Stefan Wolff
The term that perhaps best describes the international impact of the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term is “disruption.”
His tariff policy, his abolition of USAID, his questioning of the transatlantic alliance, and his attempted rapprochement with Russia have neither destroyed the liberal international order nor established anything new in its place.
But the prospects of liberal internationalism under Trump are vanishingly small. And Trumpism, in the guise of an “America First” foreign policy, is likely to outlast Trump’s second term.
That the US is no longer the standard bearer of the liberal international order has been clear for some time. Trump and his Russian and Chinese counterparts, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, appear to see themselves as dominant players in a new multipolar world order. But it is not clear that a grand bargain between them is possible – or that it would endure.
Europe is particularly vulnerable to these changes in the international order. Having been able to rely for the past eight decades on an iron-clad American security guarantee, European countries have chronically underinvested in their defense capabilities, especially since the end of the Cold War.
Defense spending as a proportion of GDP may have increased over the past decade, but remains lackluster. And investment in an independent European defense industrial base faces many hurdles.
No comments:
Post a Comment