Europe on the Brink: A Divided Continent Girds for Trump

 

GEOPOLITICS OF 2024

Europe on the Brink: A Divided Continent Girds for Trump

 

The next few months will be pivotal for the Atlantic alliance. A fragmented Continent will struggle to meet the moment.

 

European countries are in varying states of concern over the return of U.S President-elect Donald Trump, who can sound ambivalent toward traditional alliances and has threatened to shutter NATO and launch a trade war.

 

By Matthew Kaminski

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/08/europe-trump-crossroads-00193117

12/08/2024 04:00 PM EST

 

Matthew Kaminski is editor-at-large, writing regularly for POLITICO Magazine on American and global affairs. He’s the founding editor of POLITICO Europe, which launched in 2015, and former editor-in-chief of POLITICO. He previously worked for the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, based in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris and New York.

 

Donald Trump’s reelection promises to reveal and change as much about Europe as the United States.

 

There are many Europes in one: Different attitudes and approaches to themselves and to their most important political, military and economic partner in the United States. All are in varying states of concern over the return of a president who can sound ambivalent toward traditional alliances and has threatened to shutter NATO and launch a trade war.

 

To get a better sense of what kind of Europe will greet Trump next year, I took a post-election trip through three of its most important capitals. I started with the administrative center in Brussels, went to Berlin and spent the better part of a week in the frontline outpost of Poland, the EU country that borders both Russia and Ukraine.

 

In Berlin, as much as I did in Paris earlier this autumn, I saw a European giant entangled in its own domestic troubles, unable to rise to this occasion — at least not soon. I found in Warsaw and to my slight surprise in Brussels a focused and sober conversation about the consequences of the changes in the U.S. for the European bloc as one. Those capitals seem to be aware of the large stakes in a wider world, but also of their own limitations.

 

In Brussels: A Union at the Crossroads

Belgians, countrymen of Magritte, have a quirky sense of humor. On the Rue de la Loi that runs from the heart of the city’s EU quarter to the royal palace, in front of an empty plot that has sat abandoned since a hotel there was demolished in the previous decade, a large mural — in a faded kind of psychedelic aqua from around the time of ABBA — proclaims, in English, “The Future Is Europe.”

 

The future sure isn’t Europe. Unless that future is malaise. Even that mural may have no future. Days after I walked past, it was removed to make way for a new office building. Arriving on the Continent from Washington, I assumed Trump’s election would add a fresh coat of anxiety to that mood of recent years. I found the anxiety, and for sure the malaise. I found, too, a new — I’d say energizing — sense of realism and urgency from the senior EU and NATO officials I spoke to in Brussels.

 

Trump’s return is a fork in the long story of this relationship. Down one way is what Fabrice Pothier, the former head of policy planning at NATO who runs a geopolitical consultancy, calls — without endorsing this outcome — “the great undocking.” Europe and America move further apart. Europe was put off by America’s cultural and national fervors. And it will be put off by what may follow: The isolationism that calls into question America’s commitment to defend Europe and the protectionism that could rupture the world’s closest commercial relationship. For its part, America looks at Europe’s slow growth, political dysfunctions and lack of innovation and turns its attentions elsewhere.

 

At even the lowest points, like the fight over the Iraq war in 2003, we’ve never come close to a “great undocking” since the end of World War II. It helps to see the future clearly if one wants to avert it. Across the board in Europe, to most of the political fringes, people do want to avert it. That includes the traditionally “anti-American” French. That doesn’t mean more of the same. The relationship has to change. Europe has to change. Done right, it will make equally clear to America why it’s in its interests to stay in Europe.

 

There are reasons to believe this scenario can be realized. The two most important leaders in Brussels bring a pragmatic approach to the new Trump era. Ursula von der Leyen, the German who heads the European Commission, doesn’t do preachiness as past European leaders have with American presidents, including Trump. She’s businesslike. Over at NATO, the former Dutch Prime Minister and new alliance chief Mark Rutte has brought fresh energy to that building and has a preexisting and allegedly decent relationship with Trump.

 

The tests will come immediately. On the war in Ukraine, Trump has, even before taking office, created a new consensus across Europe and in Kyiv that they must seriously look for a way to end it in early 2025. The worst-case scenario here and in Ukraine is a Trump peace plan that looks like a Vladimir Putin plan. Anything that fails to secure a sovereign Ukraine, with the door open to NATO, will be that. A decent-case scenario would establish a DMZ-like frontline, leave the question of future control over Ukrainian lands now in Russian hands unresolved and provide a hard security umbrella for Kyiv — with future membership in the alliance on the table and possibly with troops from NATO countries involved in enforcing the peace.

 

“Biden was so frustrating,” one senior NATO official told me. “I believe Trump can be better. It cannot go on like this.”

