Might Trump be right about European security?
Trump, Europe and Nato (image created in Shutterstock)
I hold no brief for Donald Trump. Descriptions of him as a titanic egoist and vulgarian may be correct and it is up to the American courts to decide if, in addition, he is criminally culpable. His judgements seem to be informed by instinct rather than reductive analysis, and transactional instinct at that. And, his term in office could be characterised charitably as disruptive; less charitably as chaotic. So not everyone’s choice as a presidential candidate. But none of that makes him automatically wrong, and, on the grand strategic choices facing America, he may be on to something – though not necessarily for the best reasons.
Trump wrote The Art of the Deal as a business manifesto, but many of its principles have been transferred directly into his politics. You have to pay your way and you ain’t allowed to freeload are precepts that apply as much to international diplomacy as the New York real estate market. As a result, when major European powers fail to meet their NATO spending commitments, they are treated with the same dismissive contempt as any other recalcitrant debtor.
Whether this will lead a re-elected President Trump to storm out of the alliance that has guaranteed Euro-Atlantic security for the last 70-odd years with the same alacrity as he might abandon a mid-town property deal remains to be seen. Perhaps a more interesting question is whether it would actually be in America’s strategic interest to do so and – whisper it – Europe’s too.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th of December 1941 was followed by a German declaration of war on America four days later. A traditionally isolationist nation was confronted with simultaneous campaigns in two separate theatres. From what was essentially a standing start, America was able to mobilise the manpower and, crucially, the industrial capacity to fight and win two concurrent conflicts and a benchmark of US grand strategic policy was born.
During the Cold War America retained a singular focus on the Soviet Union. But, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the arrival of America’s brief unipolar moment, US grand strategic policy again rested on a two-war construct. It was an assumption that survived until the early 2010s, when the demands of two concurrent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan came close to exhausting the US military inventory. Moreover, and tellingly, these were counter-insurgency campaigns – heavy on manpower but forgiving to materiel and logistic stocks – and represented nothing like the challenge that large scale conventional operations would demand.
Subsequent policy statements have chosen their language with care. The Biden-authored 2022 National Defense Strategy stated a need to “prevail in conflict” yet still “deter opportunistic aggression elsewhere”. However elastic the drafting, it’s clear that the simultaneous two campaign conceit is being consigned to history. It could hardly be otherwise, as China is defined as a “pacing” challenge and Russia as an “acute threat” which America can no longer contemplate addressing simultaneously.
Not only that, but wars on the European continent and in the western Pacific would have quite different characteristics. Just as during the Second World War, European operations would be land/air based, with a maritime sub-plot supporting decisive manoeuvre on the ground. By contrast, the oceanic and insular terrain of the western Pacific will demand maritime/air capabilities in a combination that is likely to resemble the island campaign of 1941- 45.
The United Sates showed a remarkable vocation for both forms of warfare, but, if there is a defining American genius for war, it is probably to be found in the projection of maritime force at scale and over oceanic distance, not least because nobody else can do it. The fundamental redefinition of warfighting doctrine currently being undertaken by the US Navy and Marine Corps, specifically designed to fit the western Pacific theatre, shows serious intent and leads the world in operational innovation.
It would be a seismic shift to give up the all-court, omni-competent military capability that has defined American power and move in the direction of any form of force specialisation, but the inevitable charges of strategic abdication may have to be endured to fit capability to threat. And, of course, a strategic emphasis on the Pacific Basin would conform to the priority set by President Obama of a pivot to Asia which he and his successors have continued to advocate but singularly failed to execute.
Let’s pause and take stock. America is no longer capable of fighting two largescale and simultaneous military campaigns; a prioritised theatre and a prioritised set of military capabilities are therefore implied; unrequited US policy points to the Pacific as that strategic priority. Stir this mix of strategic realism, requisite military capability and declaratory policy and you have something that sets America firmly in the direction of the western Pacific as its global focus. What it certainly illustrates is that any US Commander in Chief might limit a commitment to Nato as an act of grand strategic realism rather than as a sucker punch to a business partner.
