Trump and Europe are at each other’s throats. What does it mean? |
From left: NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, U.S. President Donald Trump, Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with NATO country leaders during the NATO Summit on June 25 in The Hague, Netherlands.Pool/Getty Images
Tim Sebastian is an English journalist who served as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, and has reported from Washington and around Europe.
If you didn’t know it before, you certainly know it now.
America is the best, the richest, the most successful, the most powerful country in the world with the best military, uniquely capable of the most spectacular operations, led by the best and most decisive President on the planet.
Got it? Good. Because Donald Trump has been throwing his weight around. In Venezuela. In Greenland. And if his new National Security Strategy is enacted, he could soon be working to undermine his own allies in Europe.
But was that risk always there? Just how firm is the transatlantic alliance? Was America’s commitment to Western security ever as solid as Europe believed?
Back in the late 1980s, I took a walk along the Potomac River in Washington with an unusually frank interlocutor.
He was Admiral Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, and as such, a guardian of some of America’s closest held secrets.
Then-director of the CIA Stansfield Turner in 1979. He died in 2018.The Associated Press
At some point we touched on the “nuclear umbrella” – the shield that America purported to have installed in Europe to deter any nuclear strike by the Soviet Union and to counterattack if that deterrence failed.
In the middle of the conversation, Mr. Turner, who died in 2018, stopped and stared at me with incredulity. “You people in Europe really don’t get it. Do you?”
“Get what?” I asked.
“This nuclear umbrella that you’re talking about. You think it’s designed to give you shelter while the nukes pass overhead between Moscow and Washington. But we look at it in a different way.”
“How different?” I asked.
Mr. Turner shook his head: “Do you seriously think Washington would put the U.S. at risk of nuclear attack for the sake of Belgium … or Holland? Most Americans don’t even know where they are. You need to understand something. In our plan those Russian nukes would be kept inside that umbrella – not passing overhead.
“The reason we keep forces in Europe is that if there’s going to be a war, we’ll fight it on your territory – not ours.”
That conversation is worth remembering these days. Its central message is as relevant now as it was during the Cold War.
Treaties are all very well and good on sheets of paper, but when critical events occur and the existence of your country is at stake, who on Earth is going to read them, let alone abide by the promises they appear to make?
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sits with Mr. Trump after the announcement of a trade deal between the U.S. and EU, in Turnberry, Scotland, on July 27.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
To be honest, NATO was built on several shaky assumptions. Its treaty was meticulously crafted to give the appearance of a mutual defence guarantee for all its members – while, in fact, offering nothing of the kind.
So successful was this master class on diplomatic sophistry that statesmen from all parts of the alliance have trumpeted this fiction for decades, waving Article 5 of the treaty at anyone who dared doubt the promises it was said to contain.
But take a read. The key paragraph states that if a member country of the alliance is attacked, each NATO partner will take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Left chillingly unsaid is the specific right of each member to take no action at all. That is a big loophole. Others may be opening up right now.
Whatever happens, though, Mr. Trump’s “invade and grab” operation that seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro will already have sent a powerful warning to some countries, especially those that have displeased the White House in the Western Hemisphere.
In December, in a wordy treatise with the catchy title “National Security Strategy,” the White House warned of “urgent threats” in the region – including from countries that had “hurt” the U.S. economically and might pose a strategic threat in the future.
“The U.S. must be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says.
The National Security Strategy, released in November, 2025, paints European allies as weak and aims to reassert the U.S.'s dominance in the Western Hemisphere.Jon Elswick/The Associated Press
After years of “neglect,” America would be reasserting the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine – now “Donroe” in Mr. Trump’s telling – keeping foreign countries out of its backyard, denying them control of vital assets and preventing them from deploying their forces.
The tone was high-handed and authoritarian, but that won’t have stopped some of the bigger beasts around the world from quietly applauding from the sidelines.
My guess is you won’t have to wait long for Beijing and Moscow to follow Mr. Trump’s lead. China will likely move closer to a forcible “reunification” with Taiwan; Russia may well intensify its attacks on Ukraine and step up its hybrid warfare against the Baltic states and Western Europe.
If Mr. Trump can get away with strong-arming sovereign states, they’ll argue, then they can, too.
But planning foreign adventures has never been America’s strongest suit. And even if Mr. Trump does have a plan for the days after in Venezuela or anywhere else – a dubious assumption – he will likely change his mind plenty of times along the way.
Moreover, when it comes........