 

This was rarely stated openly before the election. In public, the Ukrainians and the Europeans in NATO were grateful to President Joe Biden for bringing them together and arming the Ukrainians to stop the Russian onslaught. The frustration? Washington didn’t commit to help the Ukrainians win. The delaying and hawing on which weapons might be provided and how to use them condemned the Ukrainians to a war of attrition that’s bleeding them down. Intended to avoid provoking Putin, the approach encouraged him to think that time was on his side.

 

The fork in the road might seem especially sharp for NATO. Trump has in the past threatened to quit the alliance or kill it by refusing to stand by the Article 5 pledge to defend any ally against attack — the glue, mental as much as military, that holds the place together. But there’s less existential dread at NATO than I remember in 2017, when Trump made those threats. The previous Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who stepped down over the summer, worked that relationship. He seems to have convinced Trump, the senior NATO official said, of NATO’s “usefulness” to America. As Sen. Marco Rubio, the presumptive secretary of state, sponsored the legislation to prohibit any president from pulling out of NATO without Senate approval.

 

“Actually my greatest worry is an ineffective administration in Washington,” said another senior NATO official. “That they go this way or that. The Democrats were like that — they couldn’t make a decision.”

 

“The immediate concern is what kind of deal they force the Ukrainians to make,” this official continued.

 

An ambitious but realistic approach would reinforce the military and political support for Ukraine to show Putin that he has more to lose than gain by continuing the war. France and Britain, which are nuclear powers, are privately talking about extending Ukraine security guarantees under any peace scenario, officials said. They want to make sure America stands behind them. They are worried Trump’s America might not. The memories of the Suez crisis — when Paris and London went out on a limb in 1956 to hold on to their imperial prize in Egypt, before Dwight Eisenhower abandoned them — are, no joke, still fresh.

 

Across town from NATO at the EU, the anxieties are over trade. As a bloc, the EU is America’s biggest trading partner. Even if the Trump administration moves first and hardest against China with tariffs, and forgoes Europe for now as some here hope, Europe would still feel the hit when Chinese exporters shift their output to their markets.

 

The people that I spoke to in positions of power have experience of Trump from his first term. Some sound like him. One incoming European Commissioner outlined a possible deal with Washington. The EU could offer to buy U.S. military hardware and import its liquefied natural gas. In exchange, the U.S. could go easy on trade. “We need to think, what goodies do we offer the U.S.?” this official said. For better or worse, Brussels has begun to internalize Trumpism and “the art of the deal,” even if they’ve not read his first book.

 

“It is in neither European nor American interests to ‘undock,’” said the second NATO senior official.

 

The realistic case for a strong transatlantic relationship can and probably has to be made in Trumpian terms. The U.S. military needs European bases and allies to project force into the Middle East and further into Asia. American military manufacturers value the European market. There will be over 600 F-35s flown by European air forces by the end of the decade. Those planes will need to be serviced and one day replaced.

 

The Continent must sober up as well. Europe took a post-Cold War break from history, funneling savings from defense cuts into welfare. They did assume the U.S. would cover them. It’s not as if the Europeans don’t know their history. The Flanders Fields of World War I are an hour’s drive from Brussels. The second world war, of course, began in Poland before engulfing the west of the Continent.

 

This holiday is over. The Ukraine war should have brought that home. It did for the eastern half of Europe, which has amped up its militaries and has economies that are more competitive and successful. The west of the Continent stayed largely in denial of this reality. That’s harder to do with Trump there.

 

In Berlin: A Crisis of Leadership

The ultimate question for a Europe adrift is: Does it have leaders to forge a new kind of transatlantic relationship with Trump and reestablish itself on the world stage?

 

The place to look first would be Berlin. The place not to look is Berlin, too. Not before next year. This is a problem for Germany and Europe — and potentially the U.S.

 

The day after Trump’s election Germany’s so-called traffic light coalition — red (socialist), yellow (free market liberals) and green (the environmentalists) — collapsed. It barely functioned for months, betraying the hopes that rose high at the start of the Ukraine war that Germany would make a Zeitenwende, the “turning point” proclaimed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, to become a serious defense and diplomatic player in the world.

 

It started with promise, then bureaucracy and weak political will cut away at it. On Ukraine, Scholz was Europe’s leader of the status quo caucus: While Germany’s government didn’t want Ukraine to lose, it didn’t want to destabilize Russia itself. Since there’s a phrase in German for everything, the doctrine of Putinversteher — we have to understand and empathize with Putin — came back in fashion in Berlin.

 

Abroad, Scholz is seen as indecisive and weak at a moment when Europe craves strong leadership on Ukraine. Also, to quote liberally from diplomats I spoke to, “a disaster,” “hopeless,” and “terrible.”

 

Scholz’s bigger problem is at home. Germany’s economic model of export-driven manufacturing, humming for a good part of this century, is broken. You can’t make the stuff cheaply anymore with higher energy prices and send it to China. An aging population and lack of technological innovation are a drag. There’s a recession. Mentally, it feels like depression.

