In many respects, Donald Trump’s 100-minute rally held in Conway, South Carolina, on February 10, 2024, was just like his previous rallies. It began with Trump giving shout-outs to local Republican dignitaries in the audience. He found an opportunity to recite his favourite poem, “The Snake,” his signature parable with its anti-immigrant message. And the rally ended with his usual 20-minute monologue that he carefully read off the teleprompter, dramatic music playing in the background while he worked towards his climactic promise to “make America great again.” But like all his previous rallies, a significant portion of his speech was unscripted, with Trump riffing and ad libbing his “greatest hits” [ses « plus grands hits »], including his “sir stories” that feature people deferentially addressing him as “sir.” But this time his ad libbing gave one of his “sir stories” an unexpected twist at the end. At the 40-minute mark, Trump started to tell one of his most-often-told stories — how he got a European leader — who, as always, deferentially called him “monsieur,” to spend more on defence by threatening that the United States would not defend his country if it were attacked by the Russian Federation.:
L’un des présidents d’un grand pays s’est levé et a dit : « Eh bien, monsieur [Sir], si nous ne payons pas et que nous sommes attaqués par la Russie, allez-vous nous protéger ? » J’ai répondu : « Vous n’avez pas payé ? Votre compte est à découvert ? » Il a dit : « Oui. Imaginons que ça arrive ». Non, je ne vous protégerai pas. En fait, je les encouragerai à faire tout ce qu’ils veulent. Vous devez payer, vous devez payer vos factures.
Indeed, some of the media translations — for example, Le Parisien, Le Monde, and Le Devoir — did not fully capture the menace in Trump’s colloquial English: “In fact, I would encourage them [les Russes] to do whatever the hell they want.” The MAGA crowd, not surprisingly, cheered loudly, as his supporters always do when Trump makes anti-NATO comments.
Never before had Trump fantasized publicly about encouraging the Russians to attack America’s European allies (though in March 2023 he had mused in a speech to a conservative conference how easy it would be for Russia to destroy the new headquarters building of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels). But it was not the first time that he had publicly attacked America’s alliances. Indeed, one of his consistent foreign policy positions going all the way back to the 1980s is that America’s allies take advantage of the United States by refusing to “pay their bills.” By the time he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, his views had hardened: as Miles Taylor revealed in his memoir of his time in the Trump White House, Trump thought that America was being “raped” by its allies. His anger was directed at NATO in Europe and the security pacts with Japan and South Korea in the western Pacific. Only the long-standing ANZUS alliance between Australia and the United States, and the AUKUS security agreement between the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom agreed to in September 2021 appear to have escaped his notice (though not surprisingly given his attacks on other American alliances, many Australians are deeply worried that if Trump ever looks carefully at these agreements, he will have the same anti-alliance reaction he has had in other parts of the world).
But Trump’s view of America’s alliances has always been idiosyncratic. Most American leaders have regarded the alliances created after the Second World War as based on a shared ideological perspective on global politics that bound Western states together. Not Trump: as John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, reminds us, the “civilizational foundations” of alliances like NATO “mean essentially nothing in Trump’s transactional world, where the motto is ‘What have you done for me lately?’” Rather, Trump saw America’s alliances as nothing more than the kind of protection rackets that he would have been familiar with in New York and New Jersey: if countries wanted to be protected against attack, they had to pay the United States for protection; and if the United States did not receive that “payment,” or if a country was “delinquent” in its “payments,” there would be no protection offered.
Given these views, it is hardly surprising that Trump has consistently been on record as being willing to deny protection to American allies he deems “delinquent” in their “payments.” For example, during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russia was openly threatening the Baltic states, Trump was asked whether, as president, he would come to the aid of these states if Russia actually attacked them. Trump initially responded by avoiding the question, saying that many NATO members “aren’t paying their bills,” and asserting that “they have an obligation to make payments.” But when he was asked again if the United States would protect NATO allies, Trump responded by asking: “Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.”
The fact that this is not how any of America’s alliances work never bothered him. We know now that Trump was repeatedly told by his own officials that there were no “payments due,” but, as one of his senior officials admitted, “he didn’t really care. He understood [how NATO funding really worked], but he liked the way he explained it better.” Thus, throughout his presidency from 2017 to 2021, and in the three-year campaign for election in 2024, he just kept embracing the completely mendacious view that America’s allies had “bills” that they had to pay to the United States if they wanted American protection.
