Donald Trump’s first term as president strained relations between the United States and our longtime allies, especially in Europe, and some of the reactions in Germany helped capture the severity of the circumstances.
The European edition of Politico published a report in 2018, for example, that said, “It’s difficult to overstate just how enraged Germany is about Trump. By questioning and criticizing such bastions of the Western order as NATO, the World Trade Organization and even the EU, Trump has thrust Germany’s leadership into an existential torpor it has yet to escape.”
Around the same time, a senior German official told The New Yorker’ Susan Glasser, “It took Germany the longest of all partners to come to terms with someone like Trump becoming president. We were very emotional, because our relationship with America is so emotional — it’s more of a son-father relationship — and we didn’t recognize our father anymore and realized he might beat us.”
Seven years later, conditions appear considerably worse. Take this New York Times report from Saturday, for example.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.
The new American vice president made quite an impression during his appearance in Munich, lecturing our ostensible allies about democracy and democratic principles, downplaying the importance of threats from authoritarian powers, raising fresh doubts about U.S. support for Ukraine, and even cozying up to Germany’s right-wing AfD — a political party that’s monitored by the country’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism.
Predictably, Trump publicly endorsed Vance’s remarks soon after.
The intensity of the related diplomatic shockwave is still being measured. NBC News reported, “The past week has left America’s European allies reeling and searching for alternatives after the Trump administration seemingly set itself in opposition to a rules-based system that the U.S. and its trans-Atlantic friends have spent decades building together.”
A New York Times reported that an “epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.” To be sure, this was hardly the new Republican administration’s first international incident. On the contrary, the last four weeks have featured one such incident after another, with avoidable incidents related to Ukraine, Gaza, Colombia, Canada, Greenland, and even Taiwan — which did not go unnoticed in Beijing. But by forcing new divisions between the United States and our Western allies, the scope of Trump’s damage is difficult to overstate. The Western alliance, whose foundation dates to the immediate aftermath of World War II, was conscientiously honed and expanded over the subsequent decades by all modern pre-Trump presidents with strong bipartisan congressional support. The Republican appears eager to take a sledgehammer to that alliance for reasons he’s struggled to explain. The only apparent beneficiary of such a foreign policy is Vladimir Putin’s Russia — which Trump has been eager to reward, and which has long dreamed of a White House willing to break with the United States’ traditional European allies.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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