Trump leaves European allies fearing for their future

The choreography was impeccable, the setting majestic, as the leaders of France and Britain made their way up the Champs-Elysées this week to pay their respects at the eternal flame beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

The intended message of this joint observance of Armistice Day – the first since Winston Churchill strode side-by-side with Gen. Charles de Gaulle in 1944 – was to reaffirm and reinvigorate the bond between two of Europe’s leading political, economic, and military powers.

Yet the weather struck an appropriately cautionary note. The air was drizzly, the Parisian skies gray.

Rarely since the end of World War II has Europe’s political and economic future seemed so clouded by uncertainty, or so threatened by stormy weather.

Across the continent, nearly three dozen NATO and European Union partners are facing a time of reckoning.

The question before them: Can they find the means, and the political will, to safeguard their security, peace, and prosperity if America is no longer playing its traditionally indispensable role on this side of the Atlantic?

It’s a challenge Europeans have known was coming ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.

But Donald Trump’s reelection has made it far more urgent.

And despite the show of Franco-English amity in Paris, a combination of political tremors and economic headwinds across Europe is making the task far more difficult.

Two related imperatives loom largest: saving Ukraine from defeat at the hands of President Putin, and reviving the economic growth indispensable to Europe’s ability to back Kyiv and to shore up its own defenses against Russia.

If Mr. Trump acts quickly as president to make good on his campaign rhetoric regarding Ukraine and Washington’s allies in Europe, it is hard to see how either goal is realistic.

Europeans’ security concerns focus on Ukraine. They worry that Mr. Trump’s promised “peace” would mean an end to U.S. military support and recognition of Russia’s control over the parts of Ukraine it has annexed.

The economic concern is that the new president will slap across-the-board tariffs on the EU, for which America is its main export market.

The Europeans hope to persuade the incoming administration to proceed more cautiously on both fronts. They’ll argue that an endorsement of a Russian victory in Ukraine would convey the same message of U.S. weakness as Washington’s sudden retreat from Afghanistan, and that a tariff war would harm America as well as Europe.

But they know the broad direction of travel under Mr. Trump – requiring Europe to invest far more in its own security, and to rebalance transatlantic trade – is unlikely to change. Nor is the shift in America’s foreign policy priorities away from Europe and toward the U.S. rivalry with China.

In other words, the prosperous family of European democracies built with the help of huge American economic, political, and military support after World War II is going to have to stand on its own two feet.

Increasingly, European politicians are talking the talk. They know that NATO members are going to have to increase defense spending – well beyond the current alliance target of 2% of gross domestic product.

But finding the political will – walking the walk – will not be easy.

More guns will mean less butter: fewer of the generous social programs made possible by the Europeans’ small defense budgets and cheap Russian gas imports.

Germany is in recession and political crisis. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition fell apart just a day after Mr. Trump’s victory. Early elections are due next February.

The other traditionally dominant political force in the EU, France, is also in political flux. President Emmanuel Macron still has over two years left in office, but he has lost his parliamentary majority, weakening his position.

The result has been a shift of Europe’s political fulcrum to other countries that would have seemed unlikely leaders just a couple of years ago – Poland, the Nordic and Baltic countries near Russia, and Britain.

A 2016 referendum in Britain pulled the United Kingdom out of the EU.

But the Conservative government that delivered Brexit was voted out of office this year. The prime minister who traveled to Paris this week, Keir Starmer, while not ready to revisit Brexit, is seeking closer security ties with mainland Europe.

The Nordic countries, along with the formerly Soviet Baltic states, are equally determined to buttress their security.

Above all, there is Poland, which voted out a Trump-friendly government last year. It has been building up its own military, and now spends more than 4% of its GDP on defense.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has voiced alarm about the possibility that the Ukraine war might end on Russia’s terms, has scheduled meetings starting this week to discuss the way forward with President Macron, Prime Minister Starmer, the leaders of the Nordic and Baltic states, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

While concerted Europe-wide action may be difficult to achieve, he’s determined to try to forge the next best thing: a coalition of the willing.