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. 

Ever since the 2015 escalator ride that led Donald Trump to the presidency, conservative writers — including me — have tried and failed to offer a systematic account of his worldview. The newly-published White House National Security Strategy (NSS) document is, in some ways, the latest attempt at doing the same thing.

The document is an effective articulation of Trumpian foreign policy. It repeatedly emphasises hard national interest over airy liberal-interventionist ideology, and realism over adherence to the “rules-based order” for its own sake. Yet it’s also racked with internal contradictions and — more importantly — is likely to crash against the man’s own mercurial tendencies, which can never be stuffed into any neat mental scheme.

Most interesting is the NSS’s statement of principles and priorities which should guide American statecraft at home and abroad in the 21st century. Here, the document sounds many refreshing notes after the hubris of post-Cold War liberal interventionism of both the Left- and Right-wing varieties.

Out, says the NSS, is any notion of “traditional political ideology” and the baggy definitions of the national interest that led Washington to treat pretty much the whole world as part of its sphere of influence. In its place, the document insists on a clear and narrower definition of the American interest. It is one marked by a “predisposition to non-interventionism”, a “flexible realism” (read: willingness to work with friendly authoritarian regimes), a balance-of-power approach to checking global domination by other contenders (read: mostly China), and a focus on sovereignty and the wellbeing of US workers.

The document’s list of priorities fits with its statement of principles. These include ending mass immigration, the protection of America’s heritage rights and liberties, and greater burden-sharing within various US alliance systems (crank up your defence budgets, Eurocrats). On the political-economic front, the NSS counsels “balanced trade” — which is Trump-speak for closing massive trade deficits — and the renewal of America’s industrial base, including for the military.

These principles and priorities may not seem all that novel. Indeed, a Democrat like Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security advisor, could easily sign up to many of them. He, too, emphasised hard-nosed realism about Chinese trade, a pro-worker global strategy, and industrial renewal.

But this only underscores the success of Trump and his supporters in shattering the post-Cold War “Washington Consensus” which promoted neoliberal globalisation and ever-deeper transnational integration. So disastrous was that consensus from a US domestic perspective, it’s hard to imagine any mainstream Democratic foreign-policy guru advising the restoration of the older free-trade regime or dismissing manufacturing as something Washington can safely leave to the Chinese.

Yet while the Trumpians deserve credit for injecting a new realism into Washington’s strategic bloodstream, they have plenty of ideological blind spots. References to industrial protectionism in the new document mark a welcome shift for the GOP, which was once the vehicle of choice for offshoring corporations chasing wage and regulatory arbitrage in the developing world. But as the writer Julius Krein points out, to make protectionism work, you first need to have industries to protect.

That requires, in addition to tariffs, a government willing to take an active role in directing investment and gearing the economy towards production rather than consumption. Industrial policy, in other words. Yet the phrase — and the concept — appear nowhere in the NSS because they remain taboo in a Republican Party still beholden to aspects of Reaganite ideology and a power base dominated by small business and regional capital. Instead, the NSS regurgitates the same old talking points about deregulation and tax cuts that you’d find on the free-market editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

More importantly, the document’s rhetoric about a non-interventionist disposition and a non-ideological foreign policy is belied by the fact that the Trump administration appears poised to start a regime-change war with Venezuela, framed in part as a matter of promoting hemispheric democracy and defeating dictatorship.

If carried out, such a war would almost certainly draw Washington into yet another nation-building exercise and prompt an exodus of migrants bound for el norte. This outcome would transform the NSS into yet another feckless exercise by Right-wing intellectuals to define on paper a Trumpism that doesn’t exist in the real world.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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