The upcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin may be held in Helsinki, but the shape of that meeting brings up another location: Potsdam. Because, as is already clear, both Russia and the United States are working to divide Europe—not into the clear East-West regions that marked the period of the Cold War, but into factions that weaken the continent militarily and economically.
Fresh off a Singapore visit that gifted Kim Jong Un a halt to U.S.–South Korea joint preparedness exercises—which was one of North Korea’s top demands—in exchange for no visible movement on any U.S. goal, Trump is eagerly rushing to a meeting with Vladimir Putin. As noted by the New York Times, foreign policy experts are worried that Trump will provide a repeat of Singapore by rewarding Putin while generating little or no benefit for the United States.
After all, that’s Trump’s pattern. He traded off military exercises to Kim for a photo op. Trump handed Chinese Communist Party Chair Xi Jinping his support in exchange for a few nice words over cake. And he’s long been a fan of Putin because the Russian autocrat made favorable statements about Trump … and because, even as Trump continues to backpedal from the idea, Russian operatives provided key assistance to his campaign in 2016. Traditional U.S. concerns for alliances and human rights don’t even enter into Trump’s thinking.
What these three leaders have in common is that they are autocrats, whom Mr. Trump admires and believes he can win over with a brand of personal diplomacy that dispenses with briefing papers or talking points and relies instead on a combination of flattery, cajolery and improvisation.
For Trump, the flattery isn’t a tool. It’s the goal. It’s his primary objective. But while Trump is happy to collect very nice words from very bad men, he’s already doing what he can to be sure that the damage he’s done to the United States is spread around the world. As reported in the Washington Post, Trump is working hard to break up not just the NATO alliance, but the European Union.
In a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump asked Macron to leave the EU. As an incentive, he offered Macron a favorable trade deal, one “with better terms than the E.U. as a whole gets from the United States.” That’s Donald Trump attempting to use trade with the world’s largest economy as a lever to crack open the EU. And that’s not a wild conjecture. That’s real. That’s something that already happened.
Trump’s efforts to break up the EU are matched by his well-documented efforts to smash the NATO alliance. Under the guise of protecting U.S. spending, Trump manages to find fault with every partner in the alliance and every facet down to the construction of the headquarters building. The statements that Trump makes about the funding of NATO, it’s relative cost to others involved, and the expense carried by the Untied States reflect what at first seemed to be a complete misunderstanding of the organization, how it works, and what it’s meant to do. That no longer seems likely. Trump’s “ignorance” on NATO funding seems more and more to be a deliberate ploy.
After all, this is the same excuse he used to cover giving up military exercises in North Korea: cost. The same Donald Trump who crowed about inflating the military cost astronomically and just declared the spectacular boondoggle of a new “Space Force” immediately becomes concerned when it’s time to put a penny of that expense to work. Trump is prepared to spend millions on military parades and billions on nonsensical displays of xenophobia, but nothing on actual defense.
Every executive since the end of World War II has made the same simple calculation: The cost of U.S. involvement in NATO is far less than the cost to the United States, both in terms of dollars and lives, that would result from a destabilization of Europe. The United States doesn’t contribute to NATO simply to protect allies. It does so primarily to protect the United States. The same math applies in South Korea, where the expense of annual exercises is a pittance compared with the potential cost of engaging in a renewed Korean War.
But Trump has a different math—one that says back away. Give away. After all, the cost of a stable Europe and a peaceful Korean peninsula may seem relatively low, but if you don’t care that either of those places holds together that equation falls apart. Compared to zero, every price is high.
Trump’s attempt to peel Macron away from the EU shows that he’s not worried about potential destabilization of Europe. He’s encouraging that destabilization. And it’s not just in France. Trump has encouraged Europe’s unraveling since before the election with his support of Britain’s departure from the EU and cheering for nationalist parties. He’s continued by meeting with rising autocrats in Eastern Europe, demeaning democratic politicians in the west, and his lies about crime rates in nations that have admitted refugees.
As Trump prepares to meet with Putin, he has already signaled his next strike against Europe. At the recent meeting of the G-7, Trump made multiple statements concerning the readmission of Russia, even though Russia was ousted from that organization for its invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Since that meeting, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made it clear that Trump could come to agreement with Putin through “other terms” than a withdrawal from Ukraine, making a tacit recognition of Russia’s position official.
Trump continues to sell the idea that his personal deal-making abilities make one-on-one meetings with dictators a good thing.
In an interview with Fox News after the Singapore summit meeting, he said that if he could have dinner with Mr. Putin, he could persuade him to withdraw from Syria and stop preying on Ukraine.
Only Trump keeps walking away from these meetings with nothing to show for them but compliments for Trump … and damage to the power of both the United States and allies.
As the European Council president Donald Tusk stated earlier this month, the interest of western liberal democracy is of maintaining governments based on rule of law against those in which everything is determined by “brute force and egoism.” Those democracies represent the hope that “chaos, violence and arrogance will not triumph.”
But egoism, chaos, and arrogance might as well be tattooed to Trump’s forehead. And if the violence has so far been limited, there are very good reasons to fear that will not remain true.