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U.S. President Donald Trump is choosing Putin over partners. - Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
Europe on the Sidelines
Trump Steers America Away from Allies and Towards Autocracies
For 80 years, the United States was the undisputed leader of Western democracies. But Donald Trump is discarding allies and values in favor of power and money as he steers America into the camp of the autocrats.
Foto: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
By René Pfister in Washington, D.C.
07.03.2025, 16.54 Uhr
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DER SPIEGEL 11/2025
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 11/2025 (March 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
In his speech before U.S. Congress on Tuesday, Donald Trump used the word "historic” precisely 14 times. But it was most accurately used during his invitation to the people of Greenland to join the United States. Trump has mused several times about annexing the island, which belongs to Denmark – a country which hasn’t shown even the slightest interest in giving up any of its territory. But on Tuesday, Trump provided the neo-imperial project with a veneer of officialdom by presenting it to U.S. Senators and Representatives, adding with a dark flourish: "One way or the other we’re going to get it.” What exactly that might mean – tariffs, threats, violence – he didn’t say.
In a different era, a U.S. president coveting the territory of an ally would have provoked days of consternation and outrage. But since his inauguration on January 20, Trump has flooded the world with so much egregiousness that the passage hardly received any attention at all. Watershed, turning point, epochal change – all of these terms describe the new relationship between the U.S. and the countries that have been its partners and allies until now. Yet those words sound strangely abstract in comparison to what Trump actually says and does – a president who doesn’t just want to swallow up Greenland, but who also hopes to transform Canada into the 51st state of the union.
DER SPIEGEL 11/2025
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 11/2025 (March 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL International
A president who sees the European Union, which was once founded in part to banish the threat of war from the Old Continent, as an adversary.
"Let’s be honest. The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States,” he said in late February. Meanwhile, he has continued to promote his concept of displacing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. And he has branded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and blamed him for Russia’s invasion of his country.
It would be naïve to view the spat between Trump and Zelenskyy last week, broadcast on live television from the Oval Office, as a dispute over the details of a possible peace deal. The rupture was so unique because it showed the entire world that the U.S. under Donald Trump no longer wants to be the leader of the free world. The country that lost more than 250,000 soldiers in World War II to protect Europe from fascism is suddenly displaying a degree of moral indifference that has left its allies gasping for breath.
During his clash with Zelenskyy, Trump no longer even pretended to act as though he stood by the side of a victim of a military invasion. Rather, he presented himself as a president who has understanding for the concerns of the dictator in the Kremlin and who unfortunately has to spend his time with a Ukrainian head of state who stubbornly rejects every "deal.” Just before throwing Zelenskyy to the wolves and out of the White House, Trump said: "You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.” A short time later, he suspended military aid for Ukraine – as if Ukraine was the main hurdle on the path to peace and not Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden branded a "war criminal.”
Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Foto: Jim Lo Scalzo / UPI / laif
It was a spectacle that had all of America’s allies wondering: What if we’re next?
On Tuesday, Trump slapped punitive tariffs of 25 percent on all goods coming into the U.S. from Canada, an act of open hostility against a neighbor that could hardly be more peaceful. "What he wants to see is a total collapse of the Canadian economy,” said a visibly shaken Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His message was clear: We may be the target today. But it might be your turn tomorrow.
The security of Japan in the face of its oversized neighbor China is just as dependent on assistance from the U.S. as the existence of South Korea, which faces the threat of a nuclear armed North Korea. Europe, for its part, is protected by the American nuclear umbrella, made up of 5,400 atomic warheads in the U.S. arsenal. Trump hasn’t yet backed out of the trans-Atlantic alliance. But will it stay that way?
"The Trump administration is bent on fundamentally changing America’s relationship with its European allies and greatly reducing the U.S. role in NATO, if not pulling the U.S. out of NATO,” says John Mearsheimer, professor of political science in Chicago and a leading proponent of clear-eyed foreign policy realism.
It would, of course, be credulous to view the U.S. involvement in Europe since World War II solely as an act of charity. In a certain sense, the United Nations was founded as an instrument of power just as NATO was, an alliance founded on April 4, 1949, with the mission – as expressed by the body’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay of Britain – being "to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The "rules-based world order” was also a means of ensuring American influence.
