Three years ago, Nicola Sturgeon stood beside Nancy Pelosi in Washington, a guest of the US Government. At a press conference in the Capitol, Pelosi lavished praise on the then First Minister’s leadership on gender and climate. Sturgeon responded with tributes to American foreign policy in Ukraine—framed as the front line in a global struggle for democracy and shared values.
That moment has vanished. Last week, Donald Trump visited Scotland. John Swinney, a year into his premiership and already politically exhausted, dutifully appeared at the Trump-owned Turnberry resort. He was the least important figure in a procession of Western politicians now repositioning themselves for what lies ahead.
Much of significance took place during the visit. Most notably, a meeting between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saw Europe commit hundreds of billions to American arms and fossil fuels in exchange for “preferential” trade access. The price? 15% tariffs. This was not a negotiation but a submission. The European project, born under US hegemony and never independent of it, is now openly subordinate—ready to be rearmed and restructured in place.
Just days earlier, at the NATO summit in The Hague, all thirty-two member states signed on to a US-led demand to commit 5% of GDP to military spending. NATO, once a Cold War alliance and later the vessel of liberal interventionism, is being retooled once again—this time to force a top-down transformation of Western economies. The Ukraine war, plainly unwinnable, has become the mechanism through which Europe is being refashioned into a militarised platform for American global strategy. Allies are being turned into assets. Dissent is not on offer.
Scotland—never a sovereign state and increasingly unlikely to become one—is utterly exposed in this landscape. The SNP long posed as a junior partner in the liberal Atlantic order: never serious state-builders, but loyal ideological courtiers. Now, with no military-industrial base to offer and no sovereign levers to pull, Swinney stands quietly at the back of the queue. A few hundred thousand pounds for Trump’s golf course is the best he can muster—strategically irrelevant, symbolically degrading.
Disoriented, the SNP continues to speak of EU membership as if the European institutions still resembled those of a decade ago—even as they are reengineered in front of us. The party is caught between silence and sentimental appeals to a world that no longer exists. The moral language it once wielded now reads as theatre.
This is the context in which Swinney chose to launch yet another iteration of the independence strategy: a majority of seats at next year’s Holyrood election. At its core, the same hollow promise: that such a mandate could not be ignored by the British state and the international powers that be. It was never true. Even during the comparative stability of the last era, the idea that liberal states would dismantle a key member of NATO and the Western bloc on the strength of electoral sentiment was fantasy. In the present context, it is delusional. Strategic bankruptcy dressed up as resolve. Even loyal supporters can no longer pretend to believe it.
Beneath this, a deeper shift is unfolding. The United States can no longer guarantee the liberal order it once imposed. As multipolarity takes hold, the fiction of universal “progressive” values dissolves with it. What we call the “culture war”—the theatre of conflict between a moralising liberal centrism and a right-populist reaction—was never capable of describing the actual transformations underway. Nor was identification with either pole capable of confronting them. This was never about values. Gaza, if nothing else, has made that abundantly clear—a bloody continuity linking one era to the next.
We are witnessing a long-building convergence of interests across the Western ruling class. Trump is not an aberration—he is the figurehead of a necessary reorganisation of political life in a shifting global system. Liberal internationalism is being refitted to serve a more brutal, transactional phase of capitalist rule. The same elites who once styled themselves as moral guardians are now agents of the transition. It will require the dismantling of welfare states, the deepening of militarised economies, and a sharp erosion of working-class life.
The Scottish political class, once useful in representing the progressive illusions of a prior era, has no role in what comes next. It is neither equipped to grasp the scale of the changes, nor willing to intervene in the crises they produce. It retreats instead into nostalgic spectacle, ritualistic slogans, and empty gestures. On the ground, the spectacle has worn thin. The contradictions are sharpening. For us, a new period is opening—and it will not be kind to illusions.
