Alexander Brotman
Some NATO member states like Poland and the Baltic states are well positioned, having promoted European self-reliance and increased defense spending for some time, proving themselves as capable partners of both Republican and Democratic administrations. France and Germany are more vulnerable due to fractious internal politics and the collapse of Germany’s fragile coalition government just the day following the US election, with a likely Christian Democratic Union-led government emerging next year. For Europe, Trump’s re-election is a wake-up and a warning call, a signal that the Biden years may not have been a return to normal and that Trump is not an anomaly but representative of a deep-seated feature of US politics.
However, NATO’s ‘brain death’ in the words of French President Macron, is far from assured, and while the future of Ukraine is undoubtedly more perilous than it would have been under a Harris administration, Kyiv’s defeat is far from certain. Ukraine may even welcome the unpredictability of the new president, as a recent article in The Economist argued, and while some domestic cabinet posts have sparked controversy, Trump’s picks of Keith Kellogg as special envoy to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser have been welcome developments.
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