Europe’s Trumpian nightmare

 

Europe’s Trumpian nightmare

 

The return of the disrupter-in-chief would further destabilize an already weakened continent.

 

November 4, 2024 4:01 am CET

By Tim Ross, Clea Caulcutt, Jürgen Klöckner and Hannah Roberts

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-europe-western-alliance-white-house-presidency-vladimir-putin-kamala-harris/

 

The American people may be about to rip up the Western alliance, again. This time could be a whole lot worse.

 

Ahead of a United States presidential election that’s too close to call, top officials in European capitals are scrambling to prepare for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

 

Political analysts and pollsters working for governments across the continent increasingly see the Republican former president as poised for one of the most startling comebacks in history.

 

Nobody thinks the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, doesn’t have a chance, but her election would largely be a continuation of the status quo.

 

A Trump win would send a tsunami of panic across a largely rudderless continent already struggling to navigate the two wars on its periphery.

 

Yes, the European Union has already survived one Trump presidency; some leaders would even argue it emerged stronger because of it.

 

But in European capitals, a consensus is building: A return of the disrupter-in-chief would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin, potentially trigger a destructive trade war and inflame political divisions across the continent.

 

Not only is Europe particularly weak at the moment, with a stuttering economy and struggling leaders in Germany and France; it would be a different Trump who would rock up at NATO summits and international gatherings from the 2016-20 version.

 

For one, he’d be unshackled by the U.S. officials who sought to restrain him during his first term. For another, the president who once referred to the EU as one of America’s “biggest foes” would likely be looking across the Atlantic with a serious chip on his shoulder.

 

“A second Trump term would be different,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, U.S. and Americas program director at Chatham House, a British think tank. “He now knows who he feels has wronged him both on the international stage and at home and has worked out with the team around him some plans for how to cut them off at the knees.”

 

Emboldened Putin

After Trump’s first election in 2016, European leaders could comfort themselves that, whatever was happening across the Atlantic, the continent itself was an island of stability, safe under the guiding hand of the powerful German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

 

This time around, European leadership is largely absent. Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz is barely keeping his coalition together, while French President Emmanuel Macron has been shrunk to a figurehead by an emboldened far right.

 

Meanwhile, the region around Europe is burning. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are occupying leaders’ attention and draining Western military and financial resources. Without continued backing from Washington, there are serious questions about how much longer Ukraine will be able to hold out against Putin’s forces.

 

In London, Keir Starmer’s new government worries that Trump will pull the rug out from beneath Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cutting military aid to Kyiv or making it conditional on immediate peace talks that would cede territory to Moscow.

 

Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking power is being taken with similar seriousness in other European capitals. “Aid could stop overnight,” said one European diplomat. “Putin will want to take advantage of it and say I’m taking the Donbas, Crimea and then I’ll bide my time before next time.”

 

That next time, the worry goes, could be a Russian attack on a country like Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia — all members of the EU and NATO — as Putin seeks to test Trump’s already lukewarm commitment to NATO and the military alliance’s mutual defense provisions.

 

France has seized on the possibility of a Trump presidency to urge other European countries to boost their military capabilities. “We cannot let the voters in Wisconsin decide on European security,” France’s Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad told POLITICO.

 

Haddad said France would work with whoever wins the U.S. election on Tuesday, but insisted Europe needed to urgently think of how to navigate a world in which Washington could no longer be counted upon. “It’s our European security,” Haddad said. “We need to be capable of supporting [the Ukrainians] whatever the result.”

 

The trouble is that European leaders — including in France — have been making the case for tooling up their militaries for the past two years. And yet, apart from Poland, few have carried through with actually doing it.

 

Trade war fears

A second European preoccupation is that Trump will reignite a transatlantic trade war. He has threatened to slap 10 percent to 20 percent tariffs on all imports to the U.S. to bring manufacturing jobs back home — and while Beijing remains the focus of his ire, he has plenty of spite to go around. Last week, Trump called the EU a “mini China.”

 

Top European trade officials recently told the EU’s ambassadors that they will be ready to react to potential trade disputes if necessary. In London, too, the risk of a reignited trade war is also playing on the minds of Starmer’s team. Like their European counterparts, British officials are working on contingency plans if Trump wins and decides to follow through on his tariff threats.

 

Trump has proposed a 100 percent tariff on all imported vehicles, which would be disastrous news for countries with significant auto industries. The German economy, for example, which is already struggling, would suffer a -0.23 percent hit to gross domestic product as a result of Trump’s trade policies, according to a study published by the London School of Economics (LSE).

 

“These tariffs will impact the American economy, not just Chinese and European sectors, so Donald Trump [plowing] ahead with these policies if elected would be awful for economies across the globe,” study author Aurélien Saussay, from the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said.

 

The antagonism triggered by a trade war wouldn’t only have an economic impact. When it comes to security, London has traditionally been one of Washington’s closest allies. But political tensions are already on display.

 

Relations between Trump and Starmer’s new center-left government are already in trouble. The Republican slammed Starmer’s “far left” Labour Party for sending activists to campaign for Harris in the election, claiming it amounted to foreign interference in American democracy. His campaign has filed a legal complaint against the party alleging “foreign interference.”

 

Trump’s record in the Middle East is another reason for Europeans to fret. In his first term, he junked the Iran nuclear deal which was backed by Germany, France, the EU and the United Kingdom.

 

“A second Trump term would see a return of its policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, which could include the possibility of direct strikes on Iran and targeted assassinations,” according to analysis from the European Union Institute for Security Studies. “Although the administration’s plan would be to re-establish deterrence, the risk of a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran would increase.”

 

European divisions

Then there’s the pressure a second Trump presidency would put on Europe itself. In the U.S, Trump is the most divisive politician of the age. He also splits European governments from each other, a factor that will make coordinating any EU-wide response on trade or security even harder for officials in Brussels.

 

Leaders in London, Berlin and Paris might recoil from a Trump victory. But Europe’s authoritarians and hard-right leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni will see it as a vindication of their positions.

 

Orbán, who broke with Europe’s other leaders by traveling to Moscow to visit Putin last summer, has been a regular at Trump-dominated gatherings of ultraconservatives in the U.S. That’s led some to speculate that he might be happy to quickly extend his congratulations to the former U.S. president even if the election result is far from clear.

 

As for Meloni, her allies in Rome say she’d be perfectly placed to act as Europe’s new Trump whisperer.

 

Andrea Di Giuseppe, the member of the Italian parliament representing Italians in North America and a member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said a Trump victory would be welcomed by Rome.

 

“If President Trump needs an intermediary with Europe, who better than Giorgia Meloni?” Di Giuseppe said. “She has been Trumpist since the first hour.”

 

Even in Germany, some are seeing opportunity in a Trump victory. It’s not a positive one, however. Senior figures within the government privately admit that Chancellor Scholz’s coalition would be more likely to break up if Harris wins.

 

That’s because the prospect of Trump back in the White House would be such a threat to global political stability that all three governing coalition parties would have to think again before breaking up their alliance.