Question: [In 2025, U.S. President] Donald Trump ... jump started major changes in the global security order, Russia's war against Ukraine continues, and populism is rising across Europe. How would you evaluate these first steps of the new era?
Timothy Garton Ash: The triple shock: the Putin shock, what I call the Xi Jinping shock, and now the Trump shock means that we are in the deepest crisis Europe has been in for a very long time, in some respects, since 1945.
But it also means that we all know that in Europe.
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There's a long-term trend of the United States becoming less committed to and less engaged in Europe, which started already after the end of the Cold War. It was happening under the Democrats and under the Republicans. It's turning either to what (Barack) Obama called nation-building at home, or the pivot to Asia.
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First of all, we never really had a unipolar world. Even the U.S.-led liberal international order was only a large part of the world. It worked because the United States was what the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry calls a "Liberal Leviathan."
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So I believe that if we are to preserve what's left of the liberal international order, which is not a great deal, it's up to us as Europeans, but also other liberal democratic partners.
Canada becomes much more important to us. Australia becomes important to us. Japan becomes important to us. In other words, there's a whole new constellation of liberal international order — if you like, a new West.
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Our role is to defend ourselves and to look after what we've achieved in Europe over the last 80 years. That means defending ourselves against external enemies or challenges. Obviously, Vladimir Putin's Russia in the first place, but also China in a different way, and other powers.
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[We Europeans need to] preserve at least some elements of what we call the liberal international order — for example, a free trading world, an international economic order. The EU is a regulatory superpower. Can we preserve some of those shared regulations around the world?
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I would say the forces of integration and disintegration [Ash mentions right-wing populism in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Czech Republic] in Europe are quite finely balanced at the moment.
We have to be tough on populism and tough on the causes of populism. We have to fight the nationalist populist and make a convincing case to our public for a different approach.
But we also have to understand why they continue to get large numbers of votes. For example, the sense that large parts of our societies have been both economically and culturally neglected in the name of liberalism.
And we need to show that we care, we're actually doing something for them economically, that culturally we don't just care about specific minorities in the name of multiculturalism, but we actually care about everyone in our societies.
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There's always been an anti-liberal Europe, as well as a liberal Europe throughout European history. And it's always been a great mistake to believe that the liberal Europe has prevailed once and for all. By the way, there are also liberal and anti-liberal forces in Ukraine, let's make no mistake about that.
The two things are intimately connected. It's very difficult to imagine Ukraine making a successful transition to a prosperous, sovereign, democratic European future if Europe is disintegrating next door. It's quite difficult to imagine a successful, liberal, democratic, integrated Europe if Ukraine is disintegrating next door.
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[History is] going to give us both hope and warnings.
The warning is that just when everybody takes things for granted, they start going wrong. [...] The hope is that we already have examples of successful liberal fightback [against anti-democratic tendencies]. The Polish (2023 parliamentary) election is a classic example of a (country) which had nearly gone in the direction of Hungary and an electoral-authoritarian, non-liberal regime, and then it came back.
The larger lesson is that you have these wave movements in history. We had what I would call a liberal democratic revolution across Europe and much of the world from the early 1970s to the 2000s. Now we have an anti-liberal counter-revolution. But with time, people start discovering that that doesn't deliver either.
In fact, it delivers even less. And if you look at the enormous demonstrations in Serbia, large demonstrations in Hungary in support of an opposition candidate, and in Turkey after the imprisonment of Mr. (Ekrem) Imamoglu, you see that the fightback also comes from the countries that have gone authoritarian.