 

Berlin reflects this glum national mood. Before the pandemic, the German capital was, in my view, the most exciting city in Europe. It came closest to the social and cultural (not business) energy of New York. It never became a commercial center for Germany, but it was the place where you met tech startup founders, interesting artists and politicians from across the world. London had lost a lot after Brexit in 2016.

 

I’ve been here several times this autumn, and with each visit the mood seemed darker. Scholz has hovered over this era of collapse with charmless stolidity. Germany’s “left behinds,” many in the poorer east, used to vote for the former communists and now embrace the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.

 

This story does feel familiar. Germany was Europe’s sick man over two decades ago as well. A left-wing chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, pushed through unpopular changes to rigid labor laws and paved the way for a rebound.

 

Who’ll do something similar now?

 

“Waiting for Merz” is a phrase you hear in Berlin, Warsaw and Brussels. Friedrich Merz is the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats. Over 20 years ago, when Merz was in his late 40s, he lost a power struggle to Angela Merkel and sat on the sidelines. He’s back now, the favorite to take over. The East Europeans think he’ll be better on Ukraine. Brussels, knowing that Von der Leyen hails from the same party, hopes he’ll bring some mojo back to Germany and restore Berlin’s traditional and since-missing sway in the EU capital.

 

The Merz projection tells you how desperate Europe is for leadership. France and its lame duck President Emmanuel Macron are wobbling along until the next presidential election in 2027. Britain’s outside the EU, and effectively outside Europe, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer looks wobbly too. The most stable governments in the big European states are in Poland and Italy, which enjoy their new status but remain on Europe’s periphery.

 

Berlin and Europe will be waiting for Merz, or really anyone, a while longer. German elections won’t take place before Trump takes office and a new government will follow weeks, possibly months, after.

 

In Warsaw: Fear of Putin, Receptiveness for Trump

When you travel east from Berlin to Warsaw these days, it feels like you have gone “West.”

 

The energy missing in Berlin? Here. The youth culture? Entrepreneurial culture? In spades. Political stability? A sense of national mission? Sense of urgency? A little more mixed on these counts, but better than most places in Europe.

 

You want to know how the ugly, gray Warsaw of Communist days has changed? The Polish capital has 278 vegan restaurants, #11 on a world ranking, ahead of Tokyo or San Francisco.

 

Decades of uninterrupted growth, the longest streak in Europe since 1990, expanded the economy ten-fold. This kind of prosperity changes a country and its people. The Poles of the recent past were rural, Catholic and had a romantic heroic streak as well as a historic chip on their shoulders. The Poles of today are confident and modern, big on tech and looking to the future.

 

This isn’t the main reason why Poland is the most important country in Trump-era Europe. That is because it sits on Europe’s frontline with Russia. It’s as a share of GDP its biggest defense spender — devoting almost 5 percent to the military. It wants Europe and America to face up to Putin. It’s also the best answer you have to the Trump charge that Europeans are free riders who don’t take their defense seriously.

 

As much as the core of Europe looks frail, Poland is one of several eastern-flank states that Trump likes and they like back. Finland, the most recent addition to NATO, views Russia with dread — going back to the past century’s Winter War that Finland prevailed in — and acts accordingly to support a strong military. The same goes for the three Baltic states in between them and Poland.

 

Now Poland, the largest country in Europe’s east, has a unique opportunity next year to rise to the occasion of a turning point year for the Continent. Paris and Berlin are unlikely to. Poland has two leaders with a lot of experience on the international stage — Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. Warsaw will hold the rotating presidency of the EU, which gives it more than symbolic authority. Trump’s most adulatory visit to Europe in his first term was to Warsaw in 2017, and those good feelings run both ways.

 

From the outside, Poland’s potential seems clear. To the Poles themselves, doubts creep in. “We’re still one of the poorer countries in Europe — seventh from the bottom in per capita terms — and sometimes think like one,” said Andrzej Olechowski, who was Poland’s finance and foreign ministers in the mid-1990s.

 

“It’s hard for mid-sized countries like Poland to play the key role in resolving the Ukrainian crisis,” said Pawel Kowal, a Polish parliamentarian and the government’s envoy for Ukraine.

 

In so far as Poland has changed as a society because of its strong economy, Polish politics are insular and ugly — more than most. Tusk surprised last year by winning back his old job and pushing out a Trump-style political party called Law and Justice, which had ruled for almost a decade. But next spring, Poles will choose a new president, who has less day-to-day power than the premier. Tusk’s favored candidate will face off against Law and Justice. A defeat would set up Tusk’s worst fear — that he’s just another Biden, a liberal parenthesis between the populist menace.

 

Spending time in Warsaw makes one wish for its politics to be more like everything else here, even gastronomy. Thinking big, creatively and keeping its sights on what matters — the unique historic opportunity for Poland and for Europe in 2025. That is to secure its eastern flank by saving Ukraine and defeating Putin. It is also a historic challenge, an existential one. Both the Polish and Ukrainian national anthems begin with the line that their country “isn’t dead — yet.”