Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

In his Davos speech today, President Trump moderated his aggressive rhetoric, declaring that he has no intention of using the American military to conquer Greenland and make it a US territory: “I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force,” he said.

But he showed no sign of abandoning his goal of pressuring Denmark to agree to the US acquisition of the frozen island. And he used the occasion to remind Europe and Canada of the real imbalance of power between the US and its allies.

“We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones,” said Trump. “We want Europe to be strong. Ultimately, these are matters of national security, and perhaps no current issue makes the situation more clear than what’s currently going on with Greenland.”

This echoed Trump’s long-standing message that America’s European allies should stop relying on the US for military protection, assuming that Uncle Sam will always come to their rescue. In a characteristically crude dig, Trump remarked that without US participation in the Second World War, the Danes would be “speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps.”

Trump can be faulted for undiplomatically saying what many Americans privately think about trans-Atlantic relations. But in Realpolitik terms, he is at least consistent: seeking to expand US hegemony in North America while shifting more of the burden of European defence onto Europe, without necessarily dismantling the Atlantic alliance.

In contrast, European critics of Trump and American Atlanticists can only make weak arguments against edging Denmark out of Greenland to make it a nominally sovereign US protectorate or the 51st state. To begin with, it is difficult for Europeans to condemn American imperialism while defending a colonial possession of the Danish Crown. The US recognised Denmark’s sovereignty over all of Greenland only in 1916, just a year before Denmark sold the Danish West Indies — now the US Virgin Islands — to the United States in 1917.

Nor were the Virgin Islands the only colonial concessions made by the kingdom of Denmark. Denmark sold the Tranquebar (Danish India) to the British Empire in 1845, coastal forts in Ghana in 1850, and the Nicobar Islands in 1868. It seems peculiar, then, that Denmark would choose to defend Greenland — at a cost of half a billion dollars a year to its taxpayers — as a remnant of its unjustly acquired colonial empire, all in the name of the rules-based global order.

Most of America’s major Nato allies want to maintain the present alliance system, in which American taxpayers pay for Europe’s defence, while European countries maintain or increase their economic integration with China. Denmark, like the EU, runs a trade surplus with the US and a trade deficit with China, and Chinese components are necessary for many Danish exports to the US.

In a trade war, those hardest hit are usually the nations with trade surpluses whose markets shrink, not those with trade deficits whose domestic businesses can replace foreign imports.

To be sure, Trump’s gratuitous insults and arrogance may backfire by hardening European attitudes against him. He is, after all, a bully. But bullies tend to be stronger than those they harass, and except in heartwarming fiction, they often get their way.