Why America betrayed Europe

There are lots of reasons, actually.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet by the European economist Anders Aslund:

His tone is plaintive, not accusatory or bitter. He really doesn’t understand why America, which has acted as Europe’s steadfast protector all of his life, is suddenly turning its back on its fellow democracies and aligning itself with Russia instead. His confusion is understandable. By all but abandoning Ukraine, endorsing Russia’s war aims, threatening not to defend NATO allies if they were attacked, and threatening to withdraw from NATO entirely, Trump is rapidly tearing up the global order that the U.S. built after World War 2.

Although the administration frames this policy as “America first”, it will hurt the U.S. just as surely as it will hurt Europe. American defense exports will suffer, as countries realize that the U.S. can and will turn off support for its weapons platforms whenever it gets annoyed with the buyer. The U.S. position in Asia and elsewhere will be severely weakened — and China’s strengthened — as every country in the world realizes that America is now a fickle and unreliable ally. In the absence of U.S. protection, many nations will — quite reasonably and appropriately — now turn to nuclear weapons instead.

It’s tempting to conclude that Trump and his people are simply working directly for Vladimir Putin — that, in Garry Kasparov’s words, “Donald Trump…has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.” I will admit that it’s certainly often difficult to distinguish Trump’s behavior toward Russia from what it would be if he were on Putin’s payroll. But in fact I think there are a number of reasons why the U.S. has suddenly abandoned Europe, and none of them require shadowy conspiracies.

So I’d like to try to answer Aslund’s question. But first, I should point out that the will of Trump is not the will of the American people on every issue. Yes, Trump was elected to the presidency, but Americans seem to have been blindsided by his turn toward Russia. His approval ratings on foreign policy have fallen substantially since the election:

Donald Trump is facing a decline in his approval ratings over his handling of foreign policy…The survey, conducted by Reuters and Ipsos between March 2 and 4, reveals that just 37 percent of respondents approve of the way Trump is handling foreign policy, while 50 percent disapprove, giving the president a net approval rating of -13 points…[This] represents a drop from January. The pollsters found then that Trump had a net approval rating of +2 points on the issue[.]

Americans generally support working with NATO and defending allies:

Source: Gallup

But foreign policy just isn’t that high on Americans’ list of priorities when the country itself isn’t at war. On surveys about the country’s most important problems, foreign policy barely gets a mention. So while Americans might not like what Trump does to Ukraine or NATO, they’re unlikely to punish him severely for it.

Therefore the question here isn’t really why America abandoned Europe, but why Trump did. In fact, I think there are a bunch of reasons. These are just guesses, of course; I don’t have any special insight into the mind of Trump or his allies. But I think they all reasonably fit with both the words and actions we’ve seen coming out of the American right.

Abandoning Europe pattern-matches with the 19th century

In general, Trump and many of his supporters are nostalgic for a time when the U.S. was a hungry young country on the rise, instead of a declining status quo power. They typically see America’s time of greatest ascent as the period between the Civil War and the World Wars — roughly 1870 to 1913.

If you think your country’s glory days are in the past, and you want to restore them, one obvious thing to try is to simply do things the way you did back then. A generous term for this is “pattern-matching”.¹ One reason Trump and his people idolize tariffs, for example, is that before the World Wars, America collected much of its revenue via taxes on imports. This is also the reason some on the American right want to abolish the Fed and return to a gold standard. Trump’s bullying attitude toward other countries, especially in North America, takes its cues from this era as well.

In America’s era of rapid growth and rising power, it studiously avoided European entanglements. Before the World Wars, Americans viewed European countries, including the UK, as their rival for power, both on the North American continent and elsewhere. Many American leaders warned the country against getting entangled in European conflicts.

This attitude persisted up right up until 1916, when Woodrow Wilson campaigned on his record of keeping the U.S. out of World War 1. Wilson coined the term “America First” to describe the idea that America should stay out of European affairs. Wilson eventually joined WW1, but the anti-European attitude returned in the 1930s with the isolationist movement. The most prominent isolationist organization was the America First Committee, a coalition of both rightists and leftists who opposed involvement in World War 2. This organization included Charles Lindbergh, who thought the U.S. should stick to the Western Hemisphere.

You’ll notice that Trump and many of his followers like to use the phrase “America First”. They are explicitly hearkening back to the attitudes of the period they consider to be their country’s golden age. This means abandoning Europe and leaving it to fight its own battles.

Trump personally likes the idea of partnering with Russia

Whatever his actual past or present relationship with the Russians, Trump certainly seems to want to partner with Vladimir Putin. This doesn’t exactly fit with the idea of 1930s-style isolationism, of course, but Russia seems to be the one country this administration instinctively views as a potential friend.

As I wrote last month, there are basically two theories as to why he wants to do this:

America is being sold out by its leaders

The first theory is that Trump (or perhaps Musk) wants to coordinate with Russia and China and divide up the world between them into spheres of influence, while cooperating to suppress global “woke” ideology. This would combine the isolationism of Lindbergh with the reactionary approach of Klemens von Metternich.

The second theory is that Trump and his people are trying to pull off a “reverse Kissinger” diplomatic maneuver in which they either flip Russia to the U.S. side against China, or at least make sure Russia stays neutral in any U.S.-China conflict. This is unlikely to succeed, for many reasons, but it does seem like an idea that the Trump people are quite enamored of.

