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THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE: THE END OF AN ERA
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threats from Russia at the NATO Summit held in
Warsaw July 8 and 9, 2016, at which Barak
Obama and European representatives took a
clear stance on mutual defence in the wake of
Russian sabre-rattling toward Poland and the
Baltic states. The new pillars of transatlantic co-
operation announced at this meeting included
joint efforts to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS),
enhanced intelligence sharing and the rotating
deployment of a deterrent force of four alliance
battalions in the three Baltic states and Poland
intended to thwart perceived Russian ambitions
in the zone that promptly triggered a build-up
of Russian forces along these borders and the
installation of Iskander and S-400 missile sys-
tems in Kaliningrad. The future of all these com-
mitments has been much less clear since Trump’s
electoral victory in November.
Transatlantic synergies on the global climate
change agenda and renewable energy goals set
at the UN Summit on Climate Change in Paris
(COP21) in December 2015 also appear to have
faded. The Paris Agreement, by which the US
and other nations had pledged to convert to re-
newal sources of energy and support the fight
against global warming, stood to alter the dy-
namics of global geopolitics long driven by com-
petition for fossil fuels and provide new oppor-
tunities for the United States to provide world
leadership. The Obama administration intro-
duced a “clean power plan” that several
Republican-governed states subsequently
sought to derail by means of a joint lawsuit
against the federal government that may or
may not be subject to a US Supreme Court rul-
ing depending on decisions taken at the district
court level and moves by the Trump administra-
tion to bowdlerise the programme.
The possibility of a new breakdown in rela-
tions between the U.S. and the EU – much
more serious than that which occurred in 2003
during the war in Iraq mounted by the Bush
administration – surfaced during the first one
hundred days of the Trump administration. It
was evitable that the election of a president as
openly populist and xenophobic as Trump
would have an impact on the United States’ re-
lations with Europe. Throughout his campaign,
Trump provided ample proof of his lack of
knowledge of, and interest in, European inte-
gration and the historical role the U.S. had
played in that process. He referred to the EU as
an “economic competitor” on at least one oc-
casion, mocked the pillars on which the EU was
founded and ridiculed Angela Merkel’s refugee
policy.
Trump’s manoeuvres on the domestic front
– which included continuous attacks on media
organisations as diverse as
The New York Times
,
The
Washington Post
, CNN and Fox and at-
tempts to tinker with congressional rules in
ways that threatened to subvert the liberal creed
set out in the US Constitution – set alarm bells
ringing in Europe. The inaugural address he
delivered on January 20 in Washington left no
doubt that the protectionist philosophy and dis-
dain for multilateralism he had expressed on the
campaign trail would soon be translated into
policy – a posture that suggested a certain shift
towards deglobalisation on the immediate hori-
zon and a bumpy road ahead for the country’s
relations with foreign allies and adversaries alike
and multinational organisations such as the UN
and NATO. Europe now faced the worrying
prospect of navigating its way in a more frag-
mented world plagued by setbacks on regional
integration between Europe, Latin America and
the Asia Pacific, a region in which the U.S. was
set to relinquish a degree of its influence as a
result of its unilateral withdrawal from the Trans-
Pacific Trade Partnership (TTIP) it had recently
signed alongside 11 other countries.