How to lose friends and alienate people
The US president’s revolting rhetoric costs much and gains little
In the history of political speech, few words will have cost so much and gained so little as Donald Trump’s remarks about his country’s closest allies. He told Fox News that he was “not sure” that NATO would come to the aid of the US “if we ever needed them”, adding: “We have never really asked anything of them.” He continued “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”
These ignorant, insulting remarks may appeal to his “America First” fans, who probably also believe that the US singlehandedly won the first and second world wars (they didn’t), having been in the fight from start to finish (they weren’t). But for the countries (30 NATO members and 21 partners) that came to the aid of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, when NATO for the first time in its history invoked its Article 5 collective defence clause, the president’s words were sickening.
For the record, of the 3,621 deaths among the coalition forces in Afghanistan, 2,461 were American. As so often, there is a splinter of uncomfortable truth in Trump’s remarks. Some countries (notably Germany, Italy, France and Spain) sent forces with at times heavy restrictions, “caveats”, on where and how they could be deployed (no night patrols, for example). Critics said ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) stood for “I Saw Americans Fight”.
The Americans therefore depended even more heavily on countries that sent uncaveated forces. The heaviest casualties (relative to the size of population) were from Georgia, Denmark, Britain and Estonia. They did not have vital national interests at stake in Afghanistan. They came because they were allies: if this war mattered to the United States, it mattered to them. They did not send invoices.
President Trump, notoriously, never apologises for anything, though after a rare public rebuke from Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, he issued a further statement lauding the British military; this only underlined his “don’t know, don’t care” attitude to the other allies. That almost nobody in the pro-Trump US commentariat notices or cares about their humiliation makes it even worse.
The insult concerns the past, but it shapes the future. NATO exists for one reason, to funnel American combat power into the defence of Europe. That relies on Congress to vote the necessary money, and the Pentagon to provide the people, plans and equipment needed to make that defence credible. But most of all it relies on the US president’s own character. As commander-in-chief, will he go to war to defend his allies? To take a specific example, if woken in the small hours to be told of a Russian provocation in, say, Norway, will he authorise the use of lethal force? Or will he mumble that he will phone Vladimir Putin in the morning and go back to sleep? A president who carelessly denigrates his allies’ sacrifices is hardly likely to risk war to defend them. Trump supporters say that the new, transactional transatlantic alliance is more realistic. But what use is a transaction when you cannot trust the other side to stick to the deal?
It is tempting to wallow in self-righteous outrage (see the preceding six paragraphs). But this will not bring the dead back to life, or restore limbs to the maimed. Better is for the European allies to pursue with grim, urgent determination the much-needed, much-overdue improvements to their national security: cohesion, resilience, defence and deterrence. The less we can rely on the Americans, the more we need these.