But Trump also has other concerns about allies. One is a belief that America’s allies will drag the United States into war. In 2018, he was asked by Tucker Carlson of Fox News: “Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” Trump responded: “I’ve asked the same question. You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people … They are very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III. But that’s the way it was set up.” His response nicely captured Trump’s willingness to signal, quite openly, that he does not regard the provisions of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949 as binding on the United States to come to the assistance of allies should they be attacked.
Trump was also annoyed that America’s alliances were supposedly asymmetric deals: on at least two occasions, in 2016 and 2019, he complained about Japan not having to defend the US if it were attacked, claiming that Japanese could just sit at home and watch the attack “on a Sony television.”
In short, over the years, Trump has offered us consistent evidence of his antipathy for America’s alliances in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific. During his presidency he consistently was infuriated by the costs of the security treaties with Japan and South Korea, musing in June 2019 about scrapping the alliance with Japan and threatening to undermine the alliance with South Korea. . In his memoirs, Bolton reminds us that Trump once angrily yelled at him that “I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Trump was as explicit with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. In 2020, according to two European Union officials who were in the room, he told her: “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,” and added: “By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO. And by the way, you owe me $400 billion, because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defense.”
Trump has also been clear that he puts no particular value on the continuation of these alliances. Even before he was elected, he was unconcerned about the impact of his insistence on the view of NATO as a protection racket: “If it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,” he said in April 2016. We know that during his presidency, Trump wanted to withdraw the United States from NATO, and was only dissuaded from such a course of action by the so-called “adults in the room.” And it can be argued that his views have become more radical since his defeat in 2020. When he was criticized for his comments in Conway, South Carolina, he just doubled down, promising that if he were president, the United States would not abide by the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty, saying: “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect. OK?”
The latest pronouncement by Trump that he would “encourage” the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to America’s European allies, has, quite understandably, caused a great deal of concern among America’s allies around the world, since Trump has a plausible path to victory in the November elections, and they worry that on his return to the White House in January 2025, he will put his anti-alliance policies into place. They worry that this time, there will no “adults in the room” to dissuade the president. On the contrary, Trump already has a plan to ensure that the American national security bureaucracy that is at present spread across the world will no longer be staffed by career civil servants or military officers who are generally committed to the maintenance of American leadership, but by America-First MAGA loyalists who have the same negative view of America’s allies as Trump.
The threat of withdrawal is particularly pronounced in Europe. Even though the United States now has a law that was intended to make it more difficult for a president to withdraw from NATO, it would still be possible for a president to effectively bring American contribution to NATO to an end. It is true that Section 1250A of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act states: “The President shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.” However, a president could choose not to name any U.S. personnel to NATO headquarters or to alliance operations; more importantly, a president could undercut the deterrent impact of the North Atlantic Treaty by announcing — as Trump has — that the United States would simply not come to the aid of its allies. De jure suspension, termination, denunciation, or withdrawal would not be necessary for Trump to implement his anti-alliance America First agenda.
Because the Europeans recognize that Trump’s candidacy poses a deep threat to the transatlantic alliance, discussions about European strategic autonomy have been reinvigorated. But many analysts fear that an American de facto withdrawal would trigger a sauve-qui-peut movement among European states that would see them selfishly scramble to find separate accommodations with the Russian Federation. As Anne Applebaum put it, “Au fil du temps, tous les alliés de l’Amérique commenceront à se couvrir. De nombreux pays européens choisiront de s’acoquiner avec la Russie. »
But there is another possibility: the governments of Europe could be driven to overcome the illogic of nationalism in a western European context, and the insecurity that necessarily comes with the ability of the Russian Federation to divide and conquer western Europe without an effective American security guarantee. To be sure, it is difficult to see Europeans seriously embracing this option as long as American global leadership is still alive and well and while the administration in Washington maintains its transatlantic engagement.
But if Trump wins in 2024, it is possible we will see a different result. For we know that Trump will surely abandon America’s global leadership, continuing the trajectory he started in his first term. We know he will surely try to implement his promise to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. After all, even before the 2024 election campaign started, Trump had his loyalists in the U.S. House of Representatives stop American military assistance to Ukraine; he would surely abandon Ukraine completely after his inauguration. Importantly, such an abandonment would signal an end to American support for security arrangements everywhere. We know that Trump is likely to withdraw from NATO, if not de jure then de facto, because he has told us this repeatedly. But if this happens, it is entirely possible that the Europeans would begin to take a more united approach, overcoming present national differences to forge a cohesive defence policy apparatus.