But for all its aberrations and missteps, no U.S. president has ever left any doubt that he sees himself as the guardian of freedom and democracy. "Ich bin ein Berliner,” intoned John F. Kennedy on June 26, 1963, in Berlin, thus making it clear that the island of freedom in the socialist sea of East Germany would never be sacrificed. In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989, Ronald Reagan spoke of the United States as a shining city on a hill. "A city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
Nothing is more deeply anchored in the nation's soul than the idea that Americans ultimately want to be heroes in in the fight against this world’s villains. The movie "Saving Private Ryan” was a global Hollywood blockbuster about a company that stormed the beaches of Normandy to free Europe from fascism. British statesman Winston Churchill is said to have once stated that America always does the right thing once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
The novelty of Trump, in other words, is not that he, too, makes decisions that are morally dubious. But that he sees decency, rules and values as categories that only morons and losers adhere to.
A product of the brutal world of New York real estate, Trump clearly believes solely in the law of the jungle. He sees the United Nations, founded in 1945 to help prevent the horrors of war by way of an international forum for dialogue, purely as an inconvenient hurdle to America’s ambitions of power. He views NATO not as a guarantor of peace in Europe, but as an excuse for the Old Continent to have the U.S. pay for its defense.
There is hardly any recent Trump interview that provides deeper insight into his mindset than the one he gave in early February to the right-wing broadcaster Fox News ahead of the Super Bowl. The conversation touched on Ukraine, but the U.S. president gave no indication whatsoever that he was interested in defending the country against Russian aggression. Instead, he talked about his hopes of striking a deal with Kyiv before the front collapsed. Ukraine "may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” Trump said. "But we're going to have all this money in there, and I say I want it back.”
Seen one way, Trump is simply turning back the clock. The rules-based world order, which the United States played a leading role in establishing after the calamity of World War II, has – from an historical perspective – only existed for the blink of an eye. For millennia before that, it was accepted practice for great powers to establish zones of influence and use violence to subjugate and exploit weaker neighbors. Trump apparently wants to return to those times, because he believes that in such a world, the strongest power always has the advantage.
Trump has already withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO) and has also terminated American involvement in the Paris Climate Agreement. "Project 2025,” the 900-page blueprint produced by the ultra-right think tank Heritage Foundation for a new conservative government, also recommends U.S. withdrawal from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In early March, Trump’s factotum Elon Musk suggested that the U.S. should also pull out of the UN and NATO. But is such a step even necessary anymore?
Already, the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on. Trump has repeatedly linked Article 5, which holds that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all, to European allies paying their "debts.” But what is the benchmark? Is it defense spending equaling or exceeding 2 percent of gross domestic product as agreed at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales? Or is it defense spending of 5 percent of GDP, as Trump has recently demanded?
Even if the Europeans fulfill this goal: Why should Trump, who promised his voters that he would always put America’s interests first, risk a nuclear war over the Baltic countries if Putin chooses to attack there next? "Europe must prepare for a world without the United States,” says William Wechsler, who worked in the Pentagon under Barack Obama and now conducts research at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington.
Trump has been described as a transactional politician, a man of the "deal.” But that is only part of the truth. The U.S. president is a politician who systematically seeks out the weaknesses of those he perceives to be his rivals. Once he finds them, it would – from his perspective – be dumb not to take advantage. Trump very clearly admires autocrats like Xi Jinping of China and Putin not just because they can operate with little interference from democratic elections. But also because they openly propagate the principle of might makes right. In March 2022, shortly before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump referred to the Kremlin strongman as a "genius.” During the meltdown with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last Friday, Trump declared his solidarity with Putin and said that the two of them had "gone through hell together.”
No other relationship illustrates the fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy better than Washington’s approach to Russia. The Kremlin, which, under Putin’s leadership, has once again demonstrated a desire to violently redraw the borders of Europe, has risen to become a welcome dialogue partner for the U.S. within the short span of just a few weeks. Trump’s clear victory in last November’s election wasn’t necessarily number one on Putin’s wish list. Moscow would have much preferred an extremely close and contentious result that paralyzed Washington for several weeks or even months.
But now, the Kremlin is shocked by the speed with which Trump is adopting Russia’s positions. The foreign policy of this U.S. administration, says Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, "largely aligns with our own vision.” It’s almost as though leaders in Moscow are having to pinch themselves to make sure they aren’t dreaming: Can it really be true that the U.S. president is speaking like a Kremlin official?
Trump spoke with Putin for one-and-a-half hours in mid-February. Afterwards, a U.S. delegation sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh to discuss the future of Ukraine without Ukraine having a seat at the table. Europe is not sitting at the negotiating table. It is an item on the menu, wrote a British journalist, referencing a quote by former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One month later, as a demonstration of its goodwill toward Moscow, the U.S. declined to join a UN resolution on the third anniversary of the invasion that expressly condemned Russian aggression. It was a move that put Washington in the illustrious company of countries like North Korea, Hungary and Belarus.
