One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.
Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.
This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.
The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.
In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.
The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”
But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:
The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.
The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.
Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.
The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.
But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.
During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.
Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.
The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.
As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.
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