Trump, Europa y un mundo con menos normas comunes (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Welcome to the Global News Podcast on YouTube, where we go behind the headlines. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. And today we're looking at global security. A year on from that speech at the Munich Conference by the US Vice President, J.D. Vance. We're joined by our diplomatic correspondent, James Landale. And James, J.D. Vance really lashed out at Europe that day. Remind us of how that speech went down and what it signalled about the new Trump administration's view of the world.

[00:00:28] Speaker 2: Basically, J.D. Vance, the US vice president, sort of landed in, if I can use a rugby metaphor, with both boots studs on straight into the Europeans and essentially launched a strong ideological attack, which was essentially saying, look, you Europeans, you're wrong on freedom of speech. You know, you're suppressing freedom of speech. You're controlling the big tech companies. You are opening your borders too much to uncontrolled migration. And as a result, you are threatening your own cultures. So, in other words, his argument there was not the usual one of, look, Europe, can you spend more on your own defence? Can you do a little bit more to be more self-sufficient and less reliant on the United States? It was essentially saying, you guys are governing wrong. You're making the wrong choices. And ultimately, you're threatening the civilisation from which the United States originally emerged. So it absolutely shocked the people who were at Munich.

[00:01:32] Speaker 1: A year on, a lot has happened. Take us through some of the most, take us through some of the most significant moments.

[00:01:39] Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it has just been non-stop. I mean, and the thing is, is that there are some things that we think about, we can remember because they're relatively recent. So like this year, we've had the US attack on Venezuela and the removal of the leadership there. We've had Donald Trump's threat of military action against Greenland to take over that. We've now had more discussions and the buildup of US forces off the coast of Iran. So that's just a bit of this year. But if you think about last year, you know, we've had obviously this time last year was dominated by President Trump's attack on President Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office and everything that fell from that. You know, the Americans withholding military support and then repairing the relationship, a mineral deal that evolved slowly but surely into talk. So there's been a whole kind of sort of Ukraine strand. Remember the military confrontation between Pakistan and India last May. These are two suspected nuclear powers lobbing missiles at each other. It was a very serious moment. You've got Trump's trade wars, obviously underlining a lot of that. You've got the developments in Gaza with the Americans finally and the others forcing an element of some sort of change of the status quo, the acceptance of the first stage in part of a peace negotiation, as well as that, you know, more civil war in Sudan at huge cost, in a way that many in the West had sort of ignored. So I mean, there's a sort of constant list of events that has just sort of, you know, it's shocked us, it's shocked audiences. And, you know, it's taken a lot of policy makers by surprise.

[00:03:31] Speaker 1: You mentioned that list by J.D. Vance of cultural issues that he wasn't happy about. But the Americans also did want the Europeans to do more for security. Did they have a point there?

[00:03:43] Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. No, I think they have had a point. And, you know, successive American administrations going back a long time, you know, Eisenhower was first talking about this after the war. So this is not a new argument. But I think it was one that was offered by the Americans under Trump to, you know, with greater force and greater power. The thing is, the Europeans have accepted that. They now accept that principle. They have started spending more on defence. Not enough in the view of the Americans, not enough in the view of some members of Europe. You think that, you know, there's still some countries, particularly, you know, close to the Mediterranean that are lagging their feet. But certainly there is an awareness now and a realisation within Europe that things have to change, that they can no longer hide or rely upon the U.S. security umbrella in a way they always have done. That doesn't mean sort of, you know, leaving, chucking, you know, the baby out with the bathwater. But it does mean thinking, how do European countries shore up their own defences, cooperate more amongst themselves to do that?

[00:04:46] Speaker 1: Of course, it's not just Europe feeling the heat. What about other countries like Canada?

