The Daily Populous Saturday February 22nd, 2025 day edition
Authored by foreignpolicy.com and submitted by PapyrusKami74

Is this view correct? A skeptic might recall that there have been serious rifts in the transatlantic partnership on many prior occasions: over Suez in 1956, over nuclear strategy and Vietnam in the 1960s, over the Euromissiles issue in the 1980s, and during the Kosovo war in 1999. The Iraq war in 2003 was yet another low-water mark between Washington and much of Europe. The United States did not hesitate to act unilaterally on numerous occasions, even when its allies’ interests were adversely affected, as Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 or as Joe Biden did when he signed the protectionist Inflation Reduction Act and the United States forced European firms to stop some high-tech exports to China. But few Europeans or Canadians believed the United States was deliberately trying to harm them; they believed that Washington was genuinely committed to their security and understood that its own security and prosperity was tied to their own. They were right, which made it much easier for the United States to win their support when necessary.

A few weeks ago, I warned that the second Trump administration might be squandering the tolerance and good will that Washington had long received from the world’s major democracies. Instead of seeing the United States as a mostly positive force in world affairs, these states might now “ have to worry that the United States is actively malevolent.” That column was written before Vice President J.D. Vance gave his confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, before President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and before U.S. officials appeared to preemptively offer Russia almost everything it wants before negotiations on Ukraine were even underway. The reaction of mainstream European observers was neatly summed up by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times: “[T]he Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary.”

A few weeks ago, I warned that the second Trump administration might be squandering the tolerance and good will that Washington had long received from the world’s major democracies. Instead of seeing the United States as a mostly positive force in world affairs, these states might now “have to worry that the United States is actively malevolent.” That column was written before Vice President J.D. Vance gave his confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, before President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and before U.S. officials appeared to preemptively offer Russia almost everything it wants before negotiations on Ukraine were even underway. The reaction of mainstream European observers was neatly summed up by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times: “[T]he Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary.”

For most European leaders—and certainly for those in attendance at Munich last week—the situation feels very different today. For the first time since 1949, they have valid reasons to believe that the president of the United States is not just indifferent to NATO and dismissive of Europe’s leaders, but actively hostile to most European countries. Instead of thinking of the nations of Europe as America’s most important partners, Trump appears to have switched sides and sees President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a better long-term bet. Speculation about Trump’s affinity with Putin has been swirling for years; those sympathies now appear to be guiding U.S. policy.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t Trump just doing what realists like you have been suggesting? Haven’t you been saying that Ukraine has no plausible path to regaining its lost territory and that prolonging the war is just prolonging suffering to no good purpose? Didn’t you also argue that basing a European security order on open-ended NATO expansion was a dangerous pipe dream? Instead of pushing Russia and China closer together, doesn’t it make good strategic sense to drive a wedge between them and fashion a European order that reduces Moscow’s incentives to cause trouble? Indeed, wouldn’t a better relationship with Russia make Europe safer in the long run? And if disrupting the comfortable transatlantic consensus convinces the nations of Europe to get their act together and rebuild some real defense capability, then the United States won’t have to keep protecting them and can focus more effort on China. In this view, Trump isn’t Europe’s enemy; he’s just dispensing some tough love to a complacent continent and following good realist logic.

If only that were true. In fact, Trump, Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other administration officials have gone well beyond the long-standing disputes about burden-sharing, the need for a more sensible division of labor within the alliance, or the long-overdue reassessment about how to handle the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia. Their aim is to fundamentally transform relations with long-standing U.S. allies, rewrite the global rulebook, and, if possible, remake Europe along MAGA lines. That agenda is openly hostile to the existing European order.

First, Trump’s repeated threats to impose costly tariffs on close allies either to coerce concessions on other issues or solely because they are running trade surpluses with the United States is hardly an act of friendship. Serious trade disputes have occurred in the past, of course, and prior U.S. presidents have sometimes played hardball with our allies on these issues. But they have not done so capriciously or used transparently dubious “national security” rationales to justify them. They have also recognized that inflicting deliberate economic harm on one’s allies makes it harder, not easier, for them to contribute to the common defense. Past administrations have also stuck to the deals they negotiated, a concept that seems utterly alien to Trump.

