[ad_1]
Amid President Biden’s lackluster performance in Thursday night’s presidential debate, former President Donald J. Trump