This is the worst threat to Western security since the end of World War II, and it will last for a long time. One expert says, “Trumpism will last longer than his presidency.” Who, though, is ready to take the lead while the US stays out of the way?
In February 1947, at 9:00 a.m., Lord Inverchapel, the UK ambassador in Washington, D.C., went into the State Department to give George Marshall, the US secretary of state, two diplomatic messages on blue paper to make them stand out. One was about Greece, and the other was about Turkey.
Britain told the US that it could no longer help the Greek government forces fight an armed Communist uprising because it was too tired, broke, and owed a lot of money to the US. Britain had already said it would leave Palestine and India and ease up on its position in Egypt.
The US knew right away that there was a real chance that Greece would give in to the Communists and, by extension, the Soviet Union. The US was also afraid that if Greece left, Turkey would follow, giving Moscow control of the Eastern Mediterranean and maybe even the Suez Canal, which is a key trade route for the world.
“It must be a policy of the United States,” he said, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”
It was the first step towards what became the Truman Doctrine. At its core was the idea that it was important for the United States to help defend democracy overseas.
After the war, the US took two very important steps: the Marshall Plan, which provided a huge amount of help to Europe’s broken economies; and the creation of NATO in 1949 to protect governments from the Soviet Union, which had now taken control of the eastern part of Europe.
This could be seen as the time when the United States took over as leader of the western world from Britain. It was more like the moment that showed that it already had.
After World War II, the United States was the leader of the free world. It had always been an isolationist country, but its two huge seas made it feel safe. During the decades after World War II, America used its power to change a lot of things around the world to fit its own needs.
As a child, the baby boomer group lived in a world that was more like the United States than ever before. And it took over the western world’s economy, culture, and defence.
But it looks like the basic ideas that the US has been using to guide its geostrategic goals will soon be thrown out.
The United States filled the void left by the British when they left almost overnight.
Trump is the first US President since World War II to question the role that his country chose for itself many years ago. For many, this makes it look like the old world order is over and the new world order has not yet begun to take shape.
Who will be the first country to step up? The security of Europe is under more stress than at any time in almost living memory. Can the leaders of Europe, who are currently fumbling around, come up with a good solution?
A threat to the memory of Truman
Trump has been critical of the world order since 1945 for many years. It was almost 40 years ago that he bought full-page ads in three US newspapers to criticise the US’s role in protecting the world’s freedoms.
“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” he said in 1987. “Why don’t these countries pay the US back for the lives we lose and the billions of dollars we lose to protect their own interests?”
“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
He has held this post since his second inauguration.
Some people in his government are angry that they think Europe is too dependent on the US. This week’s leaks of messages about airstrikes on Houthis in Yemen seem to show how angry they are.
A person with the handle Vice-President JD Vance wrote in the texts that the strikes might be good for European countries. It stated: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
Three minutes later, a different account, this one belonging to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, replied: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading.” It is HEARTLESS.”
Trump’s position seems to go beyond attacking people he thinks are taking advantage of how kind the US is. At the start of his second term, he seemed to warmly welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin. He told Russia that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO and that it should not expect to get back the land it lost to Russia.
A lot of people thought this was giving away two big bargaining chips before the talks even began. It looks like he didn’t ask Russia for anything in return.
On the other hand, some Trump supporters see Putin as a strong leader who shares many of the same conservative ideals as them.
Putin is seen as a friend in the “war on woke” by some.
At least some of the United States’ foreign strategy is now shaped by its culture wars. There are two very different and hostile ideas about what the United States stands for, and they are fighting over Europe’s safety.
Some people think that the disagreement isn’t just about Trump’s views and that Europe can’t just wait for himself to leave office.
Senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London Ed Arnold says, “The US is becoming more and more separate from European values.” “That’s difficult [for Europeans] to swallow because it means that it’s structural, cultural and potentially long-term.”
“I believe that the way things are going in the US now will last longer than Trump himself.” I believe Trumpism will last longer than his rule.
The fifth article of NATO “is on life support.”
The Trump White House has said that it will no longer be the main protector of European safety and that European countries should pay for and take care of their own defence.
“I won’t defend NATO countries if they don’t pay.” This month, the president said, “No, I’m not going to defend them.”
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty has been the foundation of European security for almost 80 years. It says that an attack on one alliance member state is an attack on all.
I had a chat with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street last month, right before he went to the White House. He told me that he was happy that the US remained the most important member of NATO and that Trump personally remained committed to Article 5.
Some people aren’t so sure.
“I think Article 5 is on life support,” Ben Wallace, who was defence minister in the last Conservative government, told me at the beginning of the month.
European countries, including the UK, need to step up, spend a lot on security, and take this seriously. If they don’t, it could mean the end of NATO and Article 5.
“Right now, I wouldn’t put my house on the fact that Article 5 could be used in case of a Russian attack…” Not for a second would I think that the US would automatically step in and help.