Either of these theories would be a convenient way for Trump to try and put a brave face on American weakness. The U.S. has deemphasized manufacturing and let its defense-industrial base go to rot, leaving it incapable of matching even Russia’s rate of weapons production, let alone China’s. The days when America was capable of fighting a two-front war in Asia and Europe are long gone; these days, it would be hard-pressed to fight a one-front war in Asia.

Trump probably knows this. He believes (wrongly) that his economic isolationism will eventually restore American manufacturing, but in the meantime, he probably feels the urge to retreat from the world stage — or at least from Europe — in order to both husband America’s dwindling resources and avoid the possibility of military humiliation.

In any case, whichever of the theories is true, it seems clear that Trump and many of his followers think Russia would make a better U.S. partner than Europe would. As for why they think this…well, I can speculate.

Europe’s values conflict — and Russia’s somewhat align — with those of the American right

If you exist in right-wing spaces in America, you will notice an admiration for Russian values. Journalists in the Trump orbit, like Tucker Carlson, regularly fawn over Russia. Cathy Young had a good post about this last year:

When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin

Some key excerpts:

At this point, pro-Putinism is no longer an undercurrent in right-wing rhetoric: it’s on the surface…For some, their hatred of the American left overrides any feelings they have about Putin. Others are more ideological: they oppose the Western liberal project itself…

An article in The Federalist the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine starkly illustrates this mindset. Author Christopher Bedford, former head of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a prolific contributor to right-of-center media, not only bluntly stated that “a lot of us hate our elites far more than we hate some foreign dictator” but admitted finding a lot to admire in said dictator—for instance, Putin’s unapologetic defense of Russia’s “religion, culture and history,” while Western elites denigrate and apologize for theirs…

David French [has] pointed to such examples as far-right strategist Steve Bannon’s praise for Putin’s “anti-woke” persona and Russia’s conservative gender politics, or psychologist Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that Russia’s war in Ukraine was partly self-defense against the decadence of “the pathological West.”…

[C]onsider the near-panegyric to Putin in a much more respectable venue: a 2017 speech by writer and Claremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell…Caldwell, who unabashedly hails Putin as “a hero to populist conservatives,” just as unabashedly acknowledges that the “hero” has suppressed “peaceful demonstrations” and jailed and probably murdered political opponents. Yet he asserts that “if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”

Many different rightists and conservatives in America have different reasons for admiring Russia. Some see it as a Christian bulwark against postmodern atheism (despite the fact that Russian society is very irreligious). Others see it as a manly and martial culture. Still others love its repression of gays. A few see it as a bastion of white power.

Modern Europe, on the other hand, embodies many of the values America’s right despises and fears. It’s a secular society with many liberal values. It has universal health care, strong social safety nets, strong labor protections, strong climate laws, and a powerful and intrusive regulatory state. Often, Europeans come across to American conservatives as smug, hectoring liberals, bragging about their longer life expectancy and free health care and lecturing Americans about gun control, poverty, etc. Sometimes, American progressives hold up Europe as an example of a superior civilization.

On top of all that, European governments embraced mass immigration from Muslim countries in the 2000s and 2010s, which many rightists see as an invasion bent on destroying traditional European civilization. Some European countries have criminalized speech they believe to be Islamophobic. JD Vance, notably, has attacked European countries over both migration and speech control.

It’s natural for the American right to want to work with countries that share their values, and oppose countries that embrace values that are alien and abhorrent to them. Commitment to democracy and to time-honored alliances overrode that sentiment for a long time, but now that Trump is in power, the American right’s deeper instincts have taken charge.

To American rightists, Russia seems strong and Europe seems weak

Trump and his people constantly talk about Europe’s need to spend more on their own defense. In fact, when Trump threatened to refuse to honor NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense commitment, he only threatened to abandon European countries that didn’t spend a large amount on their own defense.

But this is about more than European free-riding. Trump and his people see Europe as a weak entity — a soft, decadent land incapable of defending itself against its more martial and manly neighbor. Ted Cruz, a Republican senator, famously watched a Russian military propaganda video showing soldiers doing shirtless pushups, and declared that America’s “woke, emasculated military” didn’t stand a chance against them:

The notion that Russia is inherently stronger than Europe is false, of course — Europe has a lot more people and a lot more heavy industry. All the pushups in the world haven’t prevented the vaunted Russian military from turning in a decidedly lackluster performance in Ukraine. But to the American right, perceptions and posturing and vibes are often more important than numbers and statistics. Russia gives off strength, so it must be strong.

And to the American right, strength is everything in international affairs. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and concepts like the rules-based international order or international law are laughable. If Russia and Europe are to fight, Trump and company want to bet on the side with the shirtless pushups.

Of all the reasons why Trump has abandoned Europe, this is the only one that the region can do anything about. Europeans are not going to give up their fundamental values, and they won’t be able to disabuse Trump of his dreams of partnering with Russia and pretending it’s the 19th century. But what Europe can do is to look strong. It can beef up its defenses by a huge amount, implement universal military training, build up its nuclear arsenal, and boost heavy industry and defense manufacturing. Poland is already doing all of this, and the UK, France, and Germany are already moving in the direction of rearmament. That’s good.

Europe can’t make Trump or his party embrace their values. But what they can do is to become strong enough where Trump respects them instinctively. That strength will push Trump toward a posture of neutrality, instead of friendliness toward Russia. And maybe, after the weird rightist minority that has taken over the country no longer holds power, America and Europe can reestablish their storied alliance — on a more equal footing this time.

---

1. A less generous term for this is “cargo cult”.