Europe wonders if America is lost for good as tensions worsen
BERLIN — Since Jan. 20, 2017, European leaders have managed U.S. relations with one eye on the clock, anxiously counting down the hours until President Donald Trump’s term is up and hoping the core of the Western alliance isn’t too badly damaged in the meantime.
But as Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward America’s closest allies has evolved into hostile action this spring, a new fear has swept European capitals.
Trump may not be an aberration that can be waited out, with his successor likely to push reset after four or eight years of fraught ties. Instead, the blend of unilateralism, nationalism and protectionism Trump embodies may be the new American normal.
“It is dawning on a number of European players that Trump may not be an outlier,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “More and more people are seeing it as a larger change in the United States.”
Even before Trump was elected, Europeans sensed that Washington’s traditional role as guarantor of the continent’s security and stability was slipping away, and that post-World War II ties were fading along with the generations that forged them.
A succession of adverse moves culminating in Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal has brought transatlantic relations to their lowest point since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, if not far longer.
And close European observers of the United States are not optimistic about a reversion to the mean.
They study the increasing polarization of U.S. politics and see less enthusiasm for transatlantic ties at either end of the political spectrum. They have also been repeatedly disappointed as one supposed brake after another on Trump’s most extreme foreign policy impulses — Congress, the president’s own advisers and popular opinion — has fallen away. Trump, they note, is alienating America’s closest allies, and the American public doesn’t seem to mind.
Europeans have begun to wonder aloud whether they need to respond accordingly.
One sign of the evolving stance toward the United States was the biting commentary last week from European Council President Donald Tusk, whose job in Brussels is to channel the ids of the 28 nations in the European Union.
“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Tusk told reporters as he readied a summit of EU leaders largely focused on Trump-ignited brushfires. Tusk denounced “the capricious assertiveness of the American administration,” using terms that just 16 months ago would more typically have been applied to international rogue nations such as North Korea and Russia.
His sharp tone matches the public mood. In Germany, a country that rebuilt itself after World War II in America’s image and with American money, polls show that Trump is seen as a bigger threat than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
More than two-thirds of Germans describe their country as moving away from the United States, and an equal number describe the relationship as “tense,” according to a survey released this week by the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.