Hans Kundnani in Dissent: During the past year, as the reality gradually dawned on them that Donald Trump might be re-elected as U.S. president, European foreign policy analysts coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Europe must unite and “Trump-proof” itself. This new consensus, which essentially repeats arguments for European “strategic autonomy” that took place after Trump was elected the first time, represents an extraordinary collective failure. Europe’s foreign policy experts have proved unable to think clearly about what has changed in Europe in the last eight years or about the relationship between their own security concerns and those of Ukraine.
The election of Trump in 2016 created radical uncertainty about the U.S. security guarantee to Europe, which went back to the creation of NATO in 1949. While some Atlanticists insisted that NATO countries should hug the United States close—and make concessions like increasing defense spending and buying more American weapons to placate Trump—“post-Atlanticists” urged Europeans to end their dependence on the United States for their own security. If the former tendency was embodied by Poland (where the far-right Law and Justice Party was in power), the latter was embodied by France, and Germany was somewhere in the middle.
Post-Atlanticists have responded to the possibility of a second Trump presidency by simply reiterating the need for strategic autonomy, even if they don’t always use that term. But the experience of the first Trump administration suggests that Europeans are unlikely to unite in response to his re-election.
In fact, postwar history as a whole suggests that Transatlantic rifts are always also intra-European rifts. Think, for example, of the period leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Europe was divided between what U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called an “old” Europe of France and Germany and a “new” Europe of Central and Eastern European countries.
The situation has also changed since Trump’s first term in ways that make the idea of strategic autonomy even more problematic than it was before. To begin with, the United Kingdom—which, as its leading role in the war in Ukraine has again illustrated, is a key secondary security provider for Europe—is now outside the European Union. (The referendum on membership in the EU took place in the summer of 2016, but it actually left the EU in 2020.) This makes it difficult to see how the EU can replace NATO as the main European security institution, even if Keir Starmer’s Labour government is now attending EU meetings as if the United Kingdom were still a member state.
Perhaps even more important than Brexit, however, is the rise of the far right within the EU itself. When foreign policy analysts speak vaguely of “Europe,” it is never quite clear whether they mean the EU or something bigger that includes the UK—but even if they just mean the EU, it is still far from being the unitary actor that many of them imagine it is, in part because they want it to be one. Worse than this, they tend to ignore political developments in Europe itself. In particular, they seem to talk about the problem of European security as if there weren’t also far-right governments in Europe (with the acknowledged exception of Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary). Today, the right holds power not just in “new” Europe but also in “old” Europe, including Italy and the Netherlands.
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