Lord Peter Mandelson has not always been a fan of Donald Trump. The long-time member of the British Labour Party and former cabinet minister, has variously referred to the American president as a “bully, ” “little short of a white nationalist and racist” and as “reckless and a danger to the world.”
He has now changed his tune, saying recently, ”I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong. I think that times and attitudes toward the president have changed.”
Mandelson’s new tune comes on the event of his being appointed as the UK’s ambassador to Washington. So perhaps he is simply adapting to the diplomatic ways of his new job. And he was a a close ally and trusted adviser to Tony Blair who was infamous for pandering to the Yanks, so he learned from a master.
In any case, he is practically gushing in his conversion. Referring to how Trump might consider his earlier remarks, he said, “I think, you know, the president is a nice person, he’s a fair-minded person, and that’s why I feel quite confident.” Seriously, he actually called Trump a “nice, fair-minded person.”
This about-face is common in the case of Trump. Many Republicans were scathing about the man’s character when he first ran for president. Some of the choice expressions applied by Republican politicians at various times include “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” “despicable human being,” “narcissist,” “not very smart, irascible, nasty, ” and “beyond erratic.” Nonetheless, those same Republicans, at least those who stayed in politics, came to sit at Trump’s feet.
This seems to be something of a pattern with demagogues. First their subjects resist, then they submit. Perhaps they win them over with their irresistible charm, or perhaps they intimidate them into accepting that it is safer, perhaps even profitable, to submit.
Seeing Mandelson won over reminded me of another British government playing nice with a demagogue on the march. Almost a century ago, Neville Chamberlain’s government offered Adolf Hitler a piece of Czechoslovakia to achieve “peace in our time.” I’m not suggesting Mandelson would help Trump get all the pieces of other people’s property he’d like, but the eras are starting to look disturbingly similar.
The players are different, but the plays are starting to resemble each other. In Europe a growing right-wing populism verging on fascism is fed by economic uncertainty and anti-immigrant bigotry. An Eastern European power seeks to dominate its neighbours. A great power in Asia races to match the West in military might and add to its territory, while ominously reminding its neighbours that it is a big country and they are little countries.
And most disturbing of all, once again a Western power proclaims its version of Lebensraum. This time it is, of all nations, the United States. The leader of the democratic world—or is it former leader of the democratic world?—suddenly returns the international order to pre-WWII status by announcing an imperialist agenda and caring not a whit for diplomatic norms or international law.
As author David Wallace-Wells has put it, Trump would like to replace the moralistic post-war order with “the principle that global chaos opens up opportunity for great powers long hemmed in by convention and deference.”
Lord Mandelson’s genuflection reminds us of times past and perhaps offers a harbinger of things to come. And this time we are in the firing line. So much for “never again.”