Second, not only has Trump made it clear that he thinks great powers can and should take things they want, but he has made no secret of the fact that he covets some of our allies’ possessions. No wonder Trump is not troubled if Russia ends up with 20 percent of Ukraine, given that he wants all of Greenland; may reoccupy the Panama Canal Zone; thinks Canada should give up its independence and become the 51st state; and raves about taking over the Gaza Strip, expelling its population, and then building some hotels. Some of these musings might seem utterly fanciful, but the worldview they reveal is something no foreign leader can afford to ignore.

Third, and most important, Trump, Elon Musk, Vance, and the rest of the MAGA team are openly backing illiberal forces in Europe. In effect, they are trying to impose a far-reaching regime change throughout Europe, albeit without using military force. The signs are unmistakable: Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a welcome guest at Mar-a-Lago. Vance met withAlice Weidel, co-chair of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, while he was in Munich, but not with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and his declaration that the main challenge to Europe was “the threat from within” was an unveiled attack on the continent’s political order. (It was beyond ironic for Vance to criticize Europeans for anti-democratic behavior, given his refusal to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election or to condemn the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. But I digress.) Not to be outdone, Musk has been spewing his own false and hateful accusations at various European leaders, defending far-right criminals like Tommy Robinson, and interviewing Weidel and expressing his own support for her party.

Despite a few differences on certain issues, the MAGA movement and most far-right parties in Europe generally opposealmost all forms of immigration; are skeptical to hostile toward the European Union; see elites, media, and higher education as the enemy; want to reimpose traditional religious values and gender norms; and believe citizenship should be defined by shared ethnicity or ancestry and not by shared civic values or one’s birthplace. Like their fascist predecessors, they are comfortable with and adept at using the norms and institutions of democracy to subvert democratic rule and strengthen executive power. Sound familiar?

Rachman’s assessment that the United States is now an adversary of Europe is only partly correct, therefore, because Trump and his minions support European far-right nationalist movements that share their basic worldview. They are hostile to a vision of Europe as a model of democratic governance, social welfare, openness, the rule of law, political, social, and religious tolerance, and transnational cooperation. One might even say that they would like America and Europe to have similar values; the problem is that the values they have in mind are incompatible with genuine democracy.

Trump and co. think treating Europe as an enemy risks little, because they believe Europe is a declining region and incapable of getting its act together. Undermining efforts to strengthen European unity by backing the far right also makes it easier for Washington to play divide-and-rule. On the other hand, openly bullying other countries tends to encourage national unity and a greater willingness to resist (as we are now seeing in Canada), and the chaos Trump and Musk have been unleashing here in the United States may make Europeans wary of trying similar experiments at home.

It is also worth remembering that the initial push for European economic integration occurred in the 1950s, when European leaders believed the United States was going to withdraw its forces from the continent in the not-too-distant future and turn responsibility for European security back over to these states. Integrating key industries such as coal and steel was thus a first step to building sufficient economic and political unity to enable these states to stand up to the Soviet Union without direct U.S. assistance. The United States ultimately decided to keep its forces on the continent and the European Economic Community (and later EU) took on more openly economic and political objectives, but the early history reminds us that the prospect of having to go it alone was once a powerful driving force behind greater European cooperation.

Finally, if America is now an adversary, Europe’s leaders should stop asking themselves what they need to do to keep Uncle Sam happy and start asking what they must do to protect themselves. If I were them, I’d start by inviting more trade delegations from China and start developing alternatives to the SWIFT system of international financial payments. European universities should increase collaborative research efforts with Chinese institutions, a step that will become even more attractive if Trump and Musk continue to damage academic institutions in the United States. End Europe’s dependence on U.S. weapons by rebuilding Europe’s own defense industrial base. Send EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas to the next BRICS summit and consider applying for membership. And so forth.

Because all of these steps would be costly for Europe and harmful for the United States, I don’t want to see any of them actually happen. But Europe may be given little choice. Although I’ve long thought the transatlantic relationship was past its high-water mark and that a new division of labor was needed, the goal should have sought to preserve a high level of transatlantic amity rather than encourage open hostility. If Trump’s diplomatic revolution turns 450 million Europeans from being some of America’s staunchest allies into bitter and resentful adversaries increasingly looking for ways to hinder the United States, we will have only ourselves—or, more precisely, the current president—to blame.

DoYaLikeDegs on February 22nd, 2025 at 11:48 UTC »

A little hyperbolic, no?

2Crest on February 22nd, 2025 at 05:59 UTC »

Did Putin write this headline?

Professional-Pin5125 on February 22nd, 2025 at 05:43 UTC »

Americans are truly living up to their stupid stereotype by committing geopolitical suicide in the space of one month.