As dawn broke over Florida exactly a year ago this coming Thursday, Donald Trump promised a euphoric crowd that his sweeping election victory would begin a new “golden age” for America.
While he savoured his emphatic defeat of Kamala Harris by a margin exceeding two million votes, a chorus of doom-laden voices suggested that the rest of the world was facing a nightmarish era of darkness, especially perilous for America’s allies in Europe.
For months, Trump’s campaign rhetoric had painted a chilling picture of exactly what he would do to countries that had been friends of the United States for generations. If other NATO allies failed to spend more on their armed forces, Trump warned, he would refuse to keep America’s treaty obligation to defend them. Worse still, he would “encourage” the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want.”
He promised to end Ukraine’s war within “24 hours,” raising the possibility that America might join hands with Vladimir Putin to compel Volodymyr Zelensky to submit to Russian terms and choose surrender as the swiftest route to peace.
Trump also vowed to give Israel carte blanche to wage war in Gaza, which explained why Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was one of the few leaders genuinely to welcome his election victory.
Moreover, by enacting punitive tariffs, Trump intended to inflame America’s rivalry with China, risking an uncontrolled escalation between the two giants of the Pacific.
Like the villain in a Tom Clancy novel, the Trump of 12 months ago seemed to represent the sum of all fears.
“I cannot sugar-coat these warnings,” said Rose Gottemoeller, once a senior US diplomat and formerly NATO’s deputy secretary general. “Donald Trump is Europe’s nightmare.”
Yet, after a year of sound and fury, the truth is that none of the Trumpian nightmare scenarios have come about.
Instead of being a wholly destructive force to be flattered and perhaps contained by skilful diplomacy, Trump has shown himself capable of real foreign policy achievements.
### Europe and NATO
Take NATO, for example. In the last 12 months, Trump has arguably strengthened the alliance by terrifying European allies into spending more on their own defence.
He has also targeted the jugular vein of Putin’s revenues in a way that President Biden never did by imposing American sanctions on Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
To grasp the scale of NATO’s transformation, remember that when Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014, just two European allies — Britain and Greece — were spending more than 2 percent of GDP on defence.
Even when Putin launched his full-scale onslaught against Ukraine in 2022, only six European countries were meeting the 2 percent target.
The sobering reality is that not even Putin’s aggression alone would have been enough to turn the supertanker of European defence spending around; it also required Trump’s threats to walk away from the alliance.
Indeed, during the NATO summit at The Hague in June, Trump persuaded his allies to go far beyond 2 percent, agreeing to raise their defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP, with another 1.5 percent on top for national security infrastructure.
In return for that pledge, Trump agreed to reaffirm “our ironclad commitment to collective defence as enshrined in Article V of the Washington Treaty that an attack on one is an attack on all.”
Today, Putin faces a Europe that is rearming faster than would have seemed possible just three years ago, while Trump has publicly restated America’s willingness to defend its allies.
On paper, at least, that real achievement should make Europe safer.
### Trusting Trump
But how credible is a Trumpian pledge?
Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and one of America’s most experienced diplomats, fears that Trump’s sheer unpredictability has damaged the fabric of the alliance.
“The trans-Atlantic bond is thinner than it was. It’s not broken, but it’s considerably less robust,” he says.
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