Trump's contradictory Europe policy

Don't expect much clarity from the NATO summit

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Today is the NATO summit in my hometown of The Hague, where everyone is pretty annoyed that Secretary General Mark Rutte has spent over €200m disrupting our lives for a week in order to hold what amounts to about a day of meetings.

I’m not sure what is going to come out of the summit yet, but I thought it was a good moment to reflect on Trump’s policy towards Europe up to this point. And when we do that, we see a policy riven by fundamental contradictions.

It's important whenever talking about Trump to remember that there is always an element of chaos. This is not a White House that thinks very carefully and strategically about long-term plans and implements them in a methodical fashion.

Trump takes on himself an unusually large amount of decision-making and so the decision-making follows his own personal characteristics. It's impulsive, inconsistent, obsessed with appearances, prone to sudden reversals and changes of mind, and not particularly deep or expert in its thinking about policy details. It contains a lot of contradictions and he rarely makes an effort to resolve them. And so the result can be hard to understand.

But, if you squint, you can see basically three different ways of thinking about Europe: through the lens of security, through the lens of economics, and through the lens of cultural or civilizational imperatives. If anything unites these three lens, then it’s the idea of the “sphere of influence”. Trump doesn’t see European countries as partners or allies, but rather as subordinate states which he has the right to boss around.

That’s about where the consistency ends. Exactly what he wants from Europe is otherwise hard to figure out, because he says he wants completely contradictory things.

Security and defense

Let’s start by talking about security. You can’t really begin this discussion without pointing out that Trump himself has repeatedly threatened the security of two NATO allies - Canada and Denmark - since taking office. His regime has actually set in motion a policy process to acquire Greenland, and he keeps making threats against Canada.

U.S. interest in Greenland, of course, is not entirely new. It dates back a long way, even to before 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt occupied the island to keep it from falling into German hands. The U.S. kept military bases there in agreement with the Danish government after the war. During the late 1950s and early '60s, the U.S. government set about trying to build a network of nuclear launch facilities underneath the Greenlandic ice sheet. And they did it without informing the Danish government.

But never before has there been a U.S. administration that threatened to use coercion to seize the entire island for itself indefinitely. The fact Trump is doing this is reflection of his aggressive impulses and the right of the U.S. to exert power within its sphere of influence, regardless of international law and the sovereignty of other nations. Even NATO nations.

A lot of people assume this is all just a bluff, and I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the future of Ukraine and of NATO are clearly the main issues on the European security agenda. There are two things that the Trump regime says that it wants here: peace in Ukraine and much greater independence and self-reliance among European countries when it comes to matters of defense. And the big unanswered questions here are basically, does he want peace in Ukraine at any price? And, secondly, when pushes come to shove, does he really care about the future of NATO and the containment of Russia?

I think that while different people in the regime have different answers to these questions, Trump himself does not have clear answers. So you notice instead a few tendencies. The first is that there is a focus on producing the appearance of progress. Trump builds his self-identity around the production of deals, and so deals become an end in themselves. He wants desperately to have pieces of paper and signing ceremonies where he can claim that his goal has been achieved, much as he did with North Korea in his first term.

Secondly, you notice that this focus on deals as an end in themselves leads to a lack of serious engagement with geopolitical details. Trump is all about personalities and showmanship.

His regime has still not produced a detailed plan for ending the war which then forms the basis of negotiations. We don't know what their desired end-state is. Instead he has sent his friend, Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor, to try to work something out. Right now they have got stuck because they can't even arrange a temporary ceasefire, which would be the kind of piece of paper that Trump likes, but which Russia doesn’t want. Trump keeps making vague threats against Moscow but doesn't act on them. The one agreement they have reached, the so-called Ukraine minerals deal, is fairly meaningless.

We find similar confusion when we consider Trump’s approach to NATO as a whole. We all know by now that Trump wants European countries to spend much more on defense and, we suspect, to reduce U.S. exposure and commitment to security challenges in Europe. There is a view that European countries are free-riders who benefit too much from U.S. security guarantees without doing much in return. Trump sometimes floats the idea of refusing to honor Article V, or only honoring it for countries who spend enough on defense.

