The Predatory Friend: Trump Treats Europe as Anything but an Ally
The New York Times
President Trump has shown a willingness to fracture the trans-Atlantic alliance with his tariffs and demands for higher military spending.
It was not long ago that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was marshaling European allies to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He illustrated the point that a top American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, recently summarized as the way the United States wins the global competition for power and prosperity: “Be nice to your allies.”
President Trump clearly has a different view. His antagonism toward Europe has been public for decades, seeing allies as economic competitors and geopolitical parasites. And his decision on Thursday to impose controversially calculated tariffs on America’s partners, including Ukraine — but not on Russia or North Korea — laid bare his willingness to fracture a trans-Atlantic alliance that has largely kept the peace in Europe for 80 years.
Combined with Mr. Trump’s demand that NATO allies spend up to 5 percent of their gross domestic product on the military and his expressed desires to seize territory from Denmark, a NATO ally, the tariffs highlight long-term damage to American relations with Europe that are unlikely to ever be fully repaired.
“The tariffs are another addition to the perception and assessment in Europe that the U.S. under Donald Trump is not only an unreliable partner, but a partner that cannot be trusted in any way,” said Guntram Wolff, an economist and a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “That changes 80 years of postwar history, when the trans-Atlantic alliance was the core of the Western world and of the global multilateral system.”
As much as Brussels will try to preserve some of these key relationships, Mr. Wolff added, “It cannot on its own underpin the global system.”
Mr. Trump’s effort to transform the global order also seems to benefit Russia, NATO’s chief antagonist, by potentially weakening the Kremlin’s adversaries in the rest of Europe, though plummeting oil prices on Friday hit Russia as well.
