Peter Pomerantsev: With Trump, anyone who thinks that democracy is for losers is emboldened

With a new sheriff in town, it seems that under Trump's second presidency, the truth as such will be even more overshadowed, with potentially serious implications for the existing world order. How do you assess the first two months of the Trump presidency?

I consider myself a child of the great American post-war project. My parents were Ukrainian dissidents, listening to the Voice of America and Free Europe. ?My parents were dissident in Ukraine, listened to Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, when my father was expelled from the Soviet Union, he ended up working for Radio Free Europe. He still has been working with them into his retirement. He worked like 20 years there, which was the last artifact of the Cold War. So I’ve always grown up as part of the great Euro Atlantic project that's completely even not thinking about it, the extent to which I was part of it as I grew up. The people that I know in the US, the thinktanks, the intellectuals, the media, they're all connected to that project.

Now that is gone. For good. ?something new might take its place, but it remains to be seen what. USAID (United States Agency for International Development), IRI (International Republican Institute), NDI (National Democratic Institute), NED (National Endowment for Democracy) are going down the drain, probably USAGM (U.S. Agency for Global Media) will be reorganized. It is unclear who the allies are.

The idea that we are together in the West and that America is the leader of the "West" is clearly gone. We don't know what comes next. But that does not mean we cannot influence what will happen.

There's a good metaphor for the new situation that many people use, and everyone ascribes to themselves: the Western world is now like when the great Roman Empire split into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). The United States is the Western Roman Empire and Europe is Byzantium, and the two have split apart. Of course, this does not mean that they do not have relations with each other.

If we even tried to patch it up, no one would trust it anyore. I do not want to mourn it, I think that politics changes. ?But it isn’t just like an abstract thing that disappeared. International development experts are losing their jobs, the next target will be the World Bank, the role of the United States in the UN will change.

In school exams, 16 years olds will have to do essays on the world 1945-2025. They’ll scribble 800 words on the rise and fall of the Western world order. Or ChatGPT will write it for them.

What was between 1945 and 2025 is clearly gone. ?But we're clearly in an era of having to reimagine everything which has moments of excitement. But people tend to die en mass when these changes happen.

Moreover, at the heart of these changes is a deadly war in the neighbourhood. How will Trump's actions affect Vladimir Putin? Will Trump make Russia great again?

Absolutely. ?Putin has always said that Europe doesn't matter, he deserves to be on the same level as the United States. He believes that only the great powers can decide the future of the world, and Trump is giving that to Putin.

The idea of a multilateral world is gone, Trump thinks like Putin, that the big power is still around. I see a huge mistake in their thinking: they think like people of the 19th century. Many people talk about a return to the 19th century, either in terms of cultural paradigms or historical paradigms. We are back to carving up the world, some people may think that the US, Russia and China will carve up the world between themselves. But we are no longer living in an era where only few empires own all the guns and education. If a multipolar world order is to emerge, it will not just have three poles, but many more - today, any country can be a pole,?everybody’s gonna have an agency. In the case of Canada and Mexico, it is clear that they will not be as tough as Trump thought. From this point of view, it is naive to think that the world will be carved up again. We live in a much more dangerous time: everyone has their knives open.

Do you think the United States, China, Russia, and whoever we now call the great powers can be really great at the same time? Or is it in their nature to want to defeat the other?

That is another important point. The era of spheres of influence was full of tensions, and I think the Hungarians know that very well. The world is becoming very unpredictable. When you take kind of the table and throw everything in the air, it doesn't necessarily land how the people who started the disruption think it will.

The Hungarian government likes to use the term 'Trump tornado', I don't know how widespread it is internationally, but it is a good description of the fact that we don't really know what will come after the tornado's destruction: there will be chaos, looters will appear, and some people may become extremely rich, but others will be poor forever.

I've never heard that expression before, but it's very good. The chaos that is coming will not necessarily end the way the people who set off the tornado think. We are already seeing that in Canada and Mexico. Trump probably wanted to crush them in order to intimidate China, but it quickly became clear that the Canadians and Mexicans are not letting up either, they have their own agency. Things could get very ugly.

How will Trump's actions affect authoritarian leaders? The US President is basically openly supporting Vladimir Putin.

On the one hand, they have a huge opportunity. So far, it has been a great power that has put its faith in democratic values, but not the others. Now that this can no longer be said of the US, anyone who thinks that democracy is for losers is emboldened. Even Americans don't care about democracy, so why should we?

On the other hand, if we look specifically at it from Hungary's point of view, how Hungary will guarantee its own security is a huge question. If America ceases to be the guarantor of Europe's security and a new European defence pact emerges in which Hungary does not participate, it will become very vulnerable. It looks as if there will be European defence cooperation, with Ukraine certainly at the centre of it, and there is a good chance that Turkey will be too. This could create a defence arc from Oslo to Ankara, but Hungary could fall outside this defence structure.The time seems to be over when Hungary was sitting comfortably in the EU, receiving EU funds and sitting comfortably in NATO, doing what it wanted, whether it was pro-Russian or pro-China. In this case, however, we really need to think about how the country can and wants to defend itself.

How do you see Ukraine's situation in a Trump-torn world?

Ukraine has been going through the most intense disruption possible for 10 years, then the last three years, so their capacity to adapt is higher.

Many people are just shrugging it off, it's just another shitstorm, another disaster, nothing to see here. It's often likened to a computer game, the next challenge is coming up, you're in survival mode, you're not thinking about how to live, you're thinking about how to survive. Trump is a bigger shock, I think, to the committed Euro-Atlantists who have always been worried about Ukraine, but they were living in a safe world that has now fallen apart. For Germany, for example, it must have been a big shock, but from that point of view the Ukrainians were in a completely different place. Of course, there will still be serious repercussions from Trump's decisions, the Americans are 'only' providing twenty percent of the arms supplies, but that is the most important twenty percent, including air defence and intelligence.