But what, exactly, is the desired end-state for the U.S. here? In his first term, Trump also made all of these same demands and threats. It all came to a head at a NATO summit in 2018. European countries made some changes, and when Trump ran for re-election in 2020 he did so on the message that he had made NATO great again. I think it's too early to know how this is going to play out in his second term.

Economics

The picture becomes even more confusing when we move onto considering economics. The administration's security goals are supposedly based on increased European defense spending and responsibility for its own security. But the administration has also launched a targeted attack on the European economy through its tariff policy.

Trumop’s demands here are extremely radical. He wants the EU and other European countries to drastically alter not only their trade policies, but also many internal aspects of their internal economic arrangements to better suit U.S. trade and investment. For instance, he demanded that the EU reduce its value added tax rate and lower its food safety standards. Such things have sometimes in the past been part of trade negotiations. But to make such a sweeping unilateral demand for changes again highlights the extremely aggressive, sphere of influence thinking of the administration.

European countries are being treated as an economic periphery which has to reshape itself to fit the needs of the imperial center. The intention seems to be to harm European economies and make the continent poorer. That’s a goal that is seemingly completely inconsistent with the idea that Europeans are suddenly going to spend 5% of their GDP on defense. There is a big contradiction here. One way to resolve this is to say that the administration really does not care about European security at all, and so it doesn't care if it damages European economies and leaves them unable to defend themselves. But why, then, go through the trouble of demanding increased defense spending and bothering to try to resolve the war in Ukraine?

Culture and civilization

Everyone was pretty shocked earlier this year when J.D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he castigating Europe and suggested Germans ought to vote for the far-right AfD. They shouldn’t have been that surprised though, because Trump gave a very similar speech early on in his first term in Warsaw.

What we heard from Vance in Munich and earlier from Trump in Warsaw is not the kind of isolationist, “we don't care about Europe” message that is sometimes associated with Trump. What Vance basically said is that he views Europe and the United States as part of the same shared civilization, that he thinks that Europe has strayed away from the values of that civilization, and that he wants to make sure that it gets back on the correct path.

It's a sphere of influence thinking in which the United States is the most powerful and influential of the states which makes up Western civilization, and it has the right to use its power and influence to force wayward members of that civilization back onto what it considers the righteous path.

So what can we say about this? Let's start first by talking about the precise demands that Vance had, which basically amounted to giving power to far-right populist parties, ending immigration, and respecting and promoting Christianity. It's no coincidence that this is a sort of internationalization of Trump's domestic political project, more or less. It's an attack on the global liberal elite, who are supposedly colluding with immigrants to destroy the values of Western civilization, but this time in European guise.

But it is not like these far-right political parties align with other goals that the administration says that it has. In particular, they often do not want to raise defense spending in order to contain Russia. If the administration is serious about Germany ramping up defense spending and enabling U.S. disengagement from the continent, it makes no sense to support the AfD over the country’s current government.

Secondly, this guise that Trump sometimes takes as the protector of the collective West against the forces of immigration and liberalism is at odds with the idea that he is an isolationist with regards to Europe. It's untested, yet, exactly how far the administration would go to try to tip an election in favor of one of these right-wing parties, or to help them in other ways. But the administration's preference for this type of party has been stated and this amounts to a very large step into European domestic politics. Is this just a rhetorical step or the beginning of a longer journey? We don't know yet.

What lies ahead

All administrations contain different impulses and tendencies, but the Trump regime is more divergent than most. One reason for that is that it is unusually personalistic, and another is that the person it is built around is unusually shallow and suggestible in his policy thinking. Each of these three contradictory strands - on security, economics, and culture - are best understood as just part of the regime’s repertoire, to be called on according to the context and the shifting political winds.

And that makes for some unpredictable and bumpy waters ahead for Europe, which I don’t think will be much clearer about where it stands after today’s summit.