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How Trump Killed the Atlantic Alliance：And How the Next President Can Restore It

By Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro

SnapshotFebruary 26, 2019 TrumpAdministration

特朗普是如何扼杀大西洋联盟的:继任总统如何才能修复它，外交事务网站20190226

 

The Atlantic alliance as we know it is dead. The end ofthe Cold War, the United States’ growing weariness of global burdens, and apreoccupation with domestic affairs on both sides of the ocean had alreadyweakened transatlantic bonds when the presidency of Donald Trump inflicted the deathblow.

A future U.S. administration, even one that is moresympathetic to the idea of alliances, will be unable to restore the oldalliance. If a new alliance is to emerge from the ashes of the past, it must beone based on a more realistic bargain between Europe and the United States, andone that better addresses the needs of both partners. The alliance is dead;long live the alliance.

 

AUTOPSY

 The alliance died slowly, then all at once.For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, European leaders behaved likeabused spouses, mistreated but afraid to leave, hoping against hope that thingswould improve. Faced with overwhelming evidence that Trump did not believe in theconcept of alliances and viewed Europe more as a rival than a partner, theyclung to the vain hope that the “adults in the room”—the experienced foreignpolicy advisers around Trump—would restrain the president’s worst instincts.Some Americans buttressed this fantasy by imploring Europeans to pay moreattention to Trump’s policies than his tweets and to take comfort in thepresident’s reassuring personnel choices, particularly that of Secretary ofDefense James Mattis.

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There will be no transatlantic alliance under Trump. 

To keep Trump on side, European leaders flattered him.British Prime Minister Theresa May held his hand and offered him a state visit.French President Emmanuel Macron pretended to be his best friend and invitedhim to a big military parade in Paris. German Chancellor Angela Merkel heldfirm on values but studiously avoided policy disputes. The President of theEuropean Commission Jean-Claude Juncker came to Washington and helped createthe appearance of a trade victory for Trump without making any realcommitments. None of these approaches worked. Flattering Trump bought only amomentary respite; his determination to stop letting Europe “take advantage ofthe United States” was implacable.   

The European fantasy held—more or less—for Trump’s firsttwo years, but reality is now setting in. There will be no transatlanticalliance under Trump. Having watched Trump in action, only 27 percent of peoplein the United Kingdom, ten percent in Germany, nine percent in France, andseven percent in Spain have confidence in the U.S. president to do the rightthing when it comes to global affairs. Majorities in France and Germany trustChina and Russia more than they do the United States and favorable views of theUnited States are down by double digits across the continent. Even Atlanticistleaders such as Merkel have concluded that Europe “must take its destiny in itsown hands,” although neither she nor anyone else has yet figured out what thatwould entail.

Trump’s policies could scarcely have been better designedto undermine the alliance had that been their objective. Trump started offhis presidency by abandoning the Paris climate pact, signaling that the UnitedStates would refuse to cooperate on an issue that most Europeans see as anexistential threat. He then made a habit of questioning NATO’s Article 5guarantee of mutual defense, the central pillar of European security for thepast 70 years. The United States, he has declared, might not defend Europeanallies that refuse to “pay their bills.” 

In May 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of theIran nuclear deal. Every country in Europe wanted to preserve it. Those thatco-negotiated the deal—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the EU—bentover backwards to meet Trump’s demands that the arrangement be “fixed.” Butafter months of negotiations, Trump pulled the plug anyway, threatening theUnited States’ closest trading partners with sanctions. Later in May, Trumpannounced tariffs on European steel and aluminum. He has threatened toimpose similar taxes on automobile imports, under the absurd pretext of theneed to defend “national security,” a threat that prompted Merkel to remind himlast week that many of the German cars Americans buy are built in SouthCarolina.

In December, Trump sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo toBrussels to deliver a withering assault on the very concept of multilateralism.Speaking in the EU capital, Pompeo excluded the EU from the short list ofmultilateral organizations the United States considered effective, invokedBrexit as a healthy “wake-up call” for the bloc, and implied that “bureaucratsin Brussels” put their own interests ahead of those of their countries andcitizens. Trying to put an intellectual framework around Trump’s aggressivenationalism, Pompeo asserted the “central role of the nation-state” andmaintained that the United States’ mission was to “reassert oursovereignty.” Essentially declaring America’s intention to act however it sawfit, and reminding his audience of principles that, when abused, once lefttheir continent in flames was an odd way to rally European support for the“central leadership role in the world” to which he said the Trumpadministration was returning. 

A few weeks later, as if to demonstrate what his versionof sovereignty looked like, Trump suddenly announced plans to withdraw all U.S.troops from Syria without consulting or even informing the United States’European partners in the fight against the Islamic State (or ISIS). This suddenmove took even Trump’s top officials by surprise. But that did not preventthose same officials from later requesting that European countries replace U.S.forces and that they accept detained ISIS fighters whom the United States wouldnot take. Last week Trump reversed course yet again, saying some U.S. troopswould remain, but Europeans remain wary of joining them, unsure what the nexttweet might say. With such a confrontational, unreliable, and unpredictablepartner in Washington, the question should not be why Europeans are now turningaway from the United States but why it took them so long to do so.

To be fair, Trump has maintained and even increased someelements of transatlantic cooperation. He implemented President Barack Obama’sdecision to deploy more U.S. defense assets to Eastern Europe, sent arms toUkraine, and signed—grudgingly—legislation sanctioning Russia for interferingin U.S. elections and trying to assassinate a former spy in the United Kingdom.But these were all rearguard actions, engineered, sometimes against Trump’swill, either by Congress or by people no longer in the administration. Now,having lost his majority in Congress and turning to foreign policy forpolitical victories, as many presidents have before him, Trump is acting morein line with his own instincts. That is bad news for Europe.

