The Daily - Trump, Europe and the New World Order

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

In just a few weeks, the Trump administration has taken a hard line with allies such as Mexico and Canada. Now, a trade war is on the horizon with Europe.Mark Landler, the London bureau chief of The New York Times, explains how a fracturing alliance with Europe could affect global political dynamics.Guest: Mark Landler, the London bureau chief of The New York Times.Background reading: The European Union responded to American steel and aluminum tariffs with its own levies on boats and bourbon.Europe expected a transactional President Trump. It got something else.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. In a matter of just a few weeks, the Trump administration has remade the global order. They've taken a hard line with allies like Mexico and Canada and Ukraine. They've warmed up to adversaries like Russia. And now, a trade war is on the horizon with Europe. Today, my colleague Mark Landler on the alliance with Europe that seems to be fracturing, and what all of it means for the new world order.

It's Friday, March 14th. So Mark, it has felt like the story of the past few weeks, which we've been talking about a lot on the show, is the pretty fundamental remaking of the global order. And we've talked about the impact of President Trump's tariffs on Mexico and on Canada, and we've talked about his efforts to take over Greenland. But it feels like one of the biggest ruptures in all of this is the seeming breakdown of the relationship with Europe. And you have been covering Europe and the White House for decades. So I'm just really curious what you are making up this moment

Well, you called it a seeming breakdown which actually might underplay what's going on in the transatlantic relationship Right now just since President Trump took office. You've seen him Openly undermine the NATO alliance you've seen him threaten that the US will no longer provide a security umbrella for Europe. You saw him essentially side with Russia against Ukraine. You alluded to the tariffs that he's imposed not just on Mexico and Canada, but now on the European Union. So when you add all this up, it's really causing Europeans to question the very survival

of this alliance that has characterized the post-World War II era. And, you know, of course, the implications of this are enormous. They extend well beyond Europe, because if you think about it, the transatlantic alliance is really the bedrock arrangement that has shaped the entire world order for decades, not just militarily, strategically, but also in terms of trade and economic relations. So this is a genuinely shocking moment for Europe and for Europeans. But in some sense, it shouldn't be entirely surprising because if you go back through time, the Europeans should have seen at least some of this coming. It was being telegraphed to them, not just in the last year, not even just in President

Trump's first term, but really over the last five, 10, even 20 years. So you could see these last few weeks as the Europeans were finally waking up from a state of denial. Well, let's go back through time. Tell us the story of how the relationship even got to this point. The Transatlantic Alliance was really built out of the ashes of World War II. And it grew out of a number of very high-minded impulses. One, the need to rebuild Europe after World War II, and the need to avoid the kind of

horrible bloodshed that we had seen in that war. And also the need to secure democracies and the rule of law. So the US and Europe set out to build a number of alliances and institutions that would safeguard the peace and lay the conditions for future prosperity. And these included NATO, that's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance that was founded in 1949 and is built around the principle of collective

defense. They also included the United Nations and they also created very close economic ties between these countries. So this alliance is built on values, it's built on security, it's built on self-interest, but it was really meant to be the bedrock of the post-war system. As the decades unfold and throughout the entire Cold War, European countries are able to sort of essentially shelter under this security umbrella provided by the United States, which allows European countries to build their economies without having to spend a disproportionate amount of money on their own defense. Because the US is paying this huge military bill, Europe can spend its money on other things and so therefore their economies boom. Indeed, it sort of gives Europe the ability to focus and drive all their

resources and energy into economic and social development rather than having to worry about defense because much of that is essentially being carried on the shoulders of the United States. And so by the end of the Cold War, you see these countries emerging not just in peace, but also very, very prosperous. They developed one of the largest trading blocks in the world, very open trading arrangements with their neighbors, with the United States and with other countries. And so really, the United States helps create a very powerful

economic engine in the heart of Europe. All of that sounds like a great deal for Europe, obviously. Can you talk a little bit about what the US saw that it was getting out of this? Well, a couple of things. One is on purely the idealistic level, the US was bolstering like-minded democratic countries and holding back the tide of Soviet communism. So there was an ideological component. But as time went on, there were all sorts of other military and

