The president is taking a wrecking ball to our alliance with Europe.

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Over just this past week, Donald Trump has done more to rip apart the U.S.–European alliance than any foe has managed to do in the partnership’s 75 years.

The barn burner was Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech Friday at the Munich Security Conference, in which he proclaimed that the biggest danger to Europe is not Russia or China but rather the “threat from within.” He was talking not about the rise of far-right authoritarian parties but about precisely the opposite: Germany’s policy of isolating the most extreme of those parties and suppressing their speech.

His comments, delivered in an abrasive tone, were seen by the senior European officials attending the conference as blatant political meddling, as Germany is holding a nationwide vote next week. Friedrich Merz, the front-runner for chancellor, characterized Vance’s speech as “interference in the German federal election.” The vice president’s remarks were also seen as a sign of ignorance of German politics, culture, and history—and a sign, more troubling still, of disarray within the Western alliance.

Though Germany is a democracy, it is also bound by a commitment to “never again” allow the rise of Nazi-like parties. And the party Vance was defending, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, is definitely Nazi-like—so abhorrent in its nation’s politics that no other party, across the spectrum, will form any sort of coalition with it.

Yet the AfD is rising in popularity, especially in rural areas in the eastern part of the country, where many still feel shortchanged by the nation’s post–Cold War reunification with the West.

After the speech, compounding the damage, Vance blew off a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to attend, instead, a half-hour discussion with the leader of the AfD.

Lest anyone minimize the vice president’s speech as a rogue anomaly, Trump, asked about it back in Washington, hailed it as “brilliant.” The attendants no doubt also recalled that Elon Musk—widely viewed in Europe, as well as the States, as Trump’s policy executioner—had recently spoken at an AfD rally and, in an op-ed for the popular German newspaper Die Welt, trumpeted the party as the country’s “last spark of hope.” (The paper’s commentary editor resigned upon its publication.)

At the end of the three-day Munich conference, an annual event attended by security officials and experts across Europe and North America, its chairman, Christoph Heusgen, a seasoned German diplomat, broke down in tears over the emerging trans-Atlantic cleavage, saying, “We have to fear that our common-value base is not that common anymore.”

The effect only intensified a speech delivered by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a few days earlier in Brussels, at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a consortium of 57 nations that contribute military aid to Ukraine. Among other jarring statements, Hegseth said he was there “to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

They must also have been reflecting on Trump’s own announcement, on the same day as Hegseth’s remarks, that he had just been on the phone with Vladimir Putin—the first call between Putin and an American president since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—and that they would soon hold talks to end the war. It then became clear that the talks would be restricted to Russian and American diplomats; delegates from Ukraine and other European nations would not be invited.

President Joe Biden promised, through his term, that no peace talks would be held unless Ukraine participated (“Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” as he put it.) But now Putin’s men were invited to share a table only with Trump’s men to discuss not just Ukraine but a revival of U.S.–Russian relations. (Trump publicly stated that Russia should be readmitted to the G7, the group of leading industrial nations from which the nation was expelled after its annexation of Crimea.)

In reaction, French President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of several European leaders to hash out not only a common position on Ukrainian security but also measures to promote an independent European defense, in recognition that the United States may no longer be a reliable guarantor of their security.

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Some European leaders nervously debated this idea during Trump’s first term, especially after he expressed doubts over whether he’d abide by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which obligates NATO members to regard an attack on one as an attack on all. Macron was most vocal in this regard, delivering speeches on the need for European “strategic autonomy.” Biden, the most fervently Atlanticist president in decades, allayed these fears. Trump’s reemergence has revived them, and the events of the past week have revved them into high gear.

One possibly positive outcome of Team Trump’s storming through Europe is that the allies, which were already spending more on defense (mainly the result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), are primed to spend more money still. They won’t boost their military budgets to 5 percent of their gross domestic product (as Trump is demanding), but most of the members will exceed 2 percent (a figure NATO documents have expressed as a goal). (The U.S. spends about 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense.)

Still, Europe would be unable to mount a defense of the continent from, say, a Russian invasion without the support—or perhaps the leadership—of the United States. It lacks the troop strength, the firepower, the intelligence assets, and the organizational acumen to do so. (By NATO’s charter, the alliance has always been led by an American four-star general.) When I was in Berlin almost two years ago, I asked several defense experts how long it would take for Europe to create a truly independent defense force if it started building one in earnest right away. The common reply: about 10 years. Not a lot has changed since then.

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In the short term, it’s also doubtful that the Europeans alone would be able to guarantee Ukraine’s security if Trump pulls Washington’s support. The U.K.’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has offered to station British peacekeeping troops on Ukrainian soil as a deterrent, but his own military officials say they lack the numbers to provide a defense in the event of invasion.

Europe’s concerns about Trump’s steadfastness as an ally are also closely mingled with the chaos permeating the American continent in the first month of his presidency. Lawrence Freedman, a professor emeritus of war studies at King’s College and one of the most astute observers of diplomacy and strategy, wrote me in an email that the difference between previous moments of trans-Atlantic tensions and the present era is “the ideological and domestic dimension.” He went on: “We’ve got our problems and failings, but the Musk/Justice Dept/vaccines/tariffs (especially tariffs, which bring domestic and foreign policy together)—all this stuff is frightening, and it is hard to look up to, or take seriously, a country in which erratic conspiracists play such a prominent role.”

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Publish date : 2025-02-18 09:08:00

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