Read moreBy pulling out of international deals, is Trump acting in the US interest?
In the run-up to what is expected to be an extremely tight US election on November 5, leaders on the other side of the Atlantic are taking action. Europe is in a more vulnerable place now than it was during Trump’s first term, given that war has since returned to the continent with the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, the former president has vowed to continue his isolationist, “America first” approach to foreign policy, even planning a more extreme version that he was not able to implement during his first term. Some are even more wary of a “Trump 2.0” scenario.
“Trump wasn’t really prepared to win the 2016 election, so he had to rely a lot on party establishment figures, as well as army generals that he added to his administration to project ‘strength’, but these people weren’t as willing to compromise on norms as he was. They were the ‘adults in the room’ if you will, and pulled on the brakes on some of the most disruptive changes he wanted to make,” explained Oscar Winberg, a specialist in US politics at Finland’s Turku Institute for Advanced Studies.
“But now he has had four, or even eight, years to prepare, and plans to fill the administration with conservatives and loyalists, and fire civil servants who haven’t been appointed politically. So the guardrails – the seat belts and airbags that were there before – are gone.”
A resurgent Russian threat
With the prospect of Trump coming to power again, there are two things keeping Europe up at night: The war in Ukraine and US commitment to NATO.
Trump has reportedly vowed not to “give a penny” to Ukraine if he wins and will instead seek a “peace deal” by negotiating with Putin. But any such deal would likely force Ukraine to make some very painful concessions – including ceding parts of its eastern territory – and it is feared such acquiescence would only increase the Russian threat hanging over Europe.
To off-set this possibility, steps have been taken on both sides of the Atlantic to “Trump-proof” support for Ukraine, providing it with enough financial and military assistance so it can continue to resist Russian encroachment in the long term.
NATO this summer announced it was establishing a special mission, known as the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), which would be headquartered in Germany. Its creation essentially means that from now on it will be NATO itself, rather than its biggest contributor the United States, that will coordinate training Ukrainian troops and providing military equipment.
The Group of 7 – which unites the United States, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Japan – finalised a $50 billion long-term loan to Ukraine that would be funded largely by the interest on frozen Russian assets in Europe.
Outgoing US President Joe Biden has backed up his European allies by pre-empting the potential risk of a US withdrawal from the deal should Trump be re-elected by making sure the $20 billion US contribution will start becoming available by the end of the year. Congress has approved five bills on Ukraine assistance since the start of the war worth $175 billion, with $106 billion going directly to the government of Ukraine. At a news conference in Riga in mid-October, James O’Brien, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, said that Biden will be “emptying out” the funds the US Congress has earmarked for Ukraine before the end of his term.
The European Union is also taking steps to underpin its sanctions on Russia in the case of a Trump return. But there is a hurdle to overcome here, too, since Hungarian leader Viktor Orban – who is pro-Vladimir Putin and pro-Trump – has threatened to block EU aid to Ukraine and has said he wants the sanctions lifted. EU sanctions measures must be unanimously approved by all 27 members.
NATO’s golden rule
The second thing Europe needs to do to help Ukraine and shield itself from the Russian threat is to boost its own defence capabilities. Not knowing whether they will be able to count on the US for much longer, a number of European countries have increased defence spending and drastically ramped up domestic arms production.
The other European headache is NATO.
During his first mandate, Trump repeatedly said he wanted out of the alliance. According to EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, Trump even told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen so in no uncertain terms.
“Trump said to Ursula: ‘You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you. And by the way, NATO is dead. And we will leave, we will quit NATO’,” Breton cited the former president as saying.
Trump argued that he was sick of the (European) “free-loaders” who were profiting from US protection, despite not living up to the NATO goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defences. At the time, only three of the alliance’s 32 members did so.
Since then, likely spurred by Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, 23 members have hit that goal.
But even though contributions have improved, Trump is still not happy. At a rally in South Carolina earlier this year, he said he would let Russia “Do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who had not achieved the 2 percent target.
Although it is not possible for a US president to unilaterally pull the country out of NATO – Congress last year passed a law that such a decision needs Senate approval – Trump’s threat still remains very real as he calls the Alliance’s golden rule on mutual defence into question.
“You don’t have to pull out of the Alliance [to make it inefficient],” Winberg said. “It’s enough for Trump to openly say that he’s not going to honour the commitment anymore. In practice, that’s the same thing as pulling out, and as president he would have authority to do that.”
According to Politico, the fear of that has prompted a flurry of European diplomats to try to reach out and court Trump and his advisers to try to soften his stance on the military alliance.
‘Hit back hard’
The final Trump headache for Europe is his pledge to impose steep tariffs on imported goods in a bid to revive the US economy. For China, that would entail slapping its exports with a 60 percent surcharge, and 10 percent for European-made goods.
Economists have warned that it could trigger an outright trade war.
Winberg said that even if Europe tries to strike new trade agreements with other countries to try to wean off its reliance on US consumers, “it doesn’t really matter how much you prepare when you have an unreliable person in the White House”.
Europe does not so much have a preventative strategy in place, as it has a game-plan in place if it needs to respond.
The plan is to retaliate, to the extent that it will force Trump to the negotiating table.
“We will hit back fast and we will hit back hard,” a senior European diplomat told Politico.
But despite Europe’s Trump-proofing measure, Wingberg said a Trump win would, overall, be “very bad” for the liberal and democratic supporters of the Old Continent.
Source link : https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20241027-europe-guardrails-tries-to-trump-proof-security-nato
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Publish date : 2024-10-27 06:41:00
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