security related advantages for the United States. Allies fought with the US in the Vietnam War, for example. And after 9-11, the all important Article 5 provision of the NATO Treaty under which any NATO member who comes under attack is automatically supported by all the other members of the NATO alliance, you saw our allies come to our aid in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Right. So there were over the years a series of military and security advantages for the United States, but it didn't end there. There was also an economic component to this. In return for the US's role in helping

underwrite the defense of Europe, the US got advantageous access to what was turning into one of the world's great economic and trading blocks. So in the 60s and 70s, you saw American multinationals set up large operations in Europe. In the 1970s, you saw American multinationals set up large operations in Europe. In the 80s, you began to see American consumer culture come to Europe, the McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. In the 90s, you saw German carmakers build factories in the US, BMW, Mercedes. And later on, Silicon Valley giants and pharmaceutical companies began setting up regional operations in Ireland. So there's been this enormous amount of bilateral investment and trade.

And these trade arrangements that the US was able to negotiate with Europe were extremely beneficial to the United States, in part because of this alliance relationship. So it wasn't just about security, it was also about prosperity. So in other words, because the US provided so much security to Europe for all these years, it allowed Europe to basically become this huge economic powerhouse. And that relationship helped to make the United States even more of a world power than it already was. Right.

For both sides, it was a major win-win. And it seemed like this was an unbreakable bond, that the U.S. would never turn away from Europe and Europe would never turn away from us. Why would they? It was a status quo that could last really forever. But then that changed. And here I'm not talking about Donald Trump. All of this actually begins with Barack Obama.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. So even though Barack Obama is not commonly identified as being anywhere close to president Trump on his relations with allies, some of this slight suspicion for or sense of wanting to look beyond Europe began during the Obama presidency. If you recall, a major foreign policy initiative of the Obama years was the pivot to Asia. It is a great honor to be in Tokyo, the first stop on my first visit to Asia as president of the United States. So Obama came into office, I think really persuaded that the country's economic future

lay in Asia and China. The rise of a strong and prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations. He was really looking much more eastward, pivoting away from, to a great extent, from Europe. And it's not because Barack Obama didn't want to have good relations with Europe and didn't believe in NATO, but he felt that the nation's focus ought to be more on the relationship with China.

And he didn't want so much of the foreign policy and economic focus of the country to be on Europe and the European Union. So you have to understand how big a shift this is for an American president not to place Europe at the center of American foreign policy really breaks with decades of foreign policy doctrine in the United States. And this even came up in the 2012 campaign when Obama debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee. Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda's a threat, because a few months ago,

when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. When Romney raised the threat posed by Russia and Vladimir Putin, Obama mocked him. In the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. And suggested that he was stuck in the past. Every time you've offered an opinion, you've been wrong.

Also, President Obama was not persuaded that America's vital strategic interests lay in countries like Ukraine. Famously, in 2014, he gathered a number of foreign policy specialists together and asked them, what is America's strategic interest in Ukraine? His concern was that if we got too embroiled in Ukraine, we risked escalating tensions with Russia, which did have a vital interest in Ukraine. And he was not persuaded that we had a competing interest. I was actually on Air Force One traveling with President Obama around that time.

And he came back to the press cabin and was speaking to us about his views about American foreign policy. And he raised this issue of questioning America's strategic interest in Ukraine. So this wasn't just something he was talking about behind closed doors, he was musing about it quite openly, and I think almost encouraging it to enter the bloodstream. But when push came to shove, when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014...

This morning, I signed an executive order that authorizes sanctions on individuals But when push came to shove, when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, This morning, I signed an executive order that authorizes sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia. We took these steps in close coordination with our European allies. And so the partnership was still functional. It's just that for the first time you had an American president openly questioning some of the underlying presumptions of this alliance. Okay, so basically this is like the first crack in the relationship.

Yes. And then that process accelerated and was supercharged. It's terrible the way our country has been disrespected, but we will be disrespected no longer. When Donald Trump came to office for the first time in 2017. So I said NATO in my opinion is obsolete because it's not covering terrorism. Obsolete for that reason. And so throughout Trump's first term,

you hear the president going after NATO in increasingly hostile terms. It helps them a hell of a lot more than it helps us. On his first visit to NATO headquarters in 2017, he's shocked by how lavish this new glass and steel building is. It costs more than a billion dollars. This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States.

