Is Europe ready for the dangers a Trump foreign policy poses?

While the chief driver of the protests is undoubtedly humanitarian, they tell us so much more about the current state of the “land of the free”.

To begin with, they inform us of a shifting attitude towards a long-standing relationship with Israel. Increasingly, the protests are reminders too of the volatile fault lines in US politics sharply highlighted back in January 2021, when the riots on Capitol Hill warned that something fundamental to American democracy had changed.

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That the campus protests are also getting angrier and drawing in other more malign right-wing actors with distinctly different political motives and agendas, is another real cause for concern, not least in a year that will see one of the most fiercely contested and significant US presidential elections of all time.

Just as the US has its woes, so too does the man who hopes once again to enter the White House – Donald Trump. I can’t say whether Trump (below) will return to the highest office in the land, but working on the premise that he might, let me pose two simple questions.

The first is what would it mean for US foreign policy? And second, what, if anything in real terms, is the level of preparedness in Europe for such a scenario unfolding?

Certainly there’s no shortage of alarm, for everyone knows that any Trump victory, and in turn his unconventional approach to foreign policy has the capacity to reshape the international order and affect major geopolitical issues including the very one that has given rise to the campus protests currently intensifying across America.

From European defence implications to redefining foreign aid, not to mention having Trump’s finger on the nuclear button alongside his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, there is a clear and present danger.

On that last point alone it’s worth casting back to January when Trump in a New Hampshire campaign speech told a rally that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city, like former president Harry Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Scary? Yes, it’s damned scary, for put quite simply Trump’s re-election would be the biggest test in transatlantic relations in post-war history, posing an existential risk to European unity.

Some of course might argue that we’ve been here before with Trump and Europe got through it well enough. But things are different this time around given the war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East and an ongoing energy crisis that will pile pressure on the European continent. The other thing too is that this time, Trump’s people have more of a plan than they did before.

As the Financial Times’ foreign editor Alec Russell recently observed, a “second Trump term would see American unilateralism on steroids.”

Those think tanks, in particular the old-school Heritage Foundation, from which Trumpian ideas are nurtured, have not been sitting idly on their hands all this time and are ready to stand up and kick in the moment their man is back in office.

Admittedly, both Trump supporters and detractors alike, still struggle to predict specific policies he might adopt.

But as the European Council on Foreign Relations see it, Republican foreign policy positions fall roughly into three camps, or what they dub, primacists, restrainers, and prioritisers.

While the primacists favour continued US global leadership, including in Europe and Ukraine, the prioritisers meanwhile, regard the threat posed by China as the United States’ main national security threat and see an urgent need to shift resources from Ukraine to Taiwan.

Then come the restrainers, whose take is that the US should care more about its own border than foreign borders.

In the restrainers’ worldview, Ukraine and the strategic defeat of Russia are not vital to the US national interest and it’s in this camp that Trump himself mostly sits, even though his take, as experience shows, can change on a whim.

In many ways that’s one of the key policy tools in the Trump box. For if he’s good at one thing it’s his ability to exploit what has sometimes been called the “madman theory” of foreign policy.

Though first articulated by the American political activist, economist, and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1959, it was Richard Nixon who deployed the strategy whereby he portrayed himself as unstable and irrational to give himself an advantage over US adversaries in the Cold War.

As the theory goes, whether it be Nixon with the Russians or Trump with anyone else, the aim is to keep adversaries guessing given that the “madman” is capable of anything, anytime.

While arguably Nixon’s use was effective on occasions, Trump is hardly in the same league, and his impulsiveness is just that, impulsiveness.

Or, as Trump’s former US national security adviser John Bolton once put it, it’s not worth the bother trying to understand Trump’s take on foreign policy as there is no cohesion, just decisions based on grudges, moods and narcissism.

AS his last term in office showed, whether it be with Putin, Kim Jong Un, Prince Muhammad bin Salman or Xi Jinping, no-one really knows what Trump will do until he’s in the room with other leaders.

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European and Nato leaders learned that to their cost last time around and for that very reason remain wary. But while wariness is one thing, being prepared for a Trump election victory is something else again.

Those same leaders so troubled by Trump’s presidency should know by now that America First has come to mean, in effect, “Europe last.” Forewarned as they now are, they have no excuse for not being forearmed in any rematch with the man who would happily throw Europe under the diplomatic bus if it served his – not America’s - interests.

Faced with such a repeat standoff it is imperative for Europe – and the European Union (EU) in particular – to do something it has historically found difficult, present a common response, double down on solidarity and dig its heels in collectively.

For his part and given his preference for trade wars over shooting wars, it’s a near certainty that Trump would attempt to play EU members and other nations off against each other, a trap imperative to avoid.

Trump’s return to the White House of course is not yet a given. It’s inconceivable too – you would think – that European leaders will not have already weighed up and discussed how to respond should US foreign policy move into uncharted waters under his leadership.

If they haven’t they will rue the day – and hell mend them.