A study by the French company Institut Elabe shows that almost three quarters of French people do not believe that the United States is a friend of France. A big majority of people in Britain and Denmark, two countries that used to support the US, now don’t like it.
“The damage Trump has done to NATO is probably irreparable,” says Robert Kagan, a long-time Trump critic who is a conservative analyst, author, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.
“The alliance relied on an American guarantee that is no longer reliable, to say the least” .
Anyway, Trump isn’t the first US president to tell Europe it needs to spend more on defence. In 2016, Barack Obama told NATO partners, “Europe has sometimes been complacent about its own defence,” that they should make theirs stronger.
Has the “fragmentation of the West” begun?
This is all good news for Putin. “The entire system of Euro-Atlantic security is crumbling before our eyes,” he said. “Europe is being marginalised in global economic development, plunged into the chaos of challenges such as migration, and losing international agency and cultural identity.”
Early in March, three days after Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with Trump and Vance in the White House, a Kremlin spokesman said, “The West has begun to break up.”
“Take a look at what Russia wants to do in Europe,” says Armida van Rij, who runs the Europe program at Chatham House. “Its goal is to make Europe less stable.” The goal is to damage NATO and get the US to pull their troops out of this area.
‘Tick, tick, and almost tick’ could be said right now. Because it makes Europe less stable. It makes NATO less strong. We haven’t been able to get the US to pull its troops out of Europe yet, but who knows where we’ll be in a few months?”
“We forgot what our history taught us.”
This is a very tough time for Europe because it needs to figure out how to protect itself properly. Depending on the power of the United States for 80 years has left many European countries open to attack.
One country that has cut its defence spending by almost 70% since the height of the Cold War is Britain. At the end of the Cold War, in the early 1990s, Europe got a peace dividend and started cutting back on defence spending that would last for decades.
“We had a big budget [during the Cold War] and we took a peace dividend,” he says. You could say that what they did was right.
“What’s wrong is that we went from a peace dividend to robbing businesses.” Defence is now the area that people go to get money from. And that’s where we forgot what our past taught us.”
Last month, the prime minister told parliament that by 2027, Britain would spend 2.5% of its GDP on defence, up from 2.3% now. Is that enough, though?
Wallace says, “It’s not enough just to stand still.” “It wouldn’t be enough to fix the things we need to make ourselves more deployable, and to plug the gaps if the Americans left.”
Then there is the bigger issue of getting people to join the military. “The West is in freefall in its military recruiting, it’s not just Britain,” he says.
The service isn’t getting any younger people right now. We have a problem with that.”
But Friedrich Merz, Germany’s soon-to-be chancellor, has said that Europe needs to break away from the US. And in order to “Europeanize” NATO, a European military-industrial complex will need to be built up that can provide services that are currently only available in the US.
A lot of people agree that Europe needs to become more military independent, but some are worried that not everyone in Europe agrees with this.
Ian Bond, deputy head of the Centre for European Reform, says, “Right now, most people in East Europe don’t need to get the message.” “The further west you go, the more problematic it becomes until you get to Spain and Italy.”
Arnold agrees: “The view in Europe now is this isn’t really a debate anymore, it’s a debate of how we do it and maybe how quickly we do it, but we need to do this now.”
Putting together a new order for the world
The United States is the only country that offers a small group of “very important things” at this time, according to historian Timothy Garton Ash.
“These are the so-called strategic enablers,” he points out. The Patriot air defence batteries are the only ones that can shoot down Russian ballistic missiles. They do this by gathering information and using satellites. Other than the US, we should try to have our own versions of these within three to five years.
“And in this process of transition, from the American-led Nato [the idea is] you will have a Nato that is so Europeanised that its forces, together with national forces and EU capacities, are capable of defending Europe – even if an American president says ‘leave us out of this’.”
The question is how to make this happen.
Ms. van Rij says that she believes Europe needs to create a European defence industrial base that is owned by Europe, but she thinks it will be hard to do so.
“What’s really difficult are the divisions within Europe on how to actually do this and whether to actually do this.”
Over the past few decades, the European Commission and other experts have been trying to figure out how this protection might work. “Historically, it has been very hard because of strong national interests…” It’s not going to be easy, then.”
Up until now, Trump seems ready to end the rules-based international order that developed after the Cold War. In this order, sovereign states are free to choose their own allies and destinies.
Something he seems to want in common with Vladimir Putin is a world where big powers can rule over smaller, weaker countries without having to follow international laws. This is something Russia did in its Tsarist and Soviet Empires. That would mean going back to the system of “spheres of interest” that was in place for 40 years after World War II.
To be honest, we don’t know what Donald Trump would do if a NATO country was struck. That being said, the promise of US help can no longer be taken for granted. Europe needs to do something about it. It looks like its task is to stay together, finally pay for its own defence, and stay out of the “spheres of influence” of any of the big powers.
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