Trump Wants to Shut the U.S. Off From Our Allies. That Will Backfire.

Many Europeans woke up Wednesday morning stunned to learn that while they were sleeping, their nightmare had come true—Donald Trump had won the American presidential election, and not by a small margin.

They had feared this outcome ever since this time four years ago, when Trump lost his bid for reelection, loudly claimed that the race was rigged, and started running again to recapture his throne.

Allied leaders will by and large keep their shudders under wraps. They know—just as the world’s dictators have learned—that Trump is an easy mark for flattery; the best way to deal with him is to praise his wisdom, laugh at his jokes, admire his golf game, and call him “sir” (or, as a Taliban leader once did, to Trump’s pride, “Your Excellency”).

Still, this tactic can go only so far. Trump is who he is. During his single term as president, Trump made clear that he proclaimed his foreign-policy slogan—“America First”—in the same spirit as the isolationists who coined the phrase back in the 1930s, during the rise of Nazi Germany, which they saw as a threat only to people in faraway countries about whom they knew nothing. Trump denounced alliances as a waste of money, openly said he wouldn’t defend any NATO countries that failed to spend as much on their own defense as they’d pledged, and raised doubts about whether he would bother to lift a finger even if they’d met their marks.

In this, Trump will face little internal resistance. At the start of his first term, he appointed establishment national security advisers (he was impressed that they looked straight out of Central Casting) who ended up blocking some of his worst inclinations. This time, he knows the people who share his ideas and will carry out his policies. And with a firm Senate majority, they will easily get confirmed.

During this year’s campaign, he has said he would end the war in Ukraine immediately, even before he takes office—and his one great European friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has revealed that Trump told him his “plan” for doing so is simply to cut off aid to Kyiv. Trump has no love for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; it was........

© Slate

visit website