Trump in Europe: is he dismantling the postwar alliance?

“As Trump has often said, he believes all alliances to be a burden on the US”

After the fractious G7 meeting in June, he derided the Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, as “dishonest and weak”, threatened to escalate his trade wars, and – in an unprecedented move – refused to sign a joint statement by America’s allies. So when Donald Trump landed in Brussels for the Nato summit last week, leaders of the other 28 allied nations were holding on to their hats, said The Daily Telegraph. But even so, they weren’t braced for the full force of the storm that descended. In his first meeting, the US president launched into a furious tirade, in which he accused Berlin of being “totally controlled” by Moscow – because of its support for a new pipeline under the Baltic Sea that would transport Russian gas straight to northern Germany; he complained that Berlin was paying “billions and billions” of dollars to the country “we’re supposed to be protecting you against”; and he demanded that Germany contribute more to Europe’s defence. Once again, Western leaders were left wondering if Trump is intent on preserving the postwar alliance, or on abandoning it.

Trump’s language was “emotive”, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, but his message was not controversial. At a time when the EU has been trying to reduce the bloc’s reliance on Russian energy, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would double the amount of gas imported to Germany. Angela Merkel would like to present it as a common-sense means of ensuring a vital supply of cheap energy, with no political implications. But the project is opposed elsewhere: the Polish PM, Mateusz Morawiecki, has described it as a “hybrid weapon” aimed at the EU and Nato, while President Poroshenko of Ukraine (which could lose billions of dollars in transit fees from an existing pipeline if the new one is built) calls it a “geopolitical project” designed to undermine his country.

Is Trump worried about European security – or is he merely hoping to boost the demand in Europe for US liquefied natural gas? Who knows. The point is, he was right, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. It is reckless for Germany to be so reliant for its energy on a potential adversary. It is, as Trump put it, inappropriate that its former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, now works for the Russian energy giant Gazprom, the pipeline’s chief backer. And Germany should be contributing more to the defence of Europe. It is one of Europe’s richest nations, yet it spends a “paltry” 1.22% of its GDP on defence, putting it in the bottom half of Nato members in expenditure terms. The US spends 3.5%: that amounted to £469bn in 2017, more than was spent by all other Nato members put together. True, by no means was all that money spent on European security, but the imbalance is “grotesque” even so.

When Trump claimed that Nato was “obsolete”, US allies were shocked – but then too, he was speaking the truth, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. Europe’s Nato members have 1.8 million troops, but less than a third are deployable, and only 6% for any length of time. We saw Nato’s weakness in 2011, when a month into the conflict in Libya, it was reported to be running short of bombs. How would it fare if one of its members were threatened by a truly powerful adversary? Barack Obama also decried European “free riders”. He extracted a pledge that Nato members would spend 2% of GDP by 2024, but progress is slow: so far, only six have met that target.

Yet Trump’s oft-made claim that the US is getting a “bad deal” from Nato is absurd, said Claire Berlinski on Politico. That the US funds the alliance is not a “bug of the system, it is a feature”. Since the War, America’s “grand strategy” has been to support and defend a free Europe, to deter local arms races, and reduce the risk of it being dominated by any one power that may threaten US hegemony. Yes, the US is the biggest defence spender, but that is to its advantage: it is what makes it a superpower. Conversely, it is not remotely in US interests for European nations massively to increase their spending. America has worked hard to make Europe its biggest export market: far better Europeans spend their money on US goods and services than on building up their armies.

Yet, in fact, European states – particularly those closest to Russian borders – have ramped up their defence spending. But it may not alter Trump’s way of thinking, said Tomáš Valášek on the same website. To the extent that he considers Russia a problem at all, he thinks it is Europe’s problem. And as he has often said, he believes all alliances to be a burden on the US. Possibly the debate about defence spending is a “red herring”. Perhaps suspecting this, Poland has turned the tables on the US president, by offering to pay $2bn to cover the cost of a permanent US force there. That proposal will be the test of his commitment to European stability.