Stephen M. Walt
A few weeks ago, I warned that the second Trump administration might be squandering the tolerance and good will that Washington had long received from the world’s major democracies. Instead of seeing the United States as a mostly positive force in world affairs, these states might now “have to worry that the United States is actively malevolent.” That column was written before Vice President J.D. Vance gave his confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, before President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and before U.S. officials appeared to preemptively offer Russia almost everything it wants before negotiations on Ukraine were even underway. The reaction of mainstream European observers was neatly summed up by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times: “[T]he Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary.”
Is this view correct? A skeptic might recall that there have been serious rifts in the transatlantic partnership on many prior occasions: over Suez in 1956, over nuclear strategy and Vietnam in the 1960s, over the Euromissiles issue in the 1980s, and during the Kosovo war in 1999. The Iraq war in 2003 was yet another low-water mark between Washington and much of Europe. The United States did not hesitate to act unilaterally on numerous occasions, even when its allies’ interests were adversely affected, as Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 or as Joe Biden did when he signed the protectionist Inflation Reduction Act and the United States forced European firms to stop some high-tech exports to China. But few Europeans or Canadians believed the United States was deliberately trying to harm them; they believed that Washington was genuinely committed to their security and understood that its own security and prosperity was tied to their own. They were right, which made it much easier for the United States to win their support when necessary.
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