Trump’s grand and tense tour
Allies are on edge as Don does Europe
America's closest allies will be on edge this week as President Trump embarks on a European tour set to include a tense summit, tea with the British Queen and an eyebrow-raising face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump's whirlwind spin on the world stage begins Wednesday with a potentially explosive North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Belgium. The President's open disdain for multinational institutions, a looming trade war and a showdown over defense funding could weaken already deteriorated ties with some of America's closest allies, experts warn.
Trump plans to push the U.S.'s 28 partner countries in the collective to live up to the alliance's target of each nation spending the equivalent of 2% of their domestic product on defense spending. A stronglyworded letter warning of a reassessment of U.S. priorities in Europe was sent to select countries last month by the Trump administration.
The rhetoric has European leaders afraid that Trump could scale back U.S. military support as Russia ramps up its destabilizing efforts in the Baltic and Black Sea nations.
The U.S. are merely "the schmucks paying for the whole thing," Trump said as he dismissed the longstanding military alliances that forms the basis of NATO during a rally Thursday in Montana.
Experts believe Trump's bluster threatens the stability of the 69-year-old league of nations forged in the dust of World War II and on the eve of the Cold War.
"NATO was developed as a self-defense alliance, established by people who had gone through World War II and had seen in the 1930s and ‘40s how nationalism and extremism led to fascism," Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for NATO and Europe and a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security think tank, told the Daily News. “One of the main goals was to hold back aggressive Soviet expansion. Over time NATO developed into this major force for stability and unity in the west. That is being undermined.”
Trump's confrontational approach to diplomacy was on full display at last year's gathering when the President scolded world leaders over defense spending and joked that he "never asked once what the new NATO headquarters cost." He caused similar waves at this year's G-7 summit in Canada, where he openly mocked his counterparts and taunted them with threats of a trade war.
"NATO works because of the personal relationships between leaders and nations," Townsend said. "What Trump does by attacking and mocking, he is destroying the alliance from within."
The Brussels confab will also be overshadowed by the impending possibility of a global trade war as Trump imposes tariffs on trade partners and bizarrely continues to equate NATO with NAFTA, the free-trade deal between the United States, Mexico, and Canada that he's criticized and called the “worst trade deal in the history of the world.”
The European Union warned that Trump — who has already unveiled steep duties on foreign metals — will be putting a “tax on the American people” if he goes ahead with his recent threat to hit European carmakers with punitive tariffs.
Trump's tariffs would be “self-defeating and would weaken the US economy,” the EU said in a recent paper that estimated that almost $300 billion worth of US goods could be hit by countermeasures.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Wednesday that Trump's threats to impose tariffs on European car imports to the US could have dire consequences.