Trump's Trip a Disaster for Transatlantic Relations

Donald Trump manufactures enemies and unfriends allies like it’s his job.

His first trip abroad to the Middle East and Europe could have been a success, could have given him at least a temporary reprieve here at home as his poll numbers continue to slide. He skated through okay in the Middle East, as I wrote last week, one of the toughest places in the entire world to get good reviews. For the European leg of his trip, all he had to do was reassure our friends that the Transatlantic alliance is as robust as ever while refraining from doing or saying anything stupid. He botched it, though, in the one part of the world after Canada and Australia that’s supposed to be easy.

In his speech at the NATO headquarters, rather than calming nerves and reaffirming the mutual defense commitment in Article 5 where an attack on one member state is considered an attack against all, he hectored Europeans for not paying their fair share of defense expenditures.

It’s true that most NATO members don’t spend the suggested two percent of GDP on defense, but 22 of them pledged to increase spending over time until they reach or exceed that two percent threshold. They did this years ago, when Barack Obama was president.

Somebody should have told him.

He rudely shoved Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic on camera like a schoolyard bully. (The video must be seen to be believed.) In Sicily, while other heads of state walked to a plaza for a group photo, Trump refused to walk with them and waited for a golf cart driver to give him a ride, suggesting that Hillary Clinton may have more stamina after all.

“The Germans are bad, very bad,” he reportedly said at a European Union meeting in Brussels. “See the millions of cars they are selling in the U.S.? Terrible. We will stop this.”

His staff quibbled with the report, but this week he trolled Germany using similar language on his Twitter account. “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany,” he tweeted on Tuesday, “plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.”

Goodness.

First of all, the United States does not have a trade deficit with Germany. The United States trades with the European Union as a bloc, not with individual nations in particular.

Second, trade deficits, as Adam Smith Institute scholar Tim Worstall explains in Forbes, don’t matter in the slightest. “Trade deficits themselves don’t matter and bilateral deficits matter even less than that. Thus the idea that the United States buys more from Germany than that country buys from the United States is simply a matter of no import at all.”

The president of the United States is badgering Germany for no reason other than the fact that he doesn’t know what’s actually happening or how the world works. (He did the same thing to Canada last month.)

“When it comes to diplomacy,” a State Department official said to the Daily Beast, “President Trump is a drunk tourist.” And “President Trump,” writes Kori Schake in The American Interest, “acts as though boorish behavior has no consequences, as though other countries have no choice but to comply with American demands.”

Other countries do have a choice, though, and apparently unlike the American president, they know it.

The new French president Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to snub him and warmly greet German Chancellor Angela Merkel instead. Merkel, for her part, went farther and warned her constituents that Transatlanticism is on the decline now. The days when Europe can count on others are “over to a certain extent,” she said at a rally in Munich. “This is what I have experienced in the last few days.”

“Trump must have said some outrageous things behind closed doors for the cautious Markel to make this statement,” former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted on Sunday.

Donald Trump is his own worst enemy. He picks one unnecessary fight after another, not just with his Democratic opposition, which is par for the course in domestic politics, but also with members of his own party, American intelligence agencies, journalists, former American presidents, and our closest friends and allies.

Every one of his self-made enemies is capable of fighting back—the intelligence agencies with leaks, journalists with negative press coverage, members of Congress with investigations and (perhaps later) with articles of impeachment. There’s no telling what European heads of state are going to do, but we’ll find out soon enough.

A lot of us on this side of the Atlantic have been concerned about Europe’s own populist demagogues—Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Nigel Farage in Britain and Norbert Hofer in Austria. Rather than putting these folks in the saddle, Europeans might instead elect a batch of leaders that, with the exception of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, are more aggressively anti-American than anyone on the continent since World War II.

Barely four months into his presidency, Donald Trump is flitting from one self-made crisis to another. When a real crisis hits—one that isn’t of his own making and one that none of us can see coming—America First could curdle into America Alone.