US President-elect Donald Trump recently showed Europeans two faces. On Saturday, December 7, it was Trump touched by the grace of Notre-Dame, kindly greeting the crowned heads of Europe as he arrived in the nave, after agreeing to speak with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a three-way meeting with France's Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace.
On Sunday, December 8, it was the vengeful and menacing Trump who warned Europeans once again, in an interview with NBC: If you don't pay more for your own defense, don't count on the US to come to your rescue within NATO.
Having deluded themselves into believing that a Democratic administration would remain in Washington, Europeans must now face reality. Trump is back with the same ideas on trade and defense as eight years ago. His first phone conversations with European heads of state or government since his election confirmed this: Those whose defense budgets exceed 2% of GDP have been warmly congratulated. For Trump, the criterion for a good European pupil remains just that.
Now, if Trump hasn't changed on this point, there's something new on the European continent since his first term: War is here. Russia's war, which is devastating, murderous and destabilizing. It's a hybrid war too. And the US president-elect delivered a second message on NBC: He will "probably" cut military support for Ukraine.
Stubborn budgets
Here is the reality, finally. If, as they say, they want to support Ukraine and block the Russian threat, Europeans have to spend more. Spend more? But the coffers are empty! The subject dominated the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on December 3 and 4. Compared with the defense ministers' meeting in October, the mood had changed radically, one participant noted. Trump's victory on November 5 came between those two meetings. The debate in Europe is now entering the hard part.
Today, NATO's European members can feel the explosions at their doorstep, but the budgetary situation for most of them is tough. "If Trump asks us to devote 3% of our national budgets to defense spending and we tell him OK, we'll do it. In reality, we're not credible," admitted a lucid European diplomat. Poland and the Baltic states, the most exposed, have made this effort on their own, but others are still far from the 2% threshold: Belgium (1.2%), Italy and Germany (1.6%), to name but a few.
Since December 1, when the new European Commission took office, a man with the look of a quiet grandfather has tirelessly paced the meetings and dinners in Brussels: Andrius Kubilius, the new European commissioner for defense. A former Lithuanian prime minister, he's well aware of the issue.
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