How will the information war between Russia and Ukraine be affected by Trump's decisions?

The Russians have already started shifting: it is no longer America that is the main enemy, but Europe. A few days ago, Sergei Lavrov said that all the evil in history has come from Europe. We can only guess what Trump's vision of the world is, but it is clearer than ever that he does not like Europe and the European Union. ?You'll probably see Russia and America descending on Europe trying to break Europe's cohesion. Russia will reorientate all the effort it took against America and point it towards Europe and Britain, especially in order to undermine the new defense compact. And we'll see where Hungary plays in that game.

Did you mention Britain because they are trying to take the lead in the new European defence initiatives?

Yes. If you take Britain and Germany out, there is nothing. Of course the Russians will try everywhere, but these two countries will be the main targets.

The democratic processes evolved in a very different world, but today we live in a very different technological state, where the role of information has changed. Some argue that the information age is a playground for authoritarian regimes, while a healthy and functional democracy is very difficult to maintain in such an environment.

This is a very important issue. The same point was raised in early twentieth century America, when many people - including many Americans - thought that America was too big, too chaotic to be governed by a system that was basically tailored to quite rural states back in the eighteenth century, where you had small towns, everybody knew each other. Some of the American intellectuals at the time said that it should be left in the hands of technocratic elites. Totalitarians had their own answers to this dilemma.

?And you have a repeat of this argument now. Some in Silicon Valley, for example Peter Thiel says democracy is incompatible with economic freedom. It's too chaotic. People are too vulnerable; people are too easily misled. The only way to organize society is several business monopolies deciding everything.

The Chinese make the same argument, checks and balances are too inefficient and in a high data society you need centralized control.

It is true: democracy is not effective. But the alternative is even worse, even less effective. I agree that the democratic process should be updated, at least if we want to preserve the spirit of liberal democracy.

In the media, too, we need to think about how we can organise the public in a more proactive way, how we can create tech platforms that promote real debate and not give space to online mobs that then attack the liberal media. What is the role of journalism in this? I think journalists can do amazing things, especially in a repressive environment like Hungary, but the media and democracy are disconnected.

Sociologists have been talking about this for some time. If you ask someone how they feel about democracy, very often the answer is "they feel they are not getting anything out of it". It's like throwing money into a slot machine and winning nothing. They no longer feel that connection, the leaders in Washington are distant from them. Strangely enough, they trust companies more, they can call them if they want something, someone there will pick up the phone or answer an email, so they get some kind of reaction, they feel the connection. In that sense, the link between people and the democratic mechanisms is broken, and propaganda reinforces that. This is certainly a crisis phenomenon, since it is precisely the lack of this connection that makes people more open to authoritarian explanations. Democracy is unsatisfactory for them, but if they see and feel that there is a leader who defeats enemies, cuts off foreign aid, and messes with Canada, for example, they can emotionally connect with him, they feel that they too have the capacity to act, the agency. In this way, authoritarian leaders offer a different sense of identification and fulfilment.

Do you see this as being because they understand people better?

Yes, they are really good at it.

 Why?

On the one hand, authoritarian propaganda has always been very good at this. That's what my latest book is about, that people's feelings are articulated through the authoritarian leader. He or she, the authoritarian leader, becomes the conductor of people's thinking and emotions, often the worst emotions.

 You mentioned that the media and democracy are disconnected.

I am not talking about the Hungarian situation, because here the state puts much more direct pressure than in the United States or Britain. In the US, for various economic reasons, the media have decided to focus only on their own little bubble, and satisfy them. Take the New York Times, for example, which has chosen to write for liberals in America and around the world, it doesn't want to be everyone's newspaper, they are for a well-defined section of society who feel they have an identity. A media that serves identities in this way almost automatically cuts itself off from the rest of society.

Investigative journalism is the essence of journalism, but even there you have to choose investigations .Let's say you have twenty topics, you have to choose the one that actually resonates. You always have to think about the public, and in some cases this may mean giving up the obsession with neutrality and looking at journalism as a kind of social service, which is in many ways the opposite. In this respect, much more thought should be given to how what is written will affect citizens who are distanced from politics.

The objective media emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in order to set the media aside from the polarisation that was taking place at the time.We may be going round in circles, history repeating itself, and the world needs to move towards activist type of journalism, I don't know. In any case, it is clear that we need to reach out more to the section of society that is disillusioned with politics.

But there is also the almighty algorithm. What do you think about its role and its future?

It is very important. First, its regulation. We have more information than ever before, but we don't know how it's formed, what's happening in the background, it's a paradox. Since Musk's political involvement, the Ukrainian voices have disappeared from X, we don't know how, we don't know who decides and how. Editorial decisions are being made. There should definitely be full transparency here, if ?it is a political partisan machine, it should be as a ?political partisan machine. If they operate as a publisher, they should also be treated as a publisher, and that again calls for different regulation.

Related to that, the other thing I would like to emphasise is the support for alternative platforms. The Internet must not be appropriated by a few American oligarchs with weird ideas about politics. It is perfectly fine for them to have a point of view, a 'voice', but it should not be the only one. The funding of this is a huge issue. You can set up a public service algorithm, but it hasn’t worked anywhere outside Scandinavia and Britain in my opinion. Can this be some kind of philanthropic enterprise, do we give financial incentives, do we tax for-profit initiatives to distribute to non-profits? There are so many possibilities, I don't know the right solution, but it needs to be addressed.