Donald Trump caused a scandal by asserting that the United States, if he were president again, would break with the principle of mutual assistance at the heart of NATO. This principle is simple: aggression against one of the NATO member countries must be considered by each member state as an aggression against its own territory.
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I quote Trump’s remarks as reported in Le Figaro.
Empire
“One of the presidents of a great country […] said to me: “If we don’t pay and we are attacked by Russia, will you protect us?”. I said: “You haven’t paid, are you in debt? […] No, I wouldn’t protect you. In fact, I would encourage Russia to do what it wants. You must pay””.
The formula was brutal and caricatured, as is always the case with Trump.
But fundamentally, it says a lot about the evolution of the geopolitical vision of the United States.
The United States has long been demanding that its allies take their defense seriously. It was inevitable that one day the Americans would no longer want to pay.
And all the more so as we are witnessing a paradigm shift in foreign policy in the United States.
Proponents of US imperial leadership are more interested in Asia than in Europe, which for them is a thing of the past. It is not certain that the Ukrainian war marks a lasting rebirth of interest in the old continent.
Trump
On the other side of the political spectrum, Trump intends to break with the idea of an American empire, and pleads for a withdrawal of the country through a posture mixing unilateralism hostile to any form of global governance and a new isolationism.
In other words, the world of the Cold War is no longer ours. The Atlantic fault is widening. Whatever we think, it is important to adapt to it.