A sad trend in world affairs, and one that is personal for me, is the growing rift in the Atlantic. I’m not talking about the geological one under the water (which widens by more than an inch per year) but about the geopolitical fault between the United States and Europe. As a dual citizen of the US and Germany, I’ve taken the trans-Atlantic bond for granted throughout my life. But it will loosen, if not snap.
These two tectonic plates of geopolitics have long been moving in opposite directions. Several European NATO members have for decades skimped on defense spending, free-riding on US military might and first frustrating, then enraging American taxpayers and policymakers. Even if some now spend more on their armies, the change may be too little, too late.
Washington, meanwhile, has been drifting from its strategic and visceral trans-Atlanticism during the Cold War. Presidents since Barack Obama have tried, and so far failed, to “pivot” from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, where they see more important and dangerous fault lines and sense tremors all around China.
Gone is that brief unipolar moment when America was a hyperpower and could pretend to police all regions of the world. In today’s context of permanent budget crises (another is coming up) and ever more crushing debt, Washington will have to make choices.
Those will differ depending on the next president. In his first term, Donald Trump, who likes to snub America’s allies and schmooze its adversaries, threatened to yank US troops out of Germany and to withdraw from NATO altogether. In a second term, he may do that, or simply, as one think tank close to him suggests, declare the alliance “dormant.”
Kamala Harris, by contrast, would reaffirm America’s traditional commitments, as her lame-duck boss has done. But unlike Joe Biden, she is of a generation that feels the trans-Atlantic bond in its head more than in its viscera. Moreover, Harris is surrounded by advisers and think tanks — the notorious Washington “blob” — who have distanced themselves from the postwar credo of hegemonic internationalism. The choice today is between a brute MAGA isolationism or a subtler retrenchment called “restraint.”
To consider all this, I sat down with Emma Ashford, a strategist in a team of “anti-group-think ninjas” (their term) at the Stimson Center in Washington. She’s been studying scenarios of American retrenchment and their effect on Europe. Some are merely worrisome, others hair-raising.
The scenarios vary along two parameters. First, is the American retrenchment sudden and fast or gradual and slow? Second, is it intentional or unintentional — that is, taken by choice or forced by some emergency? (The threat to Europe is assumed to be the same: an aggressive and irredentist Russia.)
A Trump exit would be deliberate and discretionary, and swift. By contrast, Harris would rhetorically recommit to Europe. But like Trump, she could still be forced to retrench from the continent by contingencies.
That could happen fast: if, for example, China invades Taiwan, major war breaks out in Asia and the US needs to move soldiers, guns, ammo, ships, planes and all the rest to the Pacific overnight. Or slow: The US could have a fiscal crisis, forcing Washington to save on its troops overseas; with Asia remaining the priority, the cuts would hit Europe and gradually “hollow out” NATO.
An intentional and fast Trump pullout would be terrible for Europe. Because the details would be up to the president, northern and eastern countries such as Poland, which feel most threatened by Russia and already spend a lot on their armies, would try to flatter him into bilateral security pacts (Ashford imagines offers to pay for a “Fort Trump” in Poland, say).
This bargaining by some but not others would compromise the remnants of NATO and the European Union. Already fractious, these continental institutions would unravel into a patchwork of mini-alliances and medium-sized armies, each deficient in its own way and lacking coordination with the others. Champagne bottles would pop in the Kremlin.
A slow hollowing out of the trans-Atlantic alliance caused by an American fiscal crisis (or something similar) wouldn’t be fun either. The Europeans would continue to gab (as they have been gabbing since the 1950s) about a “European army,” and drape more summitry around their “common security and defense policy,” which already exists on paper. But nothing would come of it, because the crisis is too slow, and every country perceives different threats. Portugal in the southwest isn’t all that scared of the Kremlin, while Estonia in the northeast is scared of little else.
The large countries, such as Germany, wouldn’t be ready to sacrifice their bloated welfare systems for military preparedness. The French (and the Brits outside the EU) would talk tough, but won’t extend their own (and small) nuclear umbrellas over their European allies. The Kremlin would enjoy this show and bide its time, a bit as Napoleon once watched the Holy Roman Empire disintegrate before dissolving it.
An unintentional but sharp rupture, such as war between the US and China in Asia, would be different. For the world, this turn of events would be disastrous, especially since China, Russia, North Korea and Iran increasingly behave like an “axis” and might coordinate. But because there’d be no point bargaining with the American president, the Europeans would grasp at once that they can float together or sink separately.
A coerced and sudden American pivot could in that way become Europe’s belated Zeitenwende, or “turning point.” With the Americans off to Asia, the Europeans would have to take the initiative in Brussels, in the EU as well as the headquarters of NATO. They’d share intelligence, weapons systems and even command and control, all to defend their shared continent. Europe would be, as the cliché goes, “forged in crisis.”
All this makes you wonder why the Europeans don’t opt for a less apocalyptic scenario and get their act together without the world first going up in flames. (If you have a good answer, you deserve the Charlemagne Prize.) At minimum, the old world must finally understand what the Americans are talking about on the other side of the Atlantic, where the question of a break-up isn’t whether, but when and how.
Credit: Bloomberg
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