Much of which is being picked up by the American taxpayer. And also, you have many countries that aren't paying their fair share. They're not paying what they're supposed to be. But Trump's complaints go beyond that. He's really unhappy that none of the other NATO members, in his view, are meeting their defense spending obligations. Germany's paying 1 percent. We're paying 4 percent.

Explain that one to me, right? He wants them to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on military spending and very few of them are anywhere near that level. So we have a nation doesn't pay, the nation gets aggressive, we end up in World War III for somebody that doesn't even pay. And so there's this general complaint on Trump's part that this is an alliance of free riders.

I guess I implied if you don't pay, we're out of there, right? Even suggesting that the US might someday withdraw from the alliance or not uphold the Article 5 principle. And by the end of his term, all but giving these NATO members an ultimatum that they have to pay for their own defense and security. They've been delinquent. They haven't been paying.

I said, you got to pay. You got to pay. I said, you gotta pay, you gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay.

You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay.

You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. You gotta pay. thought of Trump in that first term as an aberration. They thought that the U S had gone off on this rather scary detour, but that

it wouldn't really mean the long-term dismantling of the Alliance. After all, Trump didn't follow through on many of these threats. He didn't pull out of NATO. And then of course, in 2020, Trump lost his reelection and you had Joe Biden come in. The United States will work closely with our European Union partners. Who was a paragon of old school transatlantic diplomacy. This is a guy who believed in NATO, had been deeply involved in diplomacy with European countries for decades. He's a real traditionalist.

Is the world safer with NATO? Are you safer? in diplomacy with European countries for decades. He's a real traditionalist. Is the world safer with NATO? Are you safer? Is your family safer? I believe the American people know the answer to all those questions is yes. And so the Europeans were reassured. They thought the U.S. is now back

to standard operating procedure. And it felt like the status quo had been restored. And indeed that was reinforced after Russia invaded Ukraine. I made it clear, I will not bow down to Putin. Because you saw the United States and Joe Biden come to the aid of Ukraine with heavy duty military aid. And so for the Europeans, it felt very much like the status quo had been restored and Europe could rely on the United States as its guarantor

of security for the foreseeable future. It's a guarantee. An attack on one is an attack on all. That is our unshakable vow. But at this point in time, they've had two US presidents from different political parties, both telling Europe, you guys need to step it up. And at the same time, Europe is also seeing this real existential threat from Russia. So I just sort of wonder if all of this should have made defense more of an urgent priority for Europe. I think that's a very valid question. And I think to some extent, the handwriting was on the wall for Europe for quite a long time.

As you say, multiple presidents had raised questions about this. And of course, as it turned out, the aberration wasn't Donald Trump in his first term. It was Joe Biden, who was a big NATO defender. Because when Donald Trump came back into office, not only did all these old anxieties come back to the surface, but they did so in a much more profound and wrenching way. Trump was not just talking tough about NATO. A lot of the moves he made revolved around the question of winding down the Ukraine war. And that just gave everything a very different feel.

A dictator without elections. For example, he accused the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, of being a dictator. Zelensky better move faster. He's not going to have a country left. Got to move. Got to move fast. When Zelensky came to visit him in the Oval Office, Have you said thank you once this entire meeting? Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, ambushed him.

You're gambling with World War III. And what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country. Donald Trump took the whole notion of an American security assurance off the table in any peace negotiation between Ukraine and Russia. Well, I'm not going to make security guarantees beyond very much.

We're going to have Europe do that. He appeared to be pressuring the Ukrainians into giving up land that the Russians had taken and occupied. I think they have to make peace. Their people are being killed and I think they have to make peace. So on a whole range of topics whether it's security, whether it's politics, the president is simply far more radical and extreme than he had been in his first term. And so this felt very different. Now, in the eyes of the European leaders, it was clear that the transatlantic alliance,

as they knew it, is in deep, deep jeopardy. We'll be right back. So Mark, you've explained to us how Trump is taking a fundamentally different approach to the U.S.'s relationship with Europe in his second term. How has Europe reacted to all of this? Well, you've seen this flurry of activity, diplomacy and multiple European capitals, leaders calling each other. Within big European countries, there are these big debates about whether to vastly increase spending on defense. And across the EU, you're seeing this effort to create a continent- wide peacekeeping force, what they're calling a coalition of the willing.