A generous interpretation of Trump’s foreign policy holds that the new president merely wants to put an end to European delusions and encourage America’s NATO allies across the pond to stand on their own two feet. And that interpretation isn’t totally wrong. Germany, in particular, radically shrank its military after the fall of the Iron Curtain and then only took hesitant steps toward rearming after Russia rediscovered its appetite for imperialism with the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Prior to Trump, both Barack Obama and George W. Bush admonished the Europeans to invest more in their defense – but Chancellor Angela Merkel consistently ignored the demands with a friendly smile on her face, and then she eliminated conscription. "Germany is the world champion in shunning responsibility,” says Wechsler, the former Obama staffer at the Pentagon.
There is, however, a more realistic view of the course Trump has charted: Under the eyes of the world, the United States is joining the authoritarian camp. Trump’s closest ally in Europe is Viktor Orbán, who has transformed Hungary over the last 15 years into an "illiberal democracy” – to the point that the judiciary and the country’s media are completely in line with the government. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, used the Munich Security Conference to posit the idea that the greatest danger to freedom in the West is not, in fact, Russia or China, but limits on the freedom of speech in Europe.
After his speech, Vance granted an audience to Alice Weidel, the floor leader for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that is under observation by German domestic intelligence due to its extremist tendencies. And a party that Elon Musk described several weeks ago as "the best hope for the future of Germany.” Sabine Fischer, an expert at the German Institute for International Security Affairs in Berlin, says: "An axis is currently developing of governments and regimes that are very clearly pursuing a right-wing extremist, anti-migration and anti-liberal agenda.”
In the United States, Trump is using a playbook that has already been followed by a number of politicians with authoritarian ambitions. He appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI, a man who has promised to go after disagreeable journalists. He has excluded the Associated Press, the largest news agency in the U.S., from the Oval Office because it has refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America.” The new government has also broken with the decades-long tradition of leaving military leadership in place even when there is a change in the White House. Two weeks ago, Trump fired the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Charles Q. Brown, and replaced him with a largely unknown three-star general who has distinguished himself through his loyalty to Trump.
After Trump’s victory last November, many Europeans harbored hopes that moderate Republicans in Congress could temper the president’s worst excesses. But such hopes have quickly been dashed. In the Senate, Republicans rubber-stamped virtually all of Trump’s appointments, such as ex-junkie and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and the notorious Russophile and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. During a recent interview with Fox News, Gabbard repeatedly dodged opportunities to criticize Putin, instead choosing to lambaste Ukraine’s Zelenskyy and Europe as a whole. They "claim to be standing and fighting for the cause of freedom and democracy (but) when we actually look at what’s happening in reality in these countries, as well as with the Zelenskyy government in Ukraine, (it) is the exact opposite,” she said.
If there is one constant between the first and second Trump administrations, it is that the Republicans are tripping over each other in their rush to fall into line behind the president. Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham were long among Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s most loyal supporters. When the German government in January 2023 briefly hesitated to deliver Leopard 2 battle tanks to Kyiv, Graham let loose in an interview with DER SPIEGEL about how disappointed in Berlin he and his colleagues were.
It was, the Senator from South Carolina said, the best chance for Germany since World War II to demonstrate that it is a force for good. Yet after Trump dressed down Zelenskyy in the Oval Office a few weeks ago, that same Senator from South Carolina said that he had never been prouder of his president and that the Ukrainian president should consider resigning.
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"Trump has achieved with the Republicans what in the free economy is called a hostile takeover,” says Wechsler, the former Pentagon staffer under Obama. For the moment, there are no indications that Trump has anything to fear from Congress. And when it comes to foreign policy, the U.S. president has plenty of leeway, such that he has nothing to fear from the Supreme Court either.
Which means that America’s allies can only rely on themselves. The American voters, of course, may one day decide that they are unhappy with Trump’s aggressive foreign policy. Already, Trump’s flirting with massive tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico sent the markets into a deep dive on Thursday. Will Americans continue to be okay with a president who aligns the U.S. with Russia while triggering a needless confrontation with Canada? "The Americans don’t want to be on the side of the bad guys,” says Wechsler. But the mid-term elections are still two years away, and Trump is in office until January 20, 2029.
"We’re going to have to get used to a world in which we – in the worst-case scenario – can no longer rely on America,” says the Berlin-based analyst Fischer. It is a message that Trump also delivered during his recent speech to Congress, just with different words. He announced his intention of making the U.S. into the most successful country in the world. "We are going to renew (the) unlimited promise of the American dream,” he said. Within this dream, Trump made exceedingly clear, there is no room for America’s former partners.
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