Whether It’s Biden or Trump, Europe Knows It Must Stand Alone

NATO’s European members have long thought they would prefer an ailing Joe Biden to an unpredictable Donald Trump. But now they’re coming to terms with the fact that — whoever wins the election — US priorities are increasingly going to shift elsewhere. 

At the same time as their summit in Washington was overshadowed by speculation on what the president’s decline means for his party’s prospects of defeating Trump in November, there were noises off-stage sharpening the visitors’ focus on what comes next. 

At a rally this week Trump dug in on criticisms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, indicating he was prepared to ignore its central pillar: the clause on collective defense. But European officials say they’re expecting both he and his democratic counterpart to concentrate more on China at the expense of Europe.

“Europe should not be helpless,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview Friday. “We need to get serious about defense of the EU because the US officially no longer has the capacity to fight two wars at the same time,” he said, pointing at increasing American tensions with China.

Prodded by French President Emmanuel Macron, who called NATO “brain-dead” five years ago, Europe has rushed to shore up its own defense capabilities. The continent’s lack of preparedness was laid bare by both Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as well as Trump’s time in the White House, when he lashed out at NATO members’ reliance on their most generous member.

Even so, “it’s not so much a Trump presidency as the international environment that are changing things for Europe,” according to Camille Grand, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior NATO official. 

The difference could be the manner in which any retreat is brought about: “With Biden it would be much more step-by-step, with Trump it’d be more disruptive,” Grand said.

At his rally, Trump recounted a threat not to come to the aid of allies that don’t meet their spending commitments. Acting on that behavior would flout how the alliance operates and create a huge crisis, according to a senior European diplomat, who wasn’t authorized to give candid views so spoke on condition of anonymity.

In the meantime, Washington’s focus on Beijing has prompted China to feature more prominently in European officials’ discussions with US politicians and think tankers on both sides of the aisle. 

In an interview on the NATO summit’s sidelines, Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics appealed to the next US administration to keep troops in Europe and continue supporting Ukraine. He said rowing back those commitments would only hinder the US’s China strategy by raising doubts among allies in its region. 

“If there is no efficient response by NATO where the United States is part of it,” Rinkevics said, “Why on earth would anyone in Asia trust the United States?”

NATO has collectively started to focus more on China, in part to stay relevant to the US. On Wednesday, its leaders issued their starkest language yet toward Beijing. They accused it of being “a decisive enabler” of the conflict in Ukraine, after US officials briefed allies about the extent of China’s aid to Russia’s war.

The US pivot to counter China is already showing up in budget priorities. The Biden administration requested $9.1 billion for its Pacific Deterrence Initiative for this year, compared with $3.6 billion for the European initiative.

With the US shifting focus to Asia, European nations keep underlining that they’re picking up the slack — partly out of hope that’ll keep Washington engaged.

For Germany, the European Union’s economic engine, the summit was a turning point, and prompted the realization that it will have to boost its defense capabilities irrespective of a Trump or a Biden White House, according to officials familiar with the government’s thinking. For them, this was mainly due to the political volatility in the US.

“We have to understand that even if Biden wins another term, the US’s attention will increasingly shift to the Indo-Pacific,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Deutschlandfunk radio on Thursday. “That means what they do more of there, they’ll do less of in Europe.” 

Around 23 out of 32 NATO allies will hit a goal of spending at least 2% of output on defense this year — up from just 10 countries last year. But with Europe struggling to both arm Ukraine and rebuild its stocks, it’s still got a long way to go to be able to defend the region without American help.

France, Germany, Italy and Poland took a step toward filling a critical military capability for which the bloc’s so far been relying on the US, when on Thursday the countries agreed to design and build their own long-range missiles.

But it’s unclear whether those efforts will be enough to assuage the next White House, particularly if it’s Trump who wins a second term. 

“Defense spending is not in and of itself something that Trump really cares about,” said Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, which was founded by Russ Vought, a former official in Trump’s cabinet. “Fundamentally, he doesn’t really like being in a situation where he thinks he is being taken advantage of.” 

There’s a constant demand from eastern Europe for the US to spend more money in Ukraine, Maitra said, adding he doesn’t speak for the Trump campaign: “Those are fundamentally not American concerns.”

With assistance from Arne Delfs, Slav Okov, Piotr Skolimowski and Kasia Klimasinska.

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