitments of liberal democracy. Those countries have written and modified the constitutions, democratized political life, built market economies and signed commercial agreements. Some even agreed the installation of American military bases OR CIA secret prisons. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, others followed later. This adaptation was imperfect and irregular – consider “Prime Minister Viktor Orban”Illiberal democracy“In Hungary and the eight-year domain of the nationalist-Popoist party and Justice of Poland, who did not do it Ends until 2023 – But the general direction of the journey always seemed clear: the small democracies of Eastern Europe modernized and democratized and, shaking the strongest possible ties with the most important democratic superpower in the world, they became richer and more safe. (Keeping in mind the differences, the same can be said in Asia on South Korea and Taiwan.)

This faith in the idea of ​​the West required a certain degree of diplomatic forgetfulness of previous betrayals. Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister, responded to the annexation of Nazi Germany of the Sondenland region in Czechoslovakia in 1938 from said Which was part of a “quarrel in a distant country, between people we know nothing about”. In the 1930s, it seemed easy for Mr. Chamberlain to neglect that a totalitarian country was seizing the land by a democrat, but those countries did not forget. Many small nations also bring scars of the betrayal of the meeting in 1945 to Yalta, where the leaders of the great powers decided their destiny Without consultation and redesigned boundaries, families made people pieces.

Yalta delivered Eastern Europe to brutal decades behind the iron tent. But in the early 90s, after the fall of communism, the nascent democracies have chosen to believe again that an association with the West – his image just brown and shining – would have brought freedom, wealth and stability.

Now that idea of ​​the West has been broken in two. One half belongs to Mr. Trump and other predatory populists. The other is composed of those who still believe in liberal democracy, respect for international agreements and the law of nations to self -determination.

For now, small countries that have thrown their parking with America are in a geopolitical trap. For Ukraine in particular, the words and actions of Mr. Trump triggered something close to an existential panic. But also the rest of the direct neighbors of Russia needs a new plan: alliances of democratic values.

The European Union seems to be fundamental for this effort. For those countries that are already members, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Estonia, the question of how to go on is simpler. The EU is also an aspiration for those countries that are not yet members, but have candidate status. As in the 90s, integration will require adaptation and change – first of all, perhaps, in military spending, since the blockage embarks on a plan to be spent Hundreds of billions of retrodes the continent. (Here, Poland It is already a model.

But Europe is only a part of the response to foreign policy of the betrayal of Mr. Trump. Countries such as Canada and South Korea cannot join the EU, but they will still look for security alliances with those countries that still share their democratic values: Canada is already approaching and is in negotiations to join the blockage Military expansion.

It is the end of a chapter. But in safety alliances and values, there will be another one: however strange it may seem, perhaps for the first time in history there are two west.

Jaroslaw Kuisz is the author of “The new Poland policy: a case of post-traumatic sovereignty” and chief publisher of Kultura LiberalnaA Polish weekly. Karolina Wigura is a professor at the University of Warsaw. They are research collaborators at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and Senior Fellows at the Center for Liberal Modernity in Berlin.

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