Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The deeper question here is: What’s going to happen to NATO and America’s international alliances after all that Donald Trump has done to them? We’re talking about it all with Elizabeth Saunders, a foreign policy writer and thinker who’s really good on this sort of thing. Elizabeth, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: OK, so the headline news out of Trump’s visit to NATO was that he lashed out at everyone in sight. He said the ceasefire with Iran is over. He threatened more strikes. He erupted at Spain for failing to help with Iran, said our trade is finished with them. And he again threatened to steal Greenland outright. Elizabeth, what was your one simple big takeaway from everything that happened there?
That episode—reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere has shown—it was really a—I wouldn’t say a wake-up call, I’d say it was a straw that broke the camel’s back, but it really made clear to the Europeans that this was a serious crisis, that America might be turning on its allies. And so from that point on, I think the strategy of flattery that many European countries had—I mean, it’s understandable why they thought they had to try—has really fallen by the wayside.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s almost comical at this point. So speaking of that, here’s an exchange in which a reporter from Denmark, Rasmus Svaneborg, questioned NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. The reporter starts out by saying, Mark, you sit next to Trump while he says and does all these things to NATO and our allies. Listen.
Mark Rutte (voiceover): You know, what I always do is acknowledge when praise is due. And I think we should praise Donald Trump for the fact that NATO is so much stronger. Of course it has to do with the Russian threat, it has to do with the war in Ukraine. But it very much also has to do with President Trump delivering now what, since Eisenhower, the United States tried to achieve—equalizing spending between the U.S. and Europe.
Saunders: Well, your first instinct is to cheer the reporter and hope that Rutte says something like, you know, you’re right, I feel cheap and horrible when I do that, and I really think that Trump is an idiot or whatever. Very much like people were cheering for Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the U.K., to have a Love Actually moment where he told off the American president in a big televised speech, as Hugh Grant does in the movie Love Actually.
This is the president of the United States. His words really matter. And he again threatened Iranian civilian targets when he said he was going to bomb Iran tonight. I mean, he throws this language around so indiscriminately. And I don’t think we can forget that it’s not normal. It’s very abnormal.
Saunders: The difficulty is, it isn’t just on the Europeans. Because the U.S. still has all the military power—or most of it, enough military power that it matters more than any other country. The Europeans and the Canadians are still dependent on it. And so you have this situation where Donald Trump is the single point of failure for the West. And it has some pretty serious threats facing it from Russia—I mean, I could go on, but the big one they were there to talk about was Russia, right?
So I don’t envy—there are many jobs I would not want to have in today’s world. University president, European head of state, right? That’s a tough one right now.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I’d like to cut her out. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. OK, we don’t want anything to do—watch them, watch them come running back. They’re open about it, they’re hostile about it. And let’s see how hostile they remain when they call up and they please, please, we want to trade with you, sir, we want to trade with you, sir. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less.
Saunders: Yeah. I think the other piece of it is that Spain refused to sign on to the defense spending pledge that Trump wanted and that Mark Rutte tried to kind of get everyone to pledge. And Spain is pretty far from Russia. It has some mountains in between it and the rest of continental Europe. It certainly has maritime—it’s of great maritime importance.
So he’s been angry about Spain not providing help that makes no sense, and then insulting Spain and Italy and—you know, Keir Starmer, who flattered him, as not very Churchillian and so forth—but then he really does need help from the NATO allies. So it’s a situation where, again, he’s not a very good negotiator. He doesn’t know how to take care of his friends and keep them happy so that they’re there when you need them.
Saunders: And also screwed over America, right? It’s very helpful to have these allies. This is the part that Trump has never appreciated—that having allies who will not just share the burden, but allow you to use their bases, provide all kinds of logistical support without having to occupy them—that’s a huge advantage.
So the U.S. role in the alliance is special. It has the most capabilities, especially the nuclear umbrella. But fundamentally, NATO boils down to trust. Trust that each country will in fact come to each other’s aid if attacked. And fundamentally, the most important country there has always been the U.S., and the credibility of the U.S. guarantee is the most important thing.
It’s also just kind of another example of how this is screwing over America too. The dynamic of NATO has always been, we ask the allies to spend more and do more on their own. But the minute they start to do that, we get annoyed, because we also want to tell them what to do. And whatever one thinks of that, clearly we’re giving up whatever leverage we had over the NATO countries militarily. And that’s a loss for the U.S. You can’t deny it.
But then what you’ve basically actually got is Trump empowering Russia in all kinds of ways, Trump failing vis-à-vis China, doing things that actually empower China, and simultaneously throwing away all our allies who would essentially act as our allies in being a bulwark against those rising powers. Is that a fair summary of what’s going on?
And I’m thinking, as I’m listening to this, does he realize that he is in a room full of people dedicated to an organization that was founded to stop the spread of communism and Russian and Soviet aggression? And many of the countries that are now NATO members were behind the Iron Curtain for decades. And they sure do know what it’s like to live under communism.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think that that’s possible. I think a Democratic president could actually repair all this. Which brings me to this Wall Street Journal report—you referenced this earlier. The Journal reported on what our NATO allies are doing right now as they contemplate a world with a much less reliable America.
What I take from this is, the world is moving on from us. Can you talk about this de-Americanization process? What does it entail, and what does it all really mean? Where does it go?
So there’s sort of hedging, insurance, reducing dependency. And then there’s rupture. And Carney’s speech in Davos talked about rupture. But I think even he would probably say it would still be better if NATO existed, right? And existed in a form that people didn’t question whether it was still going to exist in a year or two.
There’s lots of common interests that still exist. And so I think you’ll see some hedging, but it’s not going to be as far as maybe a full de-Americanization. And part of that also is just the constraints of what Europe can do and how fast it can do it. It can’t make a tech industry overnight.
Saunders: I don’t think we’re ever going back to the way it was, because I think we had Biden and then we got Trump again. And I think Krugman’s point about this—you know, they voted for him twice. That is the thing that stops people in their tracks when they think about it that way. So I think there will be—even if you got a president from the sort of more, you know, supposedly—like, just throwing out a name, Nikki Haley, right?
So I don’t think they’re going to allow themselves to be in this position, to the extent their economies and capacity allow them to diversify. They have learned an important lesson. And I think America’s going to have to learn what it’s like to have a Europe with some autonomous capacity. As I said before, that traditionally has not been what we actually want when push comes to shove. We’d much rather tell them what to do.
Saunders: Thank you so much.
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