Certainly the states of western Europe have the raw capabilities to project greater power if they were forced (or chose) to do so. With the United Kingdom, a more united Europe would have a population of more than 523 million; its GDP would be $19.9 trillion, roughly equal to that of the United States. Even without the United Kingdom, Europe has a population of more 450 million and a GDP of $16.6 trillion. The Russian Federation, by contrast, has 147 million people and a nominal GDP of $1.86 trillion. To be sure, it would take a massive effort to transform these raw capabilities into effective military power: the European defence industry would have to expand dramatically. Likewise, it would take a considerable political effort to transform the present nuclear arsenals of Britain, which assigns its nuclear weapons to NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, and France, which operates its nuclear forces independently, into an workable European deterrent. But the combination of the withdrawal of American security support for Europe and the very real threat of Russian domination would be the kind of dramatic change of circumstances that could readily transform European politics.
As Applebaum notes, a dismantling of American support for European security will surely be accompanied by a similar dismantling of the security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region. For the complaints that Trump and America First have about Europeans — that they are free-riding leeches intent on “raping” the United States with their unfair trading practices and their refusal to pay their defence “bills” — also apply to America’s Western allies in the western Pacific: Japan, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, its other friends and allies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Trump is unlikely to have one view of European allies and another, opposite one for the Indo-Pacific allies. And, as we learned from Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2021, the America First movement is simply incapable of conceiving of other countries as friends to be trusted.
In the Indo-Pacific, therefore, it is likely that Trump would pick up where he left off in 2021. He would continue to alienate allies and other friends in the Indo-Pacific. Needless to say, alienating these countries would be hugely counter-productive, since much of Trump’s anti-Chinese agenda actually needs friends and allies. In particular, his broad plan to disrupt Chinese power by trying to decouple the Chinese and American economies needs the support of China’s trading partners if it is to succeed. If an America First administration were to impose the huge tariffs on Chinese goods that Trump has promised — in February 2024 he floated the idea of a tariff of 60 per cent on Chinese imports — or if Washington tried to impose further disruptions to global supply chains originating in China, or tried to place further limits on Chinese access to advanced technology or education, it would force all America’s friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific to make a choice between security that depends on the United States and economic prosperity that comes from their ties to China. And judging by Trump’s first term, we should not be confident in the ability of an America First administration to deal successfully with governments grappling with that choice.
However, while the Europeans might be pushed into greater strategic autonomy as a result of the victory of America First in 2024, it is unlikely that a similar dynamic will unfold in the western Pacific. On the contrary: when they are abandoned by an isolationist America First administration — as they surely will be — the countries of the West in the western Pacific will not have the luxury available to the Europeans. They will not be able to unite geostrategically to try to create a defensive posture against the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific region, the People’s Republic of China. There are not enough of them, and the physical distances that separate the Western allies are too profound. Instead, we are likely to see the dynamic predicted by Applebaum: slowly, but surely, each of the Western allies of the United States in the western Pacific will make their peace with the PRC, ensuring Chinese dominance in the region.
Some of the transformations in global politics that would come with a Trump victory in November would occur quickly. The abandonment of Ukraine by the United States is already happening even before the election, accelerated by what former Republican member of Congress Liz Cheney calls the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party — the Republican majority in the House of Representatives under Speaker Mike Johnson; the eleven Republican senators who voted to kill the Ukraine aid bill, including J.D. Vance of Ohio, who has been named as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Trump in 2024; and of course Trump himself. If Trump were elected in 2024, that abandonment would likely be swiftly completed soon after the inauguration in early 2025. A de facto American withdrawal from NATO would likely follow soon after the consolidation of Russian control of all Ukraine, allowing the Trump administration to pivot to the Indo-Pacific to concentrate its attentions on the conflict with China. By contrast, the shifts in geostrategic alignment that would occur in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Canberra, and Wellington might take longer — but it is likely that these countries would draw logical conclusions about the dependability of the United States under an America First administration, and move to reorient their global policies.
