Transatlantic ties on shaky footing as Trump embarks on Europe trip

BRUSSELS/WASHINGTON — European leaders say they no longer have any illusions about Donald Trump as they welcome the US president at a NATO summit this week, but they fear his “America first” agenda may force a moment of reckoning that works to no-one’s benefit.

Trump departs on Tuesday on a European tour amid simmering disputes over trade and military spending with fellow Western allies and speculation about whether he will rebuke or embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin. He meets the Russian leader in Helsinki as the finale of a trip with earlier stops in Belgium, England and Scotland.

Trump has shown little regard for the US’ traditional bonds with the Old World, publicly upbraiding world leaders at NATO’s new headquarters a year ago for not spending enough on defense and delivering searing indictments of Western trading partners last month at an international summit in Canada.

On this trip, after meeting with NATO leaders in Brussels, he’ll travel to England before he heads to one of his Scottish golf resorts for the weekend. Widespread protests are expected throughout the visit.

“I’m going to tell NATO: You’ve got to start paying your bills. The United States is not going to take care of everything,” Trump told a rally last week, adding: “They kill us on trade.”

Experts fear the trip could produce a repeat of the dynamics from Trump’s last trip abroad, when he admonished Group of Seven allied nations at the meeting in Canada before heading to Singapore for a summit with Kim Jong-un, top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“What people are worried about this trip is he’ll have equally difficult interactions with his NATO counterparts,” including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said James Goldgeier, a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor at American University, who is an expert in NATO and security alliances.

Trump is expected to continue to press NATO nations to fulfill their commitments to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024. Trump has argued that countries not paying their fair share are freeloading off the US and has threatened to stop protecting those he feels pay too little.

Despite current disputes and name-calling rhetoric, Frances Burwell, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, still observes close cooperation on security across the Atlantic.

“In fact, we were seeing more US engagement in military exercises, more deployment in Europe and more funding behind the deployments,” said the scholar.

After all, the trans-Atlantic connections “have been built up over many decades”, she said.

Given Trump’s unpredictable temperament, however, it is really difficult to say if there will be “moments of reconciliation” in the coming high-level encounters like the NATO summit, said Burwell.

“We just don’t know at this point,” she added.