I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.
He’s shattering it. He’s making the world more dangerous. He’s siding with an alleged war criminal, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and poisoning relations with longtime U.S. allies. The trans-Atlantic alliance is unraveling.
“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values — largely put in place by America since the Second World War — which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity,” Chris Patten, the former British Conservative Party chairman and European foreign affairs chief, told me.
Patten’s tough language is a reflection of the distress in Europe, for he is a lifelong Americanophile, and now, as Lord Patten of Barnes, a model of British dignity and restraint. He added, “I love America and was once happy to regard its president as leader of the free world. Not any longer. Where are the American values that I used to admire?”
I wish I knew what to tell him. But this is a humiliating month to be an American. When I was a young reporter, we referred to countries like Poland and Romania as Soviet satellites; now Trump is doing Putin’s bidding and seems determined to put the United States in the Russian orbit.
Trump administration officials cozied up to Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this week over “a lot of jokes,” as one of the Russians put it. The two sides discussed Ukraine, and thus Europe’s future, while excluding both the Ukrainians and the Europeans. There is talk of adopting Russia’s position on Ukraine and dropping sanctions against Moscow.
This would be grotesque. I’ve covered the war in Ukraine, visited Russian torture chambers and interviewed Ukrainian children trafficked into Russia by the invaders. If only Trump and his aides had a fraction of the steel of one Ukrainian woman I interviewed in 2022, Alla Kuznietsova, who, even when subjected to electric shocks, beatings with cables and repeated rapes by Russian interrogators, refused to yield to them.
“We are grateful to Americans, but we just ask, please don’t leave us halfway,” she told me then. “Don’t leave us alone.” Yet now Trump has collapsed and seems ready to abandon heroes like her. What we’ve seen in the last 10 days from American officials is appeasement of the most craven kind.
As Neville Chamberlain’s ghost watched, Vice President JD Vance lit into Europeans in a speech in Munich and then met the leader of an extremist right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany, which many Germans see as descended from Nazism. Some of its members have downplayed the Holocaust, employed Nazi slogans and allegedly plotted to overthrow the government.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Trump administration is working to undermine democracy not only at home but also in Europe. As The Economist noted, what we’ve seen is “Donald Trump’s assault on Europe.”
Trump is widely expected to pull some troops out of Europe. And NATO looks more and more hollow; does anyone really think that if Russia dispatched little green men to seize Latvian villages, Trump would dispatch troops under NATO’s Article 5? It’s at least as likely that he would ask Putin about putting up a Trump Hotel there.
“European leaders are waking up to the fact that not only is the U.S. abandoning Ukraine, but that the U.S. represents a threat to the future of democracy and freedom in Europe,” wrote Phillips O’Brien, an international relations scholar at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain put it this way: “We’re facing a generational challenge.”
In fairness, Trump is right on a basic point: Europe should contribute much more to its own defense, rather than free-riding on American taxpayers. Europe is populous enough and rich enough that it could manage Russia on its own, but instead of managing a transition, Trump is close to switching sides.
Trump says of the Ukraine war that Ukraine “should have never started it” — when of course Ukraine didn’t start anything. Trump might as well say that a mugging victim shouldn’t have punched the attacker’s fist with his nose.
The Trump administration has lately sided with Moscow on one issue after another: Ukraine must cede territory, can’t join NATO and should hold new elections just as Russia insists. (Meanwhile, there’s no call for Russia to hold elections.) Trump even suggested that Russia should be readmitted to the Group of 7.
In a falsehood-filled rant on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump went further. He denounced Ukraine’s elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “dictator” who had squandered money and had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.” Trump’s post had the tone of statements from the Kremlin.
Trump embraced these positions of Putin without apparently negotiating much in return. Diplomacy is normally about give and take, but — as happens so often when Trump interacts with Putin — Trump has been all give.
The Trump approach to international relations buttresses Russia in other ways. His demands for territory from Panama, Greenland and Canada reinforce the Russian position that superpowers can grab whatever they want. His sanctioning of the International Criminal Court and calls for the forced removal of Gazans mark an abandonment of the rules-based international order that amplified American soft power. Trump is making Putin a winner.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, a former foreign minister of Lithuania, warns that if Trump continues to back Russia and Europe fails to step up, then “threats to European security will grow immensely. Putin will get braver, meaning more war in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and beyond.”
The danger goes beyond Europe. Perhaps the greatest international relations nightmare in the coming years would be a war between the United States and China, beginning near Taiwan or in the South China Sea. President Joe Biden deterred Chinese aggression by working closely with allies in Asia and making it obvious that Russia was paying a steep price for its invasion of Ukraine. If Trump instead lets Russia win and also frays relations with our allies, then China is more likely to move on Taiwan.
“What awful times,” Patten told me. The post-World War II era has been a remarkable historical epoch of eight decades of prosperity and progress. But now, as the British foreign secretary remarked in August 1914, “the lamps are going out all over Europe,” and we must prepare for a more dangerous world.