The idea is that multiple countries will either contribute troops or logistical support or other material. So the underlying impulse here is Europe recognizing that it now needs to take much more direct responsibility for its own security. But the tough thing for Europe is it's extremely difficult. There are very painful trade-offs. If European countries spend two and a half, three or even three and a half percent of their GDP on defense, that's money they're not spending on social welfare programs. And after all, in Europe, these programs are a bedrock of the compact between voters and the government.

And whether Europe can unify around a common defense strategy is far from clear. Some countries are far more willing, for example, to contribute troops to a peacekeeping force. Britain and France have been sponsoring that effort. Poland, on the other hand, is more reluctant because of its historically tense relationship with Ukraine. Some countries, again Britain, are more forward leaning about spending more on defense. Germany, while it's changing, has historically been more reluctant, partly because of its history.

So the politics of all this are difficult. Yeah, because you've got all these countries with their own priorities, their own politics, their own needs, different economies, and they all have to come together and agree to make this massive pivot. Yeah, and it's not at all clear whether it's going to pull them together

or tear them apart. Even if they were to get on the same page, it will take a generation or so to build up the kind of defense infrastructure that Europe has enjoyed from the United States over the last several decades. You can't build fighter jets or a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines in two to three years. These are projects that take 10, 15, 20 years. So to become a military power on this scale is not just a tap you

can turn on or off. It requires a long term society wide commitment. It's a major major undertaking and it's something that the fruits of which won't be even clear for about 20 years or so. Right. Fighter jets, military submarines, these are not things that just materialize overnight, let alone the entire military apparatus for a whole continent. It's just this massive game of catch up that Europe is playing right now. Yeah, that's right.

You could almost say that Europeans have enjoyed a holiday from history for the past few decades. They've really been able to build societies around an economic and social model that would have been different if they'd had very much of a security and defense mindset. There was a very interesting speech by a senior British retired military officer in which he said that young people in Britain should accept the fact that they're now part of what he called a pre-war generation. In other words, that they should think of the prospect of going to war as something that might really happen. That's something that is really quite alien to the post-war European experience. It really changes the identity of what it means to be European. And that's perhaps the

biggest challenge of all. And what about the economic aspect to all of this? Because as you told us, the trade ties are at the heart of the relationship between the US and Europe. Well that adds an extra layer of complexity to the issue because as Europe contemplates making these very heavy investments in defense, they're also having to deal with new economic headwinds in the form of tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed on the EU and on Britain for initially steel and aluminum,

but he's promised to impose them on a much broader range of products, most recently a 200% tariff on European wines and liquors. And you've seen the European Union retaliate by imposing their own tariffs on American products. So they're facing the prospect of economic growth being strangled, their exports being strangled, their costs going up, at the very moment that they're asking their electorates to make difficult decisions in terms of perhaps accepting cuts in other social programs or higher taxes to pay for more military spending.

So Donald Trump is asking more at the very moment that he's also making life harder for European leaders You know I feel like the theme of this entire week has been Trump tearing up relationships with allies all over the world And we've been talking a lot on the show about how these allies have responded Like whether they try to repair these relationships or not and so I think that that's the question here also are the Europeans doing anything to try and repair this relationship or are they just kind of moving on? Well, I'd say they're hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. So in addition to all the preparations they're making

for a world without the US, you're also seeing some European leaders try to salvage the Transatlantic Alliance. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has been working the phones, talking to President Trump. He's been trying to act as a bridge between President Trump and Vladimir Zelensky to keep the US part of the conversation, to perhaps persuade the US to provide some form of security guarantee for the Ukrainians. And it's had perhaps some marginal effect after cutting off intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine.

The US has now restored those two important elements. So even as the deeper questions are being asked about the future of the alliance, there's still an effort by European leaders to keep the US in the mix. And I think what that reflects above all is a recognition that this process of building an independent European defense capability is such a generational challenge that you simply don't want the US to walk away entirely. And that's what a lot of this frantic diplomacy has been about. I guess I also just wonder about the implications of all this fracturing for the US.

Because I know you said that even though the US has been footing the bill for Europe's military security, the arrangement did really have a lot of benefits for the United States too. Absolutely. So what I think the US is risking, first of all, is having less leverage and less of a relationship with some of the most powerful and prosperous economies in the world, less ability to count on these countries for other strategic issues around the world? Would European countries willingly fight alongside the United States in Afghanistan the next time?

