WP: As Trump meets U.S. allies, America’s friends see a new world order

Pic.: POLITICO

When President Donald Trump first barreled into office in 2017, he was the disrupter among world leaders, many of whom sought to wait out what they hoped would be a four-year blip in U.S. history.

Now, as he prepares for a weeks-long blitz of encounters with Washington’s historic allies that started Thursday, Trump has taken on a different role in his second term: the definer of a more enduring era to which other nations must adapt, notes ‘The Washington Post’.

Trump’s ally-filled June began with an Oval Office meeting Thursday with the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has already signaled a new age of cooperation with Trump by pledging to increase his country’s lagging defense spending. Merz, a former corporate lawyer, has pursued the effort with a vigor not shared by his onetime rival and predecessor, former German leader Angela Merkel, whom Trump openly snubbed.

The month continues at a Canadian ski resort with a summit of the Group of Seven major economies. A week later, Trump heads to the Netherlands to meet leaders of the NATO defense alliance — a group with which he clashed in his first term that is poised to endorse an increased level of defense spending that seemed outlandish when Trump first proposed it.

The agenda remains full of potential land mines. Allies fear Trump’s tariffs and his efforts to build ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom many NATO nations view as their chief security threat. And Washington could still take dramatic steps, such as pulling U.S. forces back from Europe — potentially upending an international system in which the United States projected outsize power that kept Americans safe.

“The turn in American politics and policy is enduring, rather than a four-year interregnum,” said Peter Rough, director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Hudson Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

“It means that these foreign leaders need to fundamentally grapple with what the president is putting on the table, rather than implementing delaying tactics or trying to assuage the president in the short run with the hopes that a restoration, like Joe Biden, is just around the corner,” he said.

As the president sits down in the coming days with leaders of friendly democracies, their efforts to accommodate his whims and wishes will serve as a measure of the world he has changed since returning to office. On Thursday, Merz came prepared, having consulted with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and others who emerged successful from Oval Office encounters where ambushes sometimes lie in store, diplomats said.

The stakes of these meetings for world leaders are high, given Trump’s disruptive attitude toward alliances, international trade and the entire global system that Washington fostered and led in the years after World War II. After the fall of communism, Americans exported free-market principles to newly capitalist nations. For years, Republicans and Democrats worked to sweep away global trade barriers.

Not under Trump. After he imposed the highest tariff regime in more than a century in April, then paused it, leaders have rushed to negotiate trade deals with the U.S. that are still unlikely to spare them from Trump’s best offer to date — an import tax floor of 10 percent. That level might feel like a relief after the threat of 60 percent tariffs, but before Jan. 20, it would have been treated like a sky-high imposition.

Leaders of friendly countries see the tariffs as a blow to their own citizens and industries, but also feel there is little they can do to get the president to fully reverse course. Germany’s car industry will be especially hard hit by U.S. tariffs, though Berlin can’t negotiate directly on tariff issues because the 27-nation European Union is a single trading zone and E.U. negotiators handle talks on behalf of the group as a whole.

At NATO, meanwhile, member states are close to agreeing to raise defense spending to 5 percent of their annual economic turnover, a figure that many policymakers saw as outlandish even six months ago but are now willing to entertain. Allies are haggling over details such as when they will need to meet the target and what gets to count toward the total — but are still moving in the direction of yes.

The idea seemed nearly unattainable during the first Trump term, when the president demanded at a 2018 summit in Brussels that countries increase the target to 4 percent, then threatened that he would “do his own thing” — a vague statement that members of his staff interpreted as a threat to withdraw altogether from NATO — if leaders failed to get at least halfway to that spending level within six months.

Less resolved are Trump’s vows to make Canada the 51st state and claim Greenland as a U.S. territory, pulling it away from NATO ally Denmark. Leaders also haven’t agreed about how to handle Ukraine, which in the past has been a subject of conversation at the G-7 and NATO. Ukrainian leaders are invited to both venues this year.

In Trump’s first term, he was very much an outsider in his interactions with leaders, especially at the beginning, where he was the disrupter moving through sometimes clubby rooms of fellow presidents and prime ministers.

This time, he’s been president or ex-president for nearly a decade, long enough to evolve from newcomer to sage. At the G-7, no one who was in office on Jan. 20, 2017, is still there. At NATO, only a handful have outlasted him. And leaders have had many years to figure out how to make Trump feel welcomed on sometimes unfamiliar territory. In: palaces, royal families and splendor, as the Netherlands will supply at the NATO summit. Out: protesters in proximity to the motorcade route.

Among leaders at the G-7 summit, Trump “will feel much more at ease and confident” than he did in the first term.

The reality is often more complex for Trump’s counterparts, said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

“He thinks he can threaten countries with abandonment and they’ll still make choices that are in their interests and ours,” Schake said. “Being demeaning or cruel to America’s friends makes it harder for them to justify to their own publics undertaking efforts that assist the U.S.”

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