The U.S. and its allies
The U.S. government under Trump has rattled NATO allies for years by demanding that they pay more into the organization. Trump has imposed tariffs on most of his closest allies as he has deemed them free loaders and taking advantage of the U.S. This is happening under the MAGA America First umbrella and has resulted in a divide between the U.S. and its traditional allies, potentially with the exception of Israel. This week, Trump reached out to his allies like the UK and France and others, wanting them to help keeping the Strait of Hormuz safe for international trade and shipping. He has met with silence and it seems that other countries don’t want to get dragged into the war with Iran.
According to the European, the absence of restraint is matched by the administration’s boastful contempt for international law. Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, exults in the violence. The U.S. will wage war on its own terms and seems to be in line with Israel’s targeted bombing raids and going after leaders one by one. European voters have been more willing than their leaders to recognize the new America. One where the glamour and glitz of Hollywood make way for the ugliness of troops on the streets and masked ICE militias scouring them for immigrants. It has not gone unnoticed that Trump’s answer to climate change is to burn more fossil fuels. The opposite is Germany foolishly closing down all nuclear plants to appease the Green Party and is now struggling with exceptionally high energy prices and a rapidly declining industry as domestic production is getting too expensive.
Even before Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, one nine-country poll showed 48% of Europeans regard him as an enemy of Europe. A YouGov survey suggested Germans and Brits think the US is as big a danger to their security as Iran. Asked for an overall view of America, between 60 and 70% of voters in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain say it is unfavorable.
There are durable alliances between nations, and there are ententes and pacts. The first of these identify common ground that reaches beyond coincident security and economic concerns to shared goals for regional or international order. Alliances link interests to values. The second group are transactional arrangements, recognizing common threats and ambitions but blind to principle. Remember Britain’s attempt to strike a deal with Benito Mussolini in 1938? My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Screen out the cacophony from the White House and you still hear European leaders proclaim that NATO has been the most successful alliance in history. They once had a point. It worked by marrying hard-headed national interests to the shared belief that Soviet communism posed an existential threat to western democracy. This month marks the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Peace speech at Missouri’s Westminster College. Churchill was a pragmatist rather than a wishy-washy liberal. His concern was to preserve Britain’s status at the top table of world affairs. But he saw the opportunity for postwar peace. Atlanticism, he declared, rested on more than collective military power. It spoke to the great principles of freedom and the rights of man… which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
NATO would put vaulting commitments to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, the pillars of what became known as the rules-based international system, to the service of the west’s strategic interests. The liberal democracies would face down communism from the moral high ground.
Practice and principle sometimes diverged, of course. The U.S. did not always honor its own rules. Europe looked the other way when America embroiled itself in Indo-China and when the CIA toppled democracies in Latin America, mostly as the overall enemy was communism. As for cultural collisions, middle America’s jarring attachment to guns, private health and the death penalty, Europeans chose to ignore them. The Americans they sat down with were like-minded folk from the Ivy League east coast. Europe ignored the rougher, tougher frontier America.
Occasionally, see-no-evil silence hardened into defiance, as with Franco-German opposition to the Iraq War. But by and large, Europe’s judgement, informed as much by self-interest as high mindedness, was that there was sufficient moral cement to hold the relationship together. After all, the US guaranteed the continent’s security.
That world has gone. Europe was relying on the U.S. for too long and did not pay what they should have to contribute to the alliance. Trump seems to prefer autocrats to what he sees as weak European democrats. The notion of territorial integrity, the keystone of European security, has been consigned to the White House dustbin, mostly because Trump is a realist. The U.S. has a president who is willing to wage war. The Europeans need to recognize that the new American nationalism also reflects a profound structural shift.
The U.S. was happy to sign up to a law-based international order for as long as it could set the rules to its own advantage. The soaring rhetoric about values was useful flummery. But American power is now contested, not least by China. Beijing demands its say in setting the terms of global order and have the power and means to do that. And power in Washington no longer belongs to a generation of east coast politicians who understood that an enduring alliance with Europe was a strength rather than a burden, but has rather fallen along the path of populism.
Americans and Europeans still have important shared interests, strategic as well as economic. And before too long, the U.S. may have a president who recognizes that few things would better serve China’s global ambitions than a retreat from Europe. But the idea of a permanent alliance rooted in the values of liberal democracy has run its course. The future is transactional, which seems to suit Trump, a place for pacts and deals.