In Donald Trump’s Rise, Allies See New American Approach
Photo
Donald J. Trump gave a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington last month.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Alarmed by Donald J. Trump’s
grip on the Republican presidential nomination, world leaders are
wrestling with the possibility that, even if he loses the general
election, his ascent reflects a strain of American public opinion that
could profoundly reshape the way the United States addresses security
alliances and trade.
From Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul to the headquarters of NATO
in Brussels and the vulnerable Baltic nations along Russia’s western
border, officials and analysts said in interviews that they saw the
success of Mr. Trump’s “America first” platform as a harbinger of pressure for allies to pay up or make trade concessions in return for military protection.
In
many capitals, Mr. Trump’s formal and off-the-cuff foreign policy
proposals — his threat to pull out of NATO; his musings about removing
the United States’ nuclear umbrella over Japan and South Korea; his
pledge to slap huge trade tariffs on China
— are regarded with a mix of alarm and confusion. Asked on Thursday if
Beijing was concerned about the prospect of a Trump presidency, the
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, replied, “We hope the U.S.
people from all walks of life would view bilateral relations from a
reasonable and objective perspective.”
Stefano
Stefanini, a former representative of Italy to NATO and former
diplomatic adviser to the Italian president, put it this way: “There is
no Donald Trump contingency plan.”
“The
mistake that Europe might make is to think the Trump phenomenon might
just fade away,” Mr. Stefanini said. “The sentiments that Donald Trump
is expressing will certainly influence the next administration or the
next Congress.”
Officials
do not see Mr. Trump’s rise as merely an American version of the
anti-immigration and isolationist parties that have picked up support
across Europe. They are finding signs of tangible political change in
statements by Democratic leaders, as well.
Already, Mr. Trump’s assertive positions about American interests have led some officials to look again at President Obama’s recent critique
of European and Persian Gulf allies as “free riders.” They have also
helped shed light abroad on the domestic political forces at play around
Hillary Clinton’s decision to renounce her support for a new Asian trade deal.
Some,
too, are revisiting the words of Robert M. Gates in his last weeks as
defense secretary in 2011. Mr. Gates warned that a new generation of
Americans with no memory of the Cold War would eventually ask whether
NATO, the central institution of European security, was an artifact,
like the single segment of the Berlin Wall
that remains standing as a reminder of the past. In Europe last month,
Mr. Obama pressed allies to live up to commitments to spend 2 percent of
their gross domestic product on defense, a benchmark that few have hit.
“Some
of the claims made during the campaign have been empty or just wrong,”
said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to the United States,
where he was regarded as one of the savviest analysts of
American-European relations. “There is no ‘better Iran nuclear deal,’
and not many people think it is a good idea for South Korea or Japan to
acquire nuclear weapons.”
“But
others should give us Europeans pause for thought,” he said. “NATO
members need to reflect on whether it’s right, or sustainable, for the
U.S. to pay over 70 percent of the bill for our collective security, or
how to ensure we take care of the losers as well as the winners in
global free trade.”
Clearly,
many European policy makers were already upset with Mr. Obama’s
reluctance to intervene on their behalf in conflicts where they have
national interests, and with his demand that European nations put what
he called, in an interview with The Atlantic, more “skin in the game.”
Europeans
cite the United States’ reluctance to take the lead in ousting Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi from Libya, an operation that revealed major flaws in
NATO operations. And they are unconvinced by Mr. Obama’s insistence
that he made the right decision in backing away from the “red line” he had drawn over the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
“Over
all, I would say there are too many signs of American retrenchment and
retreat,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark
who was NATO secretary general until 2014. Europeans, he said, would
generally prefer an American president “who will demonstrate determined
American leadership,” even as, to many analysts, Mr. Trump’s rise
suggests pressure for the nation to turn inward.
Mr.
Rasmussen said he saw Mr. Trump’s demands on NATO as an acceleration of
the Obama administration’s effort to encourage more burden sharing. But
they come with an isolationist twist, he said. The “America first”
term, embraced by Mr. Trump in a recent interview with The New York Times, goes back to a movement led by Charles A. Lindbergh in the 1930s to keep America out of war in Europe.
The
European reaction to the revival of that term has been so sharp that
American military leaders, while reluctant to get involved in the
campaign, have tried to take on Mr. Trump’s arguments.
Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, who just stepped down as the supreme allied commander for Europe, wrote in The Washington Post
this week that when he assumed his position in 2013, he thought that
arguments about NATO’s utility were “without merit, and there was no
need to engage.” Now, he said, without naming Mr. Trump, he felt
compelled “to explain to my fellow countrymen why the United States
absolutely needs NATO — a NATO that is strong, resilient and united.”
Five
members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a similar set of arguments at
the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday, also avoiding
any mention of Mr. Trump’s name.
But
to many who live on Russia’s raw border, especially in the Baltic
nations in Moscow’s shadow, there is nothing more puzzling than Mr.
Trump’s reluctance to criticize President Vladimir V. Putin. He has
often spoken admiringly
of Mr. Putin, saying he respects his strength and views him as someone
with whom he can negotiate. To European ears, that sounds as if Mr.
Trump may be playing into Mr. Putin’s hands, opening a rift within NATO.
“Russia’s
enthusiasm about Trump seems to be predicated on the assumption that he
may actually withdraw forces from Europe,” said Matthew Rojansky, the
director of the Kennan Institute, a Washington research group focused on
Russia.
That
is exactly the fear of others in a region where NATO is the only
bulwark against Russia and where some people doubt that an American
president would really commit forces to protect them in times of
conflict.
After
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, “a lot of Latvians woke up and said,
‘Thank God we are in NATO,’” said Lolita Cigane, a member of the Latvian
Parliament.
In
neighboring Lithuania, a plaque at Town Hall in the capital, Vilnius,
commemorates a 2002 visit by another Republican, President George W.
Bush. “Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an
enemy of the United States of America,” Mr. Bush said then. Mr. Obama made a similar vow in Estonia and increased NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe in response to the Russian threat, and Mr. Trump’s position feels like backpedaling to people in the region.
Mr.
Trump’s argument that Seoul and Tokyo, which host tens of thousands of
American troops, need to pay more or see the troops leave bewildered
officials in those countries. Japan pays roughly $2 billion a year
toward the troops’ housing, and military leaders often say it would be
more costly for American taxpayers to base those same troops in Guam or
in the mainland United States. Moreover, those bases are critical for
daily intelligence gathering on China and North Korea.
American
military officials and diplomats argue that these “forward deployed”
bases are critical to maintaining freedom of navigation and deterring
North Korea. But Mr. Trump’s argues that they are worth it only if they
do not cost the United States a fortune.
“I
think the real subliminal message Trump is saying is this: The U.S. can
afford to survive and prosper without any allies if it was forced to
cut off all ties, but the converse isn’t true,” said Chung Min Lee, a
professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul. He
added that Mr. Trump was forcing allies “to come up with convincing
elevator speeches on the key benefits they bring to the U.S., and thus
far, none of them have done so.”
In China, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s criticism, he is widely viewed as a pragmatist who is less hawkish and less focused on human rights than Mrs. Clinton is.
His
proposal to impose high taxes on Chinese goods receives little
attention there, and his talk of China’s “raping” the United States in
unfair trade deals has been met with shrugs, as if to say that charge is
nothing new. Instead, the conversation focuses on Mr. Trump’s business
success or his pronouncements on preventing foreign Muslims
from entering the United States, an attitude that jibes with the
antipathy in much of China toward the Muslim population in the western
province of Xinjiang.
“Many
in China believe a pro-business Republican president will tend to be
pragmatic and China-friendly, if not pro-China,” said Wang Dong,
associate professor of international studies at Peking University.
“Therefore, many in China tend to view Trump’s remarks of imposing more
than 30 percent of tariffs on China as rhetorical campaign language.”
Mr.
Trump’s assertion that American troops in South Korea and Japan should
be sent back to the United States is in alignment with official, though
rarely stated, Chinese goals. But his suggestion, later reversed in part,
that Japan and South Korea should be able to develop their own nuclear
arsenals alarmed Beijing, especially the notion that Japan, the occupier
of China in World War II, would become a nuclear power.
David E. Sanger reported
from Washington and Seoul, South Korea, and Jim Yardley from Rome. Jane
Perlez and Yufan Huang contributed reporting from Beijing, and Richard
Martyn-Hemphill from Stockholm.
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