Trump: Trade, Tirade and Transatlantic Relations

Akshobh Giridharadas

economy, Americas

Trump represents a new challenge to transatlantic relations, which have long been predictable, even boring. European leaders are attempting to wait him out.

Not since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has American foreign policy been at crossroads with so many debates and discourse on how to proceed.

The Trump administration’s foreign-policy schizophrenia has seen the United States jettison from multilateral trade deals and pulling back from common security pacts such as NATO. It has alienated allies and expressed a strange softness for some former adversaries such as Russia.

President Donald Trump is following a path of Jacksonian populism that is only intermittently concerned with foreign policy, and believes in inherent protectionism. He represents a new challenge to transatlantic relations, which have long been predictable, even boring. Even their dysfunctions and disputes are ritualized and repetitive.

For a long time now, transatlantic relations can be described as a boring marriage spiced by the extra-marital affairs of a Russian security threat to Europe’s eastern corridor.

There are three pillars of Trump’s foreign-policy thinking from which he has never wavered. The first is the idea that America is getting a bad deal from its allies; the second is that the American approach to free trade has impoverished American workers and weakened the United States; and the third is that as, a strong leader, he can secure better deals with authoritarian strongmen than by working cooperatively with European allies.

Trump feels that America has been stuck with the bill for global security for generations.

The United States secures Europe but feels it gets little in return. The most pertinent problem for the transatlantic relationship is Trump’s apparent indifference to the American security guarantee. His view diverges from that of all his postwar predecessors, who accepted that shouldering the majority of the burden for providing Europe’s security is a fundamental national interest and a keystone of the Western-led international order.

Trump’s view of NATO is that the United States is getting a raw deal due to the economic cost endured while, as he sees it, European members contribute very little but get all the reward. Trump seeks to define U.S. interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways. And affecting this is the transatlantic relationship.