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THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE
HAD PREEXISTING CONDITIONS. THE PANDEMIC WILL WORSEN THEM
PHILIP H. GORDON AND JEREMY SHAPIRO
APRIL 13, 2020
COMMENTARY
The novel coronavirus is clearly a big deal — economically,
politically, and socially. Students of the transatlantic relationship, like
everyone else, are naturally taken with the effort to understand the possibly
dramatic changes this pandemic will inflict upon the world. The problem is that
we do not yet know how long the crisis will last, how bad it will be, or how it
will play out.
Most global crises, even severe ones, do not fundamentally
change — and rarely reverse — the course of world politics. Crises more often
serve as accelerators, highlighting existing fissures
and widening them. Just as patients with underlying conditions are more
vulnerable to the disease, pre-existing geopolitical fault lines will likely be
exposed by the coronavirus crisis.
BECOME A MEMBER
From this point of view, the transatlantic relationship should
definitely self-isolate. Long before the coronavirus appeared, the relationship
was in intensive care: wracked by European anxiety about U.S. leadership, U.S.
resentment about defense burden-sharing, fissures in solidarity within Europe,
and rising populism and anti-globalization feelings on both sides of the
Atlantic, exacerbating differences over trade. Unfortunately, however the
coronavirus crisis plays out, it is likely to exacerbate all of these trends.
Just as with the virus itself, it will be up to leaders and citizens to act
boldly to prevent the worst.
Questioning U.S. Leadership
One trend the crisis seems likely to reinforce is the Trump
administration’s well-earned reputation in Europe as an unreliable ally. During Trump’s first
three years in office, many of his policies seem designed to undermine
transatlantic solidarity. Trump withdrew from the Paris climate
agreement; questioned the sanctity of NATO’s Article
5 defense guarantee; withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal; pulled U.S. troops from Syria without
consulting European allies; carried out the targeted killing of an
Iranian general in Iraq (again without consulting European allies); and undermined U.S. “soft power” in Europe by attacking democratic institutions,
appointing unqualified family members and political donors to top positions,
and coddling dictators.
Europeans were slow to acknowledge the real implications of
“America First” — preferring to “ignore the tweets” as long as they could.
After three years, the path America has taken is impossible to overlook. Recent polls have shown that confidence in Trump
to “do the right thing in global affairs” has fallen (from over 70 percent in
Barack Obama’s last year in office) to just 32 percent in the United Kingdom,
21 percent in Spain, 20 percent in France, 18 percent in Sweden, and 13 percent
in Germany. French President Emmanuel Macron thinks NATO is undergoing “brain death,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europeans have to take their fate
into their own hands, and a majority of Germans now believe Berlin should
strive for greater independence from the United
States in defense matters, even if it means more than doubling defense
spending. At the Munich Security Conference in February of this year, German
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier lamented that the current U.S.
administration “rejects the very concept of an international community,” and
that “thinking and acting this way hurts us all.”
Europeans once might have expected the U.S. president to lead the world in a coordinated response
to such a disease — as President George W. Bush did on the AIDS crisis and
President Obama did with Ebola. Instead, Europeans have noticed that the United
States is now home to the world’s largest number of reported COVID-19 cases and
deaths from the virus — in part due to the administration’s egregious mismanagement. They have been angered by
un-coordinated U.S. moves to buy protective masks and
equipment headed to Europe, by reports that the U.S. government was
trying to buy a German firm working on a vaccine and move its research wing to
the United States, and by Trump’s March 12 announcement of a travel ban on 26
European countries that no Europeans were given notice about in advance. Top
European officials and politicians denounced the travel ban and pointed out that “this isn’t the hour for
the will of the strongest to prevail, but for solidarity and cooperation.”
“When it comes to solidarity and unity,” the French analyst Benjamin Haddad concluded, “the United States is failing the
coronavirus test.”
Exacerbating Burden-Sharing Debates
The crisis will also exacerbate longstanding debates about
burden-sharing within NATO, an obsession for Trump. To some degree, the
urgency of the issue was alleviated over the past two years, as European
defense spending rose somewhat, allowing Trump to claim (falsely) that he had persuaded allies to
contribute “hundreds of billions” more to the alliance. But with European
budgets under extraordinary pressure from their devastated economies and the
social and stimulus spending made necessary by the pandemic, future European
defense budgets are more likely to be cut than increased.
Europeans will likely argue now more than ever that
burden-sharing should be defined not in narrow military terms, but by
considering contributions to global development, the environment, and global
health. Especially with neighboring regions so vulnerable to the pandemic,
Europeans will likely devote relatively greater resources to supporting those
neighbors than to long-term military investment.
Some have suggested that rather than dividing the United States
from its NATO allies, the crisis might bring those allies together, given the
common nature of the threat and NATO’s logistical capabilities. One analyst
even suggested the COVID-19 crisis should have
been used to trigger the alliance’s Article 5 defense guarantee.
As with some previous crises, however, the notion of expanding
NATO’s mission far beyond collective defense seems to stem as much from the
question of how NATO can help resolve a new challenge as how a new challenge
can be used to help NATO demonstrate its worth. If NATO has
capabilities that can be used to facilitate the distribution of assistance to
member states or others, those capabilities should by all means be used; but
the alliance is not well-equipped to play a major role in handling a global
health issue, and it is wishful thinking to imagine that the threat posed by
COVID-19 will lessen — rather than exacerbate — deep transatlantic differences
over burden-sharing, at least so long as Trump is in office.
