Trump: Washington and Europe’s Inconvenient Truth Teller

From the moment President Trump won the presidency, he became an object of scorn and derision in Washington and most European capitals. The reason: Trump insists on seeing the world as it is; a virtue that mobilized 60 million Americans to vote for him.

Serious-minded people can come to different conclusions about a given set of facts, but Trump’s willingness to declare openly that the world changed dramatically from what it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago was too much for the self-appointed elites in Washington and Western Europe. Trump’s early recognition that the Trade Agreements Washington made in the 1960s are legacies of the Cold War when America’s interest revolved around creating and maintaining a global community of nations committed to containment made him extremely unpopular in Europe’s capitals.

Absolved of the responsibility to defend themselves for many decades, West Europeans grew accustomed to a kind of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” approach to national security. Trump’s underlying message that Washington would no longer play the role of a global “Daddy Warbucks”—that the national economies previously in recovery from two world wars had in fact recovered—was unwelcome news.

Since 1991, the deterioration of the postwar order has accelerated, in part, because of U.S. actions in the Middle East after 2001, but in larger part due to the dramatic rise of new regional powers and coalitions of powers with renewed economic strength. The outcome is a mixed bag for NATO States.

Smaller powers inside NATO—like Greece—are behaving more and more like neutral States. Greece, like many Mediterranean and East European States, is trying to maneuver for advantage within the framework of Washington’s competition with Moscow. Why not? Greece shares Russia’s religion and much of its culture making reliance on Russia in a conflict with Turkey a safer bet than reliance on Western Europe or the United States.