Unlike any of his predecessors, Trump believes that America’s historic “friends, partners, and allies” are the problem, not the answer, as Sigmar Gabriel, the former German Foreign Minister, put it to me in our interview at the conference. To Trump, Gabriel said, “Europe now seems to be a conspiracy against American interests.” Depending on the day, Trump’s version can sound a lot like he considers the U.S. military little more than a mercenary force whose European employers have refused to pay the bills.
As if to prove the point, Trump was meeting in Washington that same day with the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, a like-minded nationalist hard-liner who has become a controversial figure in Europe for his attacks on the independent judiciary and media. Unlike leaders in larger European nations like Germany that have pushed back on Trump, Duda has aggressively wooed the American President as a counterbalance to Russia next door, even promising to build a “Fort Trump” if he would agree to permanently base U.S. troops there. Trump told reporters that he signed an agreement to send a thousand troops from Germany to Poland in what he characterized as an explicitly punitive measure: “Germany is not living up to what they are supposed to be doing with respect to NATO, and Poland is,” he said to Duda. “I have to congratulate you. Thank you very much.”
As snarky Trump comments go, it understandably rated little mention amid the other news. But the vision of an America whose foreign policy is driven by personal pique, whose troops can be rented out by the highest, most obsequious bidder, is a searing one.
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