The “adults in the room” are gone, too. Rex Tillerson,the former secretary of state, H. R. McMaster, the former national securityadviser, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, and James Kelly, theformer chief of staff, all had a traditional view of alliances and tried toshow a degree of independence from the president; all have been forced out ofthe administration. In a stunning rebuke of Trump’s world view, Mattis’resignation letter underlined the importance of “treating allies with respect”and Mattis’ conviction, obviously not shared by the president, that “ourstrength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique andcomprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”    

With the departure of those officials, Trump is nowsurrounded by people, such as national security adviser John Bolton, who eithershare his preference for unilateralism or are willing to bury their own viewsto please their boss. Vice President Mike Pence’s obsequious praise for Trump—a“champion of freedom,” apparently—in a speech at the Munich Security Conferencein February seemed to be aimed at an audience of one. And his expectation thatan audience largely made up of Europeans would applaud at the mention of “the45th President of the United States” suggests that the administration isoblivious to the damage it has done. 

Pompeo, in turn, had to swallow hard and defend Trump’sdecision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria (a “change of tactics but not ofstrategy”) as well as Trump’s unwillingness to confirm that the United Stateswould automatically come to the defense of NATO allies. When asked in Januaryif the United States would uphold Article 5 for NATO member Montenegro, Pompeorefused to “get into hypotheticals.” The United States’ European alliespreviously believed that a U.S. treaty commitment was not hypothetical—indeed,the guarantee was created to deter aggression by taking the ambiguityaway. 

 

THE ALLIANCEIS DEAD

The United States and Europe have clashed before. Indeed,the history of the alliance is a history of splits. In 1956, during the SuezCrisis, the United States deliberately undermined a war that France and theUnited Kingdom had started. In Vietnam, European countries refused tosupport an American war. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Europeand the United States argued over gas pipelines from Russia and U.S. missilesin Europe. During the Clinton administration, Americans and Europeansfought about trade, and about U.S. sanctions on European business with Cuba,Iran, and Libya. The George W. Bush administration pursued policies on Iraq,missile defense, and climate change, provoking European critiques similar tothose made of the Trump administration today.  

Yet there is something fundamentally different about thecurrent crisis. This is not merely due to the absence of a shared threat fromthe Soviet Union. Whatever their differences with Europe, all previous U.S.presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, believed that the alliance withEurope mattered. Americans valued European support. 

This president is different. He doesn’t believe inalliances, treaty commitments, loyalty, or the value of Europeanpartners. For the Trump administration, U.S. “leadership” means the UnitedStates doing what it wants, and transatlantic “unity” means Europeans doingwhat the United States tells them to do. During Bush’s second term, afterthe Iraq disaster, the United States returned to a more multilateral approach,in part out of a recognition that it had to keep the Europeans on board and inpart to spur Europe to contribute more to U.S. efforts. There will be nosimilar pivot under Trump. On the contrary, Europeans will realize theyhave to rely more on themselves, as Merkel and others have said. Such a “Europefirst” policy, whether in the form of trade retaliation, independent energyinitiatives such as the Nordstream 2 pipeline with Russia, financialinstruments created to avoid U.S. sanctions, or joint efforts with China tocounter the United States in international forums, will only exacerbatetensions with Washington.    

 

LONG LIVETHE ALLIANCE

So, is the transatlantic breach permanent? Notnecessarily. The old relationship is dead, but a new one can emerge. Trump hashis fervent supporters, but many in the United States still recognize theimportance of allies. According to recent polls taken by the Chicago Council onGlobal Affairs, 91 percent of Americans say the United States is more effectivewhen it works with allies, and the share of Americans who support an “activeU.S. role in world affairs” has actually risen under Trump, from 63 to 70percent. Seventy-three percent of Americans believe it is more important to beadmired in the world than feared. Solid majorities want the United States toparticipate in the Paris Climate accord (68 percent) and the Iran nuclear deal(66 percent), and 75 percent want to see the United States maintain or increaseits commitment to NATO.  In part as a result, all the major Democraticcandidates in the coming presidential election will run on restoring alliancesand adopting policies that align with European preferences on issues such asIran, climate change, and arms control.

That said, Europeans cannot just wait Trump out. He couldwin in 2020, and if he does, the alliance could be reborn as a populist,nationalist, and racist partnership between the United States and governmentsin Hungary, Poland, Italy, or others. Such a transatlantic alliance, one basedon the shared values of hating Islam and immigrants, would not be worthhaving. 

Even if a Democrat wins in 2020 there will be no goingback to the way things were. A Democratic president will be morepositively disposed toward cooperation with Europe, but deeper trends willcontinue to make the United States a demanding partner. Declining U.S.relative power, the accumulating costs of military deployments, and competitionwith China and other powers will increasingly challenge the American public’swillingness to bear the burdens of global leadership.  

Trump’s policy toward Europe was in this sense a symptom,if an extreme one, of a deeper disease. No future U.S. president will beelected on a mandate of solidarity with Europe without being assured of gettingsomething in return. The next U.S. president will probably take a tough line ontrade and focus more on Asia and Latin America than on Europe. The UnitedStates need not become the angry, xenophobic bully of Europe’s worst fears, butneither will it be the transatlantic altruist of Europe’s nostalgic fantasies.

A new transatlantic alliance will require both aU.S. president who recognizes its value and Europeans who are able to overcometheir own internal divisions and commit to an equal partnership. The next alliancecannot be only about channeling U.S. contributions to European security; itmust also be a global partnership to which each side contributes in order toprotect their mutual security and economic interests. That sort of allianceremains possible. It is worth fighting for.