Regardless of the speed with which such geostrategic reorientations took place, they would surely bring the disintegration of the West as a dominant force in global politics. Since the 1940s, what can be called the “geostrategic West” has been a cohesive bloc of approximately fifty high-income liberal democracies in Europe, North America, and the western Pacific. While “the West” is not a singular unitary actor in global politics, the group of countries that we call the West has been more or less united in agreement on the broad geostrategic elements of a global order under the leadership of the United States. If the states of the West in western Europe and the western Pacific are forced by the abandonment of a global leadership role by the United States, that geostrategic unity would be shattered. These states would be forced to make peace with the great powers in their neighbourhoods. In the case of the Europeans, it is possible that they could refashion themselves into a united great power capable of challenging Russia, China, and even, if it was necessary, the United States.
Where would the end of the West leave Canada? If Trump’s re-election eventually brings the realignments outlined above, Canada is likely to find itself slowly being isolated geostrategically, since it would lose the multilateral connections with other Western states across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, or in the circumpolar north. If the United States abandons or alienates the rest of the West, we will see a slow transformation in the Canadian government’s geostrategic links across all three of its oceans.
During the Cold War and post–Cold War eras, Canada’s geostrategic links to Europe were always strong with Canada a relatively active contributor to NATO’s European operations. But those links were forged in a fundamentally North Atlantic context — in other words, involving both the United States and Europe. But if the link between the United States and Europe frays, Canada’s links with Europe will fray too. This will be particularly marked if the United States withdraws from NATO and begins to regard Europe as the “foe” that Trump asserted it was in July 2018. And if that happens, and if a geostrategic rivalry emerges between a more united Europe and the United States, there will be very little tolerance in Washington for Canada as a European partner.
A similar shift is likely to emerge in the Pacific. During the presidency of Joe Biden — an administration that took Americans allies in the western Pacific seriously — Canada’s geostrategic links across the Pacific were relatively shallow and underdeveloped. If a Trump 2.0 presidency should push the countries of the West in the western Pacific into making accommodations with China, Canada’s links across the Pacific will thin considerably.
Finally, the same dynamic will be at work in the circumpolar north. The present structures and institutions for multilateral engagement in the Arctic are already under stress because one of the members of the Arctic Council, the Russian Federation, held the chairmanship from 2021 to 2023, and the other members decided to “pause” all the meetings of the Council and its subsidiary bodies as long as Russia was at war against Ukraine. If the United States under an America First administration decided to withdraw from the Arctic Council in order to pursue a more robust unilateral policy in the Arctic, the circumpolar region would become much more politicized than it already is, with the United States, Russia, and China all contesting Arctic waters, and the multilateral forums like the Arctic Council or the Inuit Circumpolar Council might be sidelined.
In short, if the American-led world order that Canadians have lived with since the 1940s is transformed as a result of a return of Trump to the presidency, Canada’s general approach to foreign policy posture will not really fit that new world order. Canadian foreign policy remains designed for a world in which the geostrategic West is a relatively united group of some fifty independent states, and the United States is an active and engaged leader of the West, willing to use its superordinate power and capabilities to help forge and maintain a global order for the anarchical society that is world politics.
But if that world is transformed, Canadians will be forced to profoundly rethink their foreign and defence policies. If Trump embraces an America First foreign and defence policy that alienates other Western friends and allies, Canadians may try to dissociate their country from the United States and pursue policies designed to maintain all those transoceanic linkages with other countries we enjoyed during the American-led world order. However, Canadians will likely discover that in the kind of world order preferred by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, small states like Canada will simply not be permitted that degree of freedom. Instead, it is likely that Canada will be stuck geostrategically — all alone with the United States in North America.
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Kim Richard Nossal (@KimNossal) went to school in Melbourne, Beijing, Toronto, and Hong Kong and attended the University of Toronto, receiving his PhD in 1977. In 1976 he joined the Department of Political Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he taught international relations and Canadian foreign policy, serving as chair of the Department from 1989–90 and 1992-1996. In 2001, he came to Queen’s University, heading the Department of Political Studies until 2009. He served as director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy from 2011 to 2013. From 2013 to 2015, he was the executive director of the Queen’s School of Policy Studies.
He has served as editor of International Journal, the quarterly journal of the Canadian International Council, Canada’s institute of international affairs (1992-1997), and was president of the Canadian Political Science Association (2005-2006). He served as chair of the academic selection committee of the Security and Defence Forum of the Department of National Defence from 2006 to 2012. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal Military College of Canada. Professor Emeritus Nossal retired from Queen’s Department of Political Studies in 2020.
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