Inside the world’s most dangerous special relationship
which might is not necessarily right. These alliances are the foundation of the West – the rich, democratic and law-governed countries, with a population of more than a billion people, and a combined GDP of nearly £30 trillion, which is (or was) the world’s best hope of spreading justice, liberty, prosperity and stability.
The West was already in trouble: divided, distracted and stagnant, facing the rise of China and the increasing failure of its economic model.
But Mr Trump’s victory leaves it on its deathbed. The new president pays only lip-service to alliances. He ignores past promises. Rules are for losers. What matters is winning. His inauguration speech promised a transfer of power back to ‘‘the people’’. “From this day forward, it’s going to be America first.”
This approach – thuggish, selfobsessed and ignorant to the point of caricature, echoes Otto “don’t call me stupid” West, the former CIA killer played by Kevin Kline in the 1988 film But this is not farce. Like his fictional counterpart – who believed that the London Underground was a political movement, Mr Trump has astonishing gaps in his knowledge. He does not understand America’s “nuclear triad” – the balance between its sea, air and land-based weapons launch systems. He dismisses Nato as “obsolete,” while getting its membership wrong and believing it does nothing to combat terrorism. In his recent interview with
he ranked German Chancellor Angela Merkel – America’s single most important friend in world politics – alongside Vladimir Putin.
And it is on the rocks of relations with Russia that his presidency, already fragile and remarkably unpopular, is most likely to founder.
Every modern American president has tried to befriend the Kremlin. Ronald Reagan was entranced by the verbose and disorganised Mikhail Gorbachev. George HW Bush made a similar mistake, snubbing the freedom-loving Ukrainians in his disastrous “Chicken Kiev” speech in 1991. Bill Clinton was bewitched by the promise of democracy and capitalism in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. George W Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and “got a sense of his soul”, where others saw only the letters K, G and B. Barack Obama backed the “reset” of 2009, believing that Mr Putin’s newly installed puppet-president, Dmitri Medvedev, marked a real change of power.
All these attempts ended in tears. The Soviet Union broke up. Yeltsin’s rule imploded humiliatingly amid corruption and economic failure. Mr Putin proved to be not a reforming moderniser but a hardline bureaucrat, first crushing media and political freedoms at home, and then – once a soaring oil price restocked his armoury – bullying neighbouring countries.
Yet all these mistakes were salvageable. They were made in a context of a remarkably durable and successful transatlantic alliance.
Nato, which could have expired in 1991, reinvented itself as the lodestar for countries wanting to integrate their military and security arrangements with the democratic West. It developed counter-terrorism capabilities, intervened successfully to topple the militaristic regime of Slobodan Milosevic and end the wars in what was Yugoslavia, and led the effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Despite President Obama’s many misjudgments, he also pushed Nato into returning to its neglected original mission of territorial defence.
After 2009, the alliance woke up to the threat from Russia. Mr Obama cajoled Germany to accept limited contingency plans to defend the vulnerable frontline states: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. After Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014, those efforts intensified. Having removed its last heavy armour from Europe in 2013, the United States sent tanks back across the Atlantic to bolster Nato’s presence in Poland.
True the United States contributes the biggest share – around a fifth – of Nato’s total defence spending. And yes, only Britain, Estonia and Poland meet the 2 per cent of GDP target and spend it properly, on modern weapons (Greece and Turkey spend 2 per cent too, but less wisely).
But contrary to Mr Trump’s isolationist rhetoric – in his inauguration address he said America had subsidised foreign armies while depleting its own – the United States is not fighting alone. Just as Britain is coordinating the defence of Estonia. Canada looks after Latvia, Germany takes care of Lithuania.
A few years ago, Russia could have marched into the Baltic states almost as easily as it seized Crimea from Ukraine. Today any aggression would involve killing thousands of soldiers from a dozen or more Nato countries. This progress is now in jeopardy. Without American pressure, maintaining Western unity towards the Putin regime, and continuing to punish its rule-breaking, will be even harder. Politicians such as Mrs Merkel have made huge efforts to bring other European leaders into line behind sanctions. Her success was in part due to the quiet support of the US. Now politicians such as Hungary’s Victor Orbán can argue that they are just taking the same pro-Russian stance as Mr Trump, the notional leader of the free world.
A second great danger is of a new Yalta agreement – echoing the cynical deal struck by Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin in 1945, against the advice of Winston Churchill (the bust of whom, the new president has just restored to the Oval Office).
But the original Yalta merely recognised spheres of influence created by military conquest. Yalta 2.0 would hand to Russia countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, which have successfully resisted it.
Yet Mr Trump sees life as a series of showy deals. It will be hugely tempting for him to seek a quick agreement with Mr Putin.
This need not be disastrous: repairing the tattered arms-control regime in Europe, especially with regard to medium-range nuclear missiles, would be desirable. We negotiated arms-control deals with the Soviet Union. We can certainly negotiate them with Mr Putin’s Russia.
But these negotiations require patience and expertise; neither of which are Mr Trump’s forte.
Wily Russian negotiators will have already spotted that the American leader needs a success to trumpet. They will try to broaden the agenda to include European security – meaning a deal made over the heads of the countries concerned.
A new Yalta – perhaps including a halt to Nato expansion, an explicit or implicit recognition of the Kremlin’s sway over all or part of its former empire, and a lessening of Nato’s military presence in the frontline states – would be disastrous.
It would shatter European unity, setting off a scramble among America’s former allies to do their own deals with Russia. Mr Putin would make mischief, meddle and bully on a hitherto unseen scale.
And that leads us to the third danger: miscalculation.
Mr Putin is in a hurry, beset by Russia’s underlying economic and demographic weaknesses. Just as Mr Trump will be tempted to make deals, Mr Putin will be tempted to break them.
Here the new American president will face a terrifying test. Failure to react, for example, to a provocation in the Baltic states, would end Nato instantly. Over-reaction risks war.
Perhaps that may give Mr Putin pause for thought. Russia’s most powerful adversary is now run by a man whose hallmark is a lack of restraint – someone who gets into Twitter spats with celebrities in the small hours, who flies off the handle when admonished or thwarted.
Mr Trump may be ignorant about nuclear weapons, but he talks with swaggering recklessness about them.
So better, perhaps, not to provoke him, however big the prize? On that slender hope hangs the future of the West.