TRUMP WARNS FUTURE OF WEST AT STAKE
Lack of resolve can doom alliance that endured Cold War, says US president
WARSAW Trump also offered rare criticism of Russia.
Just a day before he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time at the gathering of G20 leaders in Germany, Trump described Moscow’s behaviour as “destabilising”.
He also conceded that Russia “may have” tried to influence the 2016 election that brought him to power, but suggested others too may have been involved.
Looming large over his European trip is Pyongyang’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to Alaska.
In his first public remarks since the test on Tuesday, Trump said Pyongyang’s military sabre-rattling must bring “consequences” and warned he was considering a “severe” response to its “very, very bad behaviour”.
After repeatedly urging Beijing to ratchet up the economic pressure on North Korea, Trump will hold what promises to be a testy meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 in the northern German city of Hamburg.
In his Warsaw address, Trump painted a picture of liberal democracies facing existential internal and external challenges, of nations battling to defend “our civilisation” from terrorism, bureaucracy and the erosion of traditions.
The White House hoped to use the speech — with its echoes of historic Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s addresses overseas — to burnish his credentials as a global statesman and deflect suggestions he was making the US a virtual pariah.
During the speech at Krasinski Square, which memorialises the Warsaw uprising against Nazi occupation, Trump pointed to Poland as an example of resolve in the defence of Western traditions.
“We must work together to counter forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
Trump also issued a Reaganesque call to tackle bureaucratic overcontrol, which he framed as more than just an inconvenience or byproduct of a rules-based society.
While Trump positioned himself as a leader with the vision to confront an epoch-making crisis, for many US allies in Europe and beyond it is Trump himself who had called the world order, and a century of American global leadership, into doubt.
“Trump’s decisions to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord have dealt a blow to the near-global consensus,” said Dmitri Trenin, director for the Carnegie Moscow Center.
In public, European officials professed the decades-old transatlantic partnership to be inviolable and essential.
In private, they wondered whether it could survive four or eight years with an impulsive and capricious US president at the helm. AFP