US President Donald Trump (l) and former Slovak premier Vladimír Mečiar (r) (source: TASR/AP )
Here’s a dated tableau: It’s April 2000, and I’m smoking a cigarette in an alcove of the World Trade Center in New York with Ivan Mikloš, the deputy prime minister of Slovakia. We’re both here for an investment conference. He’s touting his government’s new openness to the West, and I’m hawking subscriptions to The Slovak Spectator.
Some 25 years later on, turns out the twin towers weren’t the only things that proved ephemeral.
I don’t remember whether Mikloš and I spoke in English or in Slovak as we smoked. But we shared an appreciation for liberal democracy and for American stewardship, which at the time was helping Slovakia make up lost ground in its NATO and EU integration.
I also remember it was the first time I felt he saw me, despite our many previous interviews. Only here, in that colossal monument to U.S. power, did The Slovak Spectator perhaps finally make sense: As a cultural outpost of a benign America, like baseball in Japan.
Decades later, none of that matters following 9/11, the slow US disengagement from Europe and subsequently from liberal principles, culminating in US President Donald Trump’s MAGA revolution.
Looking back, I regret all my carping about corruption. Turns out the United States wasn’t as hot against it as they had us believe here in Bratislava. Too bad they didn’t tell us earlier; it might have spared some local miscreants a lot of heckling.
Ditto the adherence to budgetary discipline; the contributions to international peacekeeping; the need for arms control; or the concern for migrants in distress. All causes The Slovak Spectator took up, now in need of a patron.
These days, the twin towers no longer stand, and Washington has long lost interest in Bratislava. Mikloš is no longer deputy PM or even in politics; neither of us smoke, as far as I know. And instead of leaders of his stature, a cabal of scroungers rules Bratislava, truckling to Trump and to Moscow and consorting to keep each other out of jail.
But you know what? You’re still here, and so am I. And so, for that matter, is Ivan Mikloš, if someone can rescue him from his NGO dotage and convince him to do more than write querulous op-eds.
Doesn’t it remind you of 1997, back when I joined The Slovak Spectator? And didn’t we have some game?
Trump is America’s Vladimír Mečiar. Thanks to The Slovak Spectator, I know what that means; I know he can be beaten; and I know the recipe.
Which is, for anyone just joining: Giving a shit, and spreading the word.
