POLITICO: Foreign diplomats are worried about the rule of Law in Trump’s America – It could complicate law enforcement across the Globe, they say

Pic.: POLITICO

The mood among the European diplomatic set appears to be one of heightened vigilance and of low-level — but persistent — anxiety about where things are headed in the U.S. legal system in Trump’s second term and beyond, writes POLITICO.

Donald Trump’s second term in office has been marked by a series of unprecedented and highly controversial law enforcement decisions — everything from mass pardons to an immigration crackdown that has pushed, if not blown right through, the most basic constitutional constraints. Recent public polling suggests that a growing number of Americans are rattled by what they have seen and are increasingly concerned about the future of the country’s law enforcement apparatus and legal system. The news on Friday that the FBI raided the home of John Bolton, a former Trump official turned critic, is not likely to help matters.

Now those concerns are going global.

Senior officials in some of America’s closest European allies are quietly fretting about the law enforcement priorities of the Trump administration and even the conduct of the Justice Department, according to four European diplomats who are stationed in Washington and who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive trans-Atlantic diplomatic and law enforcement matters.

Their concerns run the gamut from the administration’s approach to specific issues — including immigration, free speech and international drug trafficking — to broader and more structural questions about the integrity of the U.S. legal system and the potential erosion of the rule of law.

The atmosphere has gotten so bad that some of the diplomats I spoke to now worry the Trump administration has complicated, and could eventually undermine, their countries’ ability to cooperatively work with the Justice Department on critical diplomatic and law enforcement initiatives.

“Our formal position is that we don’t care who the [U.S.] president is,” one of them told me, but the Trump administration’s actions on various legal fronts have prompted serious “concerns about what’s happening here” and how it may impact the international legal community.

It is a sentiment that is both shared and discussed broadly within the European diplomatic corps, they said.

These diplomats’ concerns about international law enforcement cooperation are not abstract either, for our allies or for us. “U.S. disengagement from key enforcement partnerships,” another said, “has weakened global coordination in combating corruption, money laundering and cyber threats.”

The United States’ ability to cooperate with its trans-Atlantic allies plays an important — and underrated — role in promoting some of the country’s most critical law enforcement objectives.

Some of Europe’s diplomats worry in particular about the administration’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement, even as they recognize that Europe has struggled to manage its own migration issues. One of the diplomats I spoke with told me that they were taken aback by the administration’s wide-ranging efforts to deport legal immigrants and revoke visas on vague and unsubstantiated claims like “support for terrorism” — moves that they also view as sharp and disturbing incursions on free speech.

The apparent disconnect between U.S. law enforcement prerogatives and international legal commitments in that context is emblematic of broader concerns that several of the diplomats expressed to me about the Trump DOJ. Since Trump’s return to office, their embassies have at times struggled to reach their designated law enforcement liaisons at the DOJ — people who they ordinarily work with to coordinate and facilitate information-sharing on law enforcement matters and to manage extraditions.

There are also broader and more serious concerns about whether the Justice Department is being irreversibly politicized under Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

They worry that the standards for decorum among the nation’s top law enforcement officials have fallen, and that senior administration officials like Bondi and Patel — as well as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — have politicized law enforcement in a way that may seriously compromise the integrity of the U.S. criminal justice system and make allied law enforcement agencies reluctant to lend support to Trump administration investigations or prosecutions they see as primarily political.

By definition, diplomats focus on advancing their own countries’ interests on the global stage, but three of the four officials also expressed broader concerns about the future of the rule of law in the United States under Trump.

They are not concerned about potential spillover effects in their own legal systems; as one of them noted, the two-party American political system makes the country particularly vulnerable to large political swings. But they are watching and worrying about the future of the country.

One of the diplomats pointed in particular to the ways in which the private sector and civil society have acceded to Trump’s extortionate demands, and they questioned whether the decision to “align with the Trump administration out of fear or pragmatism” could ultimately entrench a form of politics in the U.S. that is typically associated with corrupt foreign regimes.

Another diplomat pointed to “politicized judicial appointments, selective law enforcement and shifting prosecutorial standards” in recent months that they believe “have fed a growing perception — both in the U.S. and abroad — that the law is being applied unevenly.”

The implications are not simply theoretical — nor are they limited to the U.S.

“In the transatlantic context,” one diplomat told, “shared principles of justice underpin coordination on everything from extradition and financial crime to cybersecurity and climate policy.” They worry about “a return to the ‘cowboy era,’ when might made right and institutional guardrails were weak,” which could in turn create an international environment where “polarization deepens and democratic norms erode.”

These confessions show two things.

First, the division of the Global West is deepening.

Second, while being “concerned” by the decisions of the Trump administration, in the EU countries legislation that restricts freedom of speech has recently been strengthened (EU, Britain), and jurisprudence is increasingly politicized against opponents of the leadership of the largest European states. Political persecution under the guise of law enforcement is used to maintain mainstream political power – France, Romania, Germany, etc.

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