French President Emmanuel Macron came to the White House this week and his old pal President Donald Trump didn’t even greet him at the door as the protocol requires for visiting world leaders. It’s not the most important norm that Trump has thrown in the garbage can in his first month in office but it’s a telling one. The president doesn’t consider it necessary to show respect to America’s traditional allies anymore. Macron might as well have been a door-to-door salesman.
They didn’t hold hands as much as they did in Trump’s first term but they did hold a couple of fairly congenial press avails in which the two leaders pretended to be friends and Macron very gently corrected Trump on a couple of his most egregious lies about Ukraine, namely that the U.S. had spent more than Europe on military aid to the war-torn country and that Ukraine had started the war. Overall, it didn’t seem to accomplish much since Trump has come to believe that he will be seen as a great peacemaker if he forces Ukraine to surrender to Russia while America’s erstwhile allies are coming to understand that he could not care less what they think about anything.
The post-WWII alliances are being tossed aside in favor of new ones with strongman leaders.
Macron is scheduled to debrief the European heads of state today, and tomorrow the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be at the White House to try another round which will likely have the same result. All this urgent diplomacy came after Trump accused France and the UK of not having done anything in three years to “end the war.” Macron called a crisis meeting of European leaders in Paris last week to discuss next steps. They’ll convene again this weekend after Starmer returns home to see where they stand.
I understand that they have to try, despite the writing being on the wall. After all, the alliances that were formed after WWII to ensure there would not be another catastrophic world war held together the peace, prosperity, and security of the last 80 years. Abruptly destroying them on the whim of a vengeful, 78-year-old would-be strongman whose definition of an ally is one that unquestionably does his bidding with no question of reciprocation is difficult to accept. But it seems they have no choice and the consequences are monumental.
One of the main purposes of the NATO alliance and the rest of the American security guarantees of the past 80 years was to ensure that the long-standing enmity between the nations involved in the two world wars would not compel them to re-arm and do it all again. The brief alliance between the U.S. and the Soviets to beat the Nazis didn’t last and the Cold War that ensued featured proxy wars all over the world as the two nuclear powers competed for influence. But that stand-off did manage to prevent the worst case scenario and the United States and its allies ultimately prevailed with the break-up of the Soviet Union accomplished without another massive conflagration.
That happened over 35 years ago now and it was not a ridiculous notion to think that a re-evaluation of that post-WWII world order was overdue. Even though Trump’s reasoning was puerile and uninformed, it wasn’t a completely outrageous request in his first term that Europe should pick up more of the tab for their national defense. America’s security umbrella was expensive and the world was changing so a pullback to allow others to take a bigger role wasn’t a totally crazy idea.
But then Russia invaded Ukraine and the logic of the NATO alliance was quite suddenly made relevant again. In fact, it was so relevant that countries that had long held back from joining the alliance, Finland and Sweden, were so alarmed by the Russian aggression that they finally joined up. The alliance agreed to supply Ukraine with the military supplies and arms it would need to defend itself, not merely out of sympathy but the knowledge that this kind of aggression was exactly how things had gotten out of control twice before. As it turns out 80 years isn’t very long in the great scheme of things after all.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is oblivious to all that and wouldn’t care anyway. For reasons no one may ever fully understand he has an almost preternatural affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin and seethes with resentment toward Europe. Given that it has elected Trump twice now, Europe is belatedly realizing that the U.S. is no longer a reliable ally and are speaking openly about arming up. The UK’s Starmer announced this week that they plan to substantially raise defense spending (at the expense of foreign aid) and Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz made it clear in a speech after the election last weekend that his country would no longer be dependent on the U.S. for its security.
Politico reported:
The Trump administration does not care about Europe and is aligning with Russia, said Merz, who is on course to become Germany’s new leader. The continent, he warned, must urgently strengthen its defenses and potentially even find a replacement for NATO — within months. […]
“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting said. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump’s statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”
You can’t blame them. But in light of the neo-fascist AfD coming in second in the recent election, you can’t blame some of us for feeling a little nervous about where that may lead. But we have only ourselves to blame.
He’s not wrong that the U.S. is aligning with Russia and they are right to be nervous as well. The sell-out of Ukraine began almost the moment Trump took office. He has excluded them (and the European allies) from “peace talks,” extorted natural resources as “compensation” for the money America has spent on its defense, demanded that Russia be allowed back in the G7, called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and said that Ukraine started the war. At the UN on Tuesday the U.S. joined Russia, Belarus and North Korea, in opposing a resolution condemning Moscow’s war against Ukraine. All of this has been done without asking anything of Russia. In fact, it comes with a promise to lift sanctions and work on joint economic ventures.
The post-WWII alliances are being tossed aside in favor of new ones with strongman leaders such as Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman. These are all based upon Trump’s personal admiration for their leaders, not any sort of strategic logic. The world has begun to accept that this is real and is adjusting accordingly.
The UK’s Financial Times published a mournful requiem for the great post-war alliance the other day which ended with these words:
After three generations of US leadership, it is always tempting to believe that Trump does not mean what he says. Perhaps this is a feint in some grand art of the deal. But allies and erstwhile friends must banish those self-soothing thoughts. With Trump, what you see is what you get. America has turned.
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