Limit but not abandon. The trick will be to redefine the relationship with Nato that allows the USA to play to its strengths and Europe to accept its responsibilities. The model playing out in Ukraine, now, may show the way. America has spent around $75 billion in Ukraine in order to see one of its main strategic opponents embarrassed on the battlefield. There have been no American casualties, its infrastructure is intact and its sovereignty unchallenged. Regardless of Republican Party posturing on continued support to Ukraine, that’s cheap by any standards and a deal that even Donald Trump might take.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that he might also see an historical echo in this approach. When President Roosevelt declared the ambition that America should become the “Arsenal of Democracy”, he was identifying the unique and defining contribution the USA could make even before it became actively involved in the Second World War. Only America could contemplate the mobilisation of capital and industrial capacity on a war-winning scale and what was true in 1940 remains broadly true today, Chinese ambitions notwithstanding. It may therefore be that we can see the outline of a redefined American two-war construct with the simultaneous prosecution of one conflict and the sustainment of a second, conducted by proxy.
Now we come to the difficult bit: how does Europe respond? A satisfactory answer would require a separate article, perhaps a doctoral thesis. At one level, European Nato should be entirely able to take care of itself. In terms of population and GDP numbers, it dwarfs Russia and has recently seen the accession of Sweden and Finland, two militarily capable nations with civil societies habituated by the previous requirements of neutrality to take war seriously. Together they have rolled the Nato eastern border several hundred kilometres further east, turned the Baltic into a Nato lake and isolated the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
At several other levels, it gets complicated. First, Russia is match-fit for major conflict as its economy moves on to a war footing and its training establishments feed the latest tactical developments into its mobilised population. Europe is flaccid in comparison and faces a 5-to-10-year programme to reconstitute front line force elements, develop a defence industrial base, build logistic stocks based on wartime consumption rates and a training and reserve base to sustain long war.
Second, fat and happy European nations may have to put their money where their strategically autonomous mouths are and reorient their economies to support national security rather than a social contract. They will also have to socialise increasingly heterogeneous populations to the possibility of war on a continental scale. Will the crowds turning out to support Palestine on a weekly basis volunteer to fight in a war with Russia?
Third, European leaders will need to develop a higher standard of strategic literacy. When Emmanuel Macron was recently exchanging small man slogans with Vladimir Putin, he first mentioned the possibility of western troops deploying to Ukraine and then reminded the Russian President that France possessed nuclear weapons too. What he didn’t do was connect the two statements, because he couldn’t. France, unlike Russia, does not have the capacity, nor the intellectual framework, to create the continuum of violence that represents a credible process of escalation. Once committed to an escalating conflict, President Macron would therefore have the alternatives of surrender or blowing up the world. That an apparently sophisticated politician simply didn’t understand this reality shows the scale of the problem.
Beyond that are the seemingly intractable issues of command and a residual US nuclear guarantee. Can an American continue to act as Supreme Commander of Nato in a potential conflict to which the US is not fully committed? Can an American not continue to act as Supreme Commander of Nato in a potential conflict where deterrence can only be guaranteed by the US nuclear inventory? The arguments become increasingly theological and there is a reassuring comfort in the status quo.
Unfortunately, that may not be available. Political stability in Europe in the modern era has traditionally been maintained by a balance of power which ensured that no single nation could become dominant. Often this guarantee fell to an external agency and between the mid-18th and early 20th centuries it was a role episodically accepted by Britain, until the moral and material exhaustion of 1918 required a successor guarantor. A reluctant United States first accepted the role in 1917 and then again in 1941, on the second occasion sticking around until the present day when it, in turn, begins to feel the intimations of its own strategic mortality.
If America does limit its role in Nato and Europe, either as a result of Trumpian caprice or cold-eyed strategic necessity, it will change the global security architecture and require Europe to accept a unity of purpose it has probably not enjoyed since the time of Charlemagne. Alternatively stated, Europe might finally achieve the degree of strategic maturity that takes it on the road to accepting the inalienable responsibility for its own security. It’s about time.
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