Not long ago, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was setting up the European allies to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He illustrated the point that a higher diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, recently summarized as the way the United States win the global competition for power and prosperity: “Be kind to your allies”.
President Trump clearly has a different vision. His antagonism towards Europe has been public for decades, seeing the allies as economic competitors and geopolitical parasites. And his decision on Thursday to impose controversial rates calculated to American partners, including Ukraine-but not Russia or North Korea bare his will to fracture a transatlantic alliance that has widely maintained peace in Europe for 80 years.
In combination with the demand of Mr. Trump that NATO allies spend up to 5 % of their gross domestic product in the army and its express desires to seize the territory from Denmark, a NATO ally, the rates highlight long -term damage to American relationships with Europe that is unlikely that they are never completely repaired.
“The rates are another addition to the perception and evaluation in Europe according to which the United States under Donald Trump are not only an unreliable partner, but a partner of which you cannot trust in any way,” said Guntram Wolff, economist and former director of the German Council on foreign relations. “This changes 80 years of post -war history, when the transatlantic alliance was the core of the western world and the global multilateral system.”
Although Brussels will try to preserve some of these key relationships, Wolff added: “He can’t at the base of the global system”.
The effort of Mr. Trump to transform the global order also seems to benefit from Russia, the main antagonist of NATO, potentially weakening the opponents of the Kremlin in the rest of Europe, even if on Friday, oil prices also hit Russia.
“It seems that there is no order in the disorder,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, Thursday. “No clear path through the complexity and chaos that are created like all US commercial partners are affected”, “damaging the most vulnerable citizens”.
Europeans are increasingly aware of the fact that Trump, not moderate and even encouraged by more ideologically compatible and loyal councilors in his second term, intends to follow his intentions to distance the United States from Europe. But “the intensity, speed, aggression and imperialism of this administration was a surprise for some people”, said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council for foreign relations.
Many European governments thought they could navigate the requests of Mr. Trump through transactional methods, such as the purchase of multiple weapons and the natural liquefied-the main American gas-American exports-and more loaded. The developments of the last few weeks show the limits of this approach, including the irregular application of the Trump administration rates in Great Britain and the European Union and its demand for Ukrainian minerals in exchange for years of military aid.
“The challenge for Europe is like facing a predatory America willing to use the vulnerability of the allies to extort them, whether it is a mineral agreement in Ukrainian or attempts to annex Greenland or the open way trump is trying to divide Great Britain from the EU with differential commercial agreements,” said Leonard.
For now, the European Union is being held together, largely because Trump has applied the same rates of 20 % to all its 27 Member States, including more ideologically friendly countries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Italy. But Washington can also choose to use differentiated rates on some sectors to put pressure on individual countries, such as Denmark, on issues such as Greenland.
There is a general assumption that the rates are a prelude to an agreement, like the son of Mr. Trump Eric urged in a message on X. “I would not like to be the last country that tries to negotiate a commercial agreement with @realdonaldrump”, he wrote. “The first to negotiate will win: the last will absolutely lose.”
Sophia Besch, a German analyst at Washington Carnegie Endowment, sees two messages basically different from the Trump administration. “It is not clear whether this is an opening offer to negotiate or if they are really remaking the world, without any interest in repairing it,” he said. “Several people around Trump are pursuing different things.”
The issues of rates and safety are distinct but hardly separated, said Mrs. Besch and others, showing the will of Mr. Trump to use American power in a cruel and even cash against friends, their economies and the poor, who are more likely to suffer from inflation and higher taxes.
The secretary of state Marco Rubio tried to be reassuring in Brussels last week, during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, while mixing emollience with warning. He denounced “Histeria and Hyperbola” in the media and insisted on the fact that Mr. Trump supports the alliance and his commitment to collective defense. “President Trump clarified that NATO supports,” said Rubio. “We will remain in NATO.”
But no none born.
Trump expects the European allies to take on the main responsibility for their security and for Ukraine while America turns to Asia, Rubio warned. “It is against a NATO that does not have the skills of which it must fulfill the obligations that the Treaty imposes on each individual Member State.”
However, the economic impact of rates, which should cause inflation and lower economic growth, will only make it more difficult for European allies to increase military spending at 3.5 percent of the GDP goal that NATO is taking into consideration for its summit in July, not to mention the 5 percent that Trump has requested.
Only for Germany, a rich country, the impact will be considerable, with the German Finance Minister, Jörg Kukies, estimating a 15 % reduction in German exports to the United States. He says that Germany will continue to try to negotiate better conditions with Washington, even if Brussels is strongly recommended if carefully for the block. However, the German Economic Institute estimates the possible costs of these rates for Germany alone at around 200 billion euros ($ 218 billion) in the next four years.
The Europeans will now look for other markets and more free trade agreements, such as those he has with Canada and Mexico, said Maggie Switek, economist and director of research at the Milken Institute. “There is still room for cooperation with US and US companies while we think about how to navigate this new situation and the new American theory,” he said.
But for Moscow, which is not very authorized with the United States, the tariff blow for the American allies was another gift. Former President of Russia Dmitri Medvedev happily sang on X on the damage done.
By invoking an old Chinese proverb, he said that Russia “sat next to the river, waiting for the body of the enemy to float. The corpse in decomposition of the EU economy”.