[00:04:50] Speaker 2: The Canadians have at various stages clashed with the Americans, particularly between Prime Minister Carney, who is obviously a new leader of the Canadians, with Donald Trump. So that has been a fairly up and down relationship. What's been interesting is the way that Carney has begun to sort of carve out a little role for himself, not necessarily as the leader of the sort of anti-Trump crowd, because I think he would dispute that. But he is certainly now saying this is how other countries like Canada, like the UK, like middle powers, can think about doing things slightly differently. Instead of just hanging on every truth social that Donald Trump puts out, we need to organise ourselves and we need to cooperate better ourselves so that you can say, let's have an ad hoc, you know, whether you're talking about AI, sharing of biotech or military issues or whatever it is, just saying, let's have ad hoc relationships, partnerships that form a new kind of way of cooperating that isn't just dependent on, you know, what the United States says.

[00:06:02] Speaker 1: Talking of truth socials, it's not just rhetoric. The US has written all this down in its new security strategy. How much difference does that make?

[00:06:11] Speaker 2: I think it's a very significant document because essentially it sets out in cold print Donald Trump's instincts that are also instincts now of the American system. In other words, it sort of says, look, this is not just a Trump issue. This is going to outlast Trump and is now the US position, which is essentially, in many ways, a retreat back into the old position of the Monroe doctrine of saying that the United States is only going to be concerned about its own affairs, its own region in the world, which they call the Western Hemisphere. So that's why Donald Trump feels able to, in his mind, to conduct military action against Venezuela in breach of international law. That's why he thinks it's perfectly acceptable to threaten military action against Greenland because he considers both those countries to be part of the US hemisphere, over which the US feels it has a national security right to do as it pleases. So that's the drive of the security document, the strategy that's been set out. The other side of it, though, was also it set out in very, very cold print America's view of Europe and basically saying, you know, you guys have to be more concerned about your own security. We're focused on the United States with one eye, of course, to China. With an echo of where we began with J.D. Vance in Munich, this document warned that if Europe carried on its current path, it would face what they called civilizational erasure, which again infuriated the Europeans because they obviously disagreed very strongly.

[00:07:48] Speaker 1: Yeah. On top of this change in strategy, you've also got this strange relationship between Presidents Trump and Putin. What does all this mean for Russia's place in the world?

[00:07:58] Speaker 2: Well, for the Russians, it's been an uncertain, slightly discombobulating period because the Americans have blown hot and cold. On the one hand, Donald Trump has made it very clear that he wants that US and Russia relations to be normalised. He talks constantly of the economic gains that he believes that can be gained from that. But on Ukraine, which is obviously the main point of focus, the Americans have blown hot and cold. And sometimes they are very supportive of the Russians, are very critical of the Ukrainians, and they accuse the Ukrainians of being the people who are holding up peace when, you know, it's clearly the Russians because they are the aggressors here. On other occasions, though, Donald Trump has expressed and voiced his own frustration at his inability to get Vladimir Putin to change his mind on Ukraine. And thus far, you know, as somebody who watched this quite closely and spends a fair amount of time in Ukraine, I have yet to see any evidence that the Russians genuinely want there to be peace and that at the moment, the Russian side believes that there are greater gains to be made by continuing to prosecute this war. And that does cause some frustration within the White House.

[00:09:10] Speaker 1: So one year into the second Trump presidency, is the world safer or more dangerous?

[00:09:18] Speaker 2: I think the world is safer inasmuch that it is adapting. It's learning to get used to this new system. But on the other hand, it is more dangerous because there are more moving parts, there are fewer norms, there are fewer rules. It may be that we reach at some point a new order where there are different rules. But at the moment, countries are very uncertain about what these rules are. They're trying to navigate. And for many of them, it's very, very hard. I spend a lot of my time talking to diplomats. And I met one of them yesterday, who was the head of a very significant middle power government, who just said, James, it's the law of the jungle. And we're all trying to work out how to navigate through it.

[00:10:07] Speaker 1: James Landale, our diplomatic correspondent. Thank you. If you liked this episode, please subscribe on YouTube. If there's anything you'd like us to cover, leave a comment below. And for more international stories, download the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.