Dividing Europe
The pandemic did not create the tensions within the European
Union, but it has clearly reinforced them. The 2010 financial crisis revealed a divide within Europe between
frugal northern states, including Germany, Finland, Austria, and the
Netherlands, and more indebted southern states, particularly Italy, Spain,
Greece, and Portugal. Northerners blamed the south’s spendthrift ways for causing the crisis,
while Southerners accused their northern neighbors of a lack of solidarity or even cruelty when they attached onerous
conditions to financial bailouts. Neither charge was precisely accurate, but
both sides presented their case as morality tales that then became embedded
in European politics. A similar dynamic emerged between the east
and west of Europe during the refugee crisis of 2015. Eastern countries like
Poland and Hungary simply refused to take refugees and accused their Western neighbors of trying
to dilute their Christian heritage. Westerners increasingly viewed them as authoritarian and xenophobic.
The coronavirus hits precisely the same fault lines. The
economic crisis caused by the lockdowns means that once again the south,
particularly Italy and Spain, needs fiscal help from the less indebted north.
They’ve demanded so-called corona-bonds, essentially sharing the debt burden
coming from the crisis, as a test of European solidarity. Italian Prime
Minister Guiseppe Conte has even claimed that a lack of response might put
the entire E.U. project at risk. Germany and the Netherlands, among others, blame the southern states for
insufficient savings in good years and worry that guaranteeing their debts will
only enable more poor fiscal discipline in the future. To date, they’ve agreed
only to a fiscal bail-out package that comes with
conditions on how to spend the money. Italians are so angry that one Italian
newspaper removed the Netherlands from its weather
map. All this is reminiscent of the financial crisis
bailouts of 2010-12 that imposed austerity and caused such bitterness with the
European Union.
Meanwhile, the governments in Hungary and Poland, which are thus
far less affected by the virus, have used the occasion to further impose authoritarian controls and to blame migration and multiculturalism for
the greater incidence of the virus in the West.
As this crisis unfolds, Washington is absent. But in a moment of
crisis, Europeans have often needed active American encouragement to retain
their cohesion. The United States, for example, played an important role in ensuring that internal
European tensions remained within bounds during the financial crisis. The clear
recognition that they now must find their own compromises will perhaps
encourage greater European responsibility. But it will also certainly increase the
sense that the United States no longer cares about the European project.
Trade Tensions
The coronavirus crisis will likely also exacerbate transatlantic
trade tensions. Such tensions are nothing new, but they have deepened
dramatically since Trump took office. Europe, according to Trump, “treats the US worse than
China” and “was set up to set up in order to take advantage of the United
States.” Accordingly, Trump has imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe
and threatened automobile tariffs, claiming they threaten U.S. national
security. His administration has demanded that the European Union agree to a
new trade bargain with the United States that will expand U.S. manufacturing or
face further trade restrictions. Europeans have threatened retaliation in kind
and demonstrated their own intent to maintain their manufacturing bases.
The effect of the crisis has already been to reinforce these
anti-globalist and nationalist tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic. When
Trump banned travel from Europe, he justified the action by blaming the
European Union for failing to take “the same precautions,” and initially
even announced on national television that the
ban would also proscribe “trade and cargo” before correcting himself the next
day. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio
have both called pandemic a “wake-up call” regarding U.S. vulnerabilities
in a globalized world. That call will likely reinforce the existing movements
on both sides of the Atlantic to “onshore” key industries and to reduce
interdependence. The national security justification used to put limits on
steel and aluminum imports will now likely extend to medical equipment,
vaccines, and even medical research and development, measures that could lead
Europeans to follow suit.
Trade bans in the heat of a pandemic are not surprising. But in
the transatlantic context of increasing populism and pre-existing trade
tensions, we can expect that the lack of solidarity displayed during the crisis
will translate to further conflict even after the virus fades away.
Elections Matter
As president, Trump has shown a shockingly impressive capacity
to find the petty irritants in America’s relations with its allies and to turn
them into full-blown crises. In transatlantic relations, as in the response to
the coronavirus, Trump rarely causes the problems, but he almost always makes
them worse.
A Democratic victory in the U.S. election in November would
create opportunities to reverse these trends. Former Vice President Joe Biden
is a longstanding proponent of transatlantic cooperation and has said he would seek to “place the United
States back at the head of the table, in a position to work with its allies and
partners to mobilize collective action on global threats.” But Biden’s
commitment to transatlantic relations will not magically reverse the trends
that contributed to Trump’s election in the first place — populism,
anti-globalization, and resentment of the costs of U.S. leadership — and that
have driven the two sides of the Atlantic apart in recent years. A President
Biden will need to walk a fine line between providing more support for European
allies and insisting that they take on greater responsibilities — for defense,
for security in their region, and for internal European cohesion.
If Trump is re-elected, the prognosis for the relationship is clearer —
and darker.
If returned to office after the way he has governed and conducted
foreign policy for four years, Trump will conclude that he has a mandate to
move forward even more boldly with an America First agenda and to apply it to
Europe. America’s European allies will conclude from the election result that
the American people solidly support that approach and assume it reflects a new
reality that will continue into future presidencies. The type of special
relationship the United States has maintained with Europe for some 75 years
will be over. There will be a new one, but there will be little special about
it.
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