Hard to say in the current environment. For the most part, the Europeans have tended to side with the United States when the chips are down. A very conspicuous example of this is Europe's use of Huawei, the giant Chinese telecom company, to build its 5G networks. Back in 2020, Britain yielded to requests from the first Trump administration not to allow Huawei into its 5G network for national security reasons. If the same decision were to come up today and the US was no longer the steadfast ally it had been,

would Britain make a different decision? It's possible. So both on a security level and on an economic trade level, the price the United States might pay for this is having less leverage and hence drawing less benefits from their relationship and running the risk that the major beneficiary of all of this is China. So what you're saying is that this could basically push Europe into the hands of one of America's

adversaries, China, which is kind of confusing because Trump very much seems like he wants to contain China so that they don't overtake the US. And so on the one hand, maybe it makes sense to make Europe pay its own way and be less dependent on the US. And yes, of course, we have more resources to spend at home in turn. But on the other hand, it would seem like the US would potentially be giving away this extremely valuable relationship with Europe to China. Yeah, that's a fair question to raise.

And to some extent, I think what you're getting at is there is a contradiction in Trump's logic here. One of the arguments that the people around President Trump make is that by reestablishing good relations with Russia, even at the expense of Europe, the US will be able to draw Russia away from China and leave China more isolated. But a lot of foreign policy analysts say that's actually completely backwards. What this will do is not give Russia any less of an incentive to ally itself with China, but what it will do is give Europe a much greater incentive to build more and closer commercial ties to China.

I think what we're seeing here is that Trump brings fundamentally a 19th century view of great power rivalry to foreign policy. The world is dominated by a small handful of great powers who are fundamentally predatory toward their smaller neighbors. And you see that a little bit with Trump's treatment of Canada and Mexico on trade and tariffs. You see it also with his desire to annex Greenland, to perhaps annex the Panama Canal, but you also see it in his tolerance of other great powers behaving that way.

So that explains his openness to Vladimir Putin absorbing parts of Ukraine and Crimea. It could also, down the road, explain his tolerance for China, making moves in its neighborhood. And that's led to fears that China might make a move on Taiwan. So fundamentally, the way Trump seems to think about the world is as a small number of great powers carving up spheres of influence. And the smaller countries that lie within these spheres

are simply going to be in a sense, vassals. They're going to be treated as inferior countries exploited and preyed upon by the great countries. So, Mark, you have been reporting on the relationship between the US and Europe for decades. Did you ever think you'd be writing about the dissolution of the US-European partnership? Candidly no, because it is so fundamental to the way the US has thought about its place in the world. The superpower status of the United States

is not just a function of the size of the US military or the size of the US economy. It's a function of this incredible web of alliances that the US has struck with like-minded countries literally spanning the globe. What Donald Trump has done or what he's attempting to do is create a superpower that relies on none of that. That doesn't project power through friendships or shared values, but projects hard power, raw power, forces countries to submit to the United States. And that is an imperial model. We've seen this in earlier times in history,

going back to the Roman Empire, but we haven't seen this in the modern age, and we've never seen the United States attempt to engineer this. And so it's truly uncharted territory, both for the country and for those of us who write about foreign policy, something we've really truly never seen before.

Mark, thank you so much. Thanks Rachel. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to support an immediate ceasefire deal with Ukraine, saying that a halt in fighting would only benefit Ukraine as Russia made gains on the battlefield. Putin said that a number of questions needed to be resolved before Russia would agree to

a deal, a clear sign that he was in no hurry to go along with any kind of a truce. And Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer broke with much of his party on Thursday and said he would vote for the Republican bill to keep the government open past Friday. The move angered many of his fellow Democrats, but Schumer argued that if Democrats refused to help keep the government funded, it would lead to a shutdown that would allow Elon Musk and the Trump administration to further defund and dismantle federal programs. The Republican bill is a terrible option.

It is deeply partisan. It doesn't address far too many of this country's needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even more, even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Carlos Prieto, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Maria Byrne and Paige Cowitt. Contains original music by Marianne Lozano,

Rowan Niemisto and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you Monday.