Enjoy 2024, maybe the last year of the postwar order

It's difficult to get your head round the post Trump 2.0 world

Danny Finkelstein has a good piece in the Times today about how the US election next year might affect our own vote.

I don’t know how much influence it will have on our election, but - assuming the polls and forecasts are right - the return of Donald Trump in a more angry and vengeful form will maybe change everything for the Europeans.

I was trying to explain the internal politics of South Yorkshire to Theresa May when Trump made his first call to No10 as President.

People now forget the fears there were that he would dump NATO, and the relief when he didn’t.

But there is every reason to think that Trump 2.0 is likely to be more uncompromising and have less time for free-riding European friends than v. 1.0.

It is quite possible that his return will mean:

• The abrupt end of US aid to Ukraine, and some form of Russian victory

• Millions more forced to flee west

• Russia - with its war economy pumping along - then tempted to push onward, maybe into the Baltics

• Taiwan under acute threat

• NATO as an alliance either broken or remade: “pay 2%+ right now or you are out”

It’s a pretty bleak prospect. I am glad Britain and France kept an independent nuclear deterrent.

Enjoy 2024 - all of us in Western Europe could be waking up to a very different world in 2025.