As the West’s global dominance crumbles, the elites desperately want to blame Trump. They’re wrong |
Asking a lot of other people about what they think may be interesting. But the real fun starts when you make it all about your own opinion. That is, of course, the secret magic of politicized opinion polling. And sometimes you wonder if there is any other type. In any case, a major recent effort by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a gilt-edged Western establishment think tank, is no exception.
Published under the poetic title “Alone in a Trumpian World,” the study examines the “EU and Global Public Opinion after the US Elections,” that is, really, after the return of Donald Trump, bugaboo extraordinaire of mainstream Euro-centrists and their establishment nomenklatura throughout bureaucracies, media, academia, and, of course, think tanks.
Based on a large-scale opinion poll conducted with a total of 28,549 respondents last November, just after Trump’s US election triumph, in 16 European (including both Russia and Ukraine) and eight non-European countries, the resulting report mimics a simple commentary: summarizing some observations here, offering some conclusions there.
Among the observations, the most straightforward is that much of the world is optimistic about Trump, hoping that he will not only benefit America, but also promote international peace by making the US a more normal great power.
The main outliers to this pattern are the European Union and the even more splendidly self-isolated UK, where respondents stick to a pessimistic view.
In a way, the report’s authors themselves cannot stop illustrating that European isolation. Time and again, we read that the more positive opinion almost everyone else in the world has of Trump – whether rightly or wrongly – is “surprising” or “remarkable.” It’s ironic, but this tone of mildly puzzled perplexity is just what you would expect from a bunch of Western European elite representatives that find the world hard to grasp because Europe is so out of sync. Just imagine how different this report might look if it were based on the same polls but had been drafted by a group of Indian or Chinese intellectuals.
In any case, at its core, this is not even really a study of political moods. Instead, think of it, if you wish, as a manifesto wrapped in opinion polling. As you would expect from authors who are major public intellectuals – Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev, and Mark Leonard – this is not a shy policy memo, humbly submitted by bureaucrats who may even enjoy their anonymity. On the contrary, this is a brief, sometimes cursory, yet extremely ambitious statement of geopolitical........