Donald Trump’s careless words are rapidly destroying the transatlantic alliance
When marriage rows turn to violent threats, or worse, the children cower wide-eyed and helpless, and trust shrivels. You can sweep up the broken crockery, but you cannot unsay the harsh words, or forget them. That is the state of the Atlantic alliance following the extraordinary upsets of the past few weeks.
Some are still in denial. At a recent off-the-record session at an international security conference, I watched four highly educated, well-informed guests from the United States trying to help their European hosts understand Donald Trump. All had worked for him in the past. None of them would directly defend his threat to annex Greenland by force. But they would not condemn it either. Indeed they dismissed European anxieties as ill-informed. “Read ‘The Art of the Deal’” said one. Key tactics include:
- Aim High & Push: Start with extreme demands and relentlessly push for them.
- Create Leverage: Use threats to make the other side feel they need the deal
- Maintain Options: Control, sell, buyout – it doesn’t matter. The goal is profit.
- Use Showmanship: Unconventional actions frame the narrative. Who cares what people say?
And that indeed seems to be an accurate explanation of the US president’s tactics over Greenland, both in terms of direct pressure on the authorities in Nuuk and Copenhagen, and of the blustering threats against NATO allies that dare to show solidarity with them. The answer—supposedly—is to keep calm and work on a counter-offer. Suggest something quick, showy and symbolic: a “Fort Trump” military base in Greenland, for example. Bog everything else down in process; get the lawyers involved, let the president’s attention wander to a new topic, and life will go on.
Except it won’t. Trust is built over decades and sacrificed in days. Trump’s tactics may be well-suited to a real estate deal. But they are no basis for an alliance where you expect other countries to make sacrifices and bear risks in a common cause. If the United States now appealed to its European allies to contribute to a military intervention in a faraway country, Venezuela, say, how many of them would respond? When the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, allies sent their men and women to die and be maimed, chiefly because they saw it as an essential act of transatlantic solidarity. You show up for the Americans, and they will show up for you.
The new era is different. Trump says (sometimes) that the US will honour its Article 5 obligations to allies that pay. That created corrosive uncertainty (how much exactly, paid when and spent on what?). Now a new condition is looming, exemplified in Trump’s extraordinary threatening letter to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. Don’t object to anything the administration does, ever, anywhere.
Another big change: even in the toughest times of the Cold War, Europeans and the US shared a threat perception: the Soviet Union was an enemy. Trump barely sees Russia as a threat to the US, and cares even less that it threatens Europe.
Alliances, like marriages, are always a mixture of trust and transactionalism. But push the trust too far, and it frays. Deliberately insult it, and the trust goes very quickly. Europeans can be faulted for testing American patience over decades. But “she made me do it” is no excuse for domestic violence, or for this.
The analogy is not exact: marriages don’t feature mid-term elections and four-year presidential terms. But like countless battered spouses over the centuries, Europeans now have to decide between humiliation (and the prospect of continued abuse) and starting a new life elsewhere.
Edward Lucas is a British writer, journalist, and security specialist.
Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash