US Vice President JD Vance stunned his European audience at the Munich Security Conference when he insisted that Donald Trump was the “new sheriff in town”. Sorting out a lawless world is something many of us would welcome, but does the US President fit the ideal of a Wild West lawman?
Try as I might, I cannot imagine Clint Eastwood playing Mr Trump bringing order to Dodge City (unless that is confused with Elon Musk’s Doge city). However, other titles of Eastwood’s great Westerns, such as A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, do sound more Trump-appropriate.
These titles capture one part of Mr Trump’s complex political psyche: money. The levying of international import tariffs may bring in (he hopes) a fistful of a few million – a few billion? – dollars more. Whatever European views about Mr Vance’s speech may be, we can surely agree that a sheriff implementing order would be good for our disordered world, especially in those existing flashpoints of Gaza and Ukraine. Unfortunately, disorder is the international disease of the 2020s in democracies, too.
Democratic elections in recent times have often failed to produce political order. Quite the opposite. Voters everywhere appear to be fed up with politics as usual.
The idea of “change” has universal appeal. In the UK, the change was profound. The Labour party won two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, yet six months after the election opinion polls showed Labour’s popularity receding.
Unsettling change was also the theme elsewhere. French President Emmanuel Macron, undermined by the French Assembly elections, appointed Michel Barnier as prime minister last September. The Barnier government lasted about three months.
In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government lasted longer but his coalition collapsed in November. The upcoming German elections on Sunday are fraught with difficulty. The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland is doing well in the polls. AfD has also been blessed – if that is the correct word – by Mr Vance’s suggestion that traditional German parties need to work with the far right.
That has been taboo in Germany since the fall of the Nazis. Yet mould-breaking insurgent parties of the far or unconventional right appear to be doing well across Europe. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s relatively new vehicle, the Reform UK party, is performing well in opinion polls.
One coherent link between all this European political turbulence and Mr Trump’s presidency is that former “outsiders” are “in”. Electorates in many countries want positive change but suspect that traditional politicians cannot bring about significant change in a satisfactory way. And so, Mr Trump is not a sheriff, restoring an old order. He is a disruptive force with a mandate for change, and change is what we are getting.
The world can see that Mr Trump dislikes existing arrangements, agreements and institutions. He is uninterested in the UN, not very respectful of Nato, sceptical of other international institutions, and incensed by the idea of American tax dollars aiding foreign countries through USAID.
Domestically, every institution from the US Department of Education to the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being shaken up and reorganised. Suspicion of multinational organisations is also a feature of insurgent and far-right parties in Europe, where membership of the EU is blamed for everything from slow economic growth and loss of sovereignty to immigration.
And when Mr Vance’s idea of “Sheriff Trump” wades into various gunfights, whose side is he on? His threatened tariffs will lead to some capitulation among smaller countries – Colombia folded already – and some panicky pledges of co-operation from larger partners including Canada and Mexico. Nevertheless, trade wars may still follow. China is no pushover. Pessimistic economists fear “de-globalisation” or what the rest of us might call “every country for itself”.
Rather than Sheriff Trump imposing law and order, as gun-carrying lawmen did in the 19th-century Wild West, perhaps we should worry about a repeat of the 1930s from Wild Washington.
The potential dislocation to international trade from tariffs and protectionism threatens a 21st-century version of the Great Depression, while Mr Trump’s “solution” for Ukraine led some in Congress to complain that Russia is being rewarded for aggression. Nevertheless, the Trump-inspired shake-up of Nato has begun. From the Nordic countries, Estonia and Poland to the UK and Spain, European governments will undoubtedly plough more taxpayers’ money into increased defence spending. That may be both inevitable and welcome.
Even so, the Trump tariff threat is already finding pushback at home, in the US itself. The chief executive of the Ford Motor Company fears that “long term, a 25 per cent tariff across the Mexican and Canadian border would blow a hole in the US [car] industry that we have never seen”. Tariffs on European or Chinese goods will blow further holes in other economic sectors, too.
The world doesn’t have a new sheriff. What it has is a new disruption based on some old, failed policies, tariff wars and appeasement. Personally, I’d rather watch a re-run of old Clint Eastwood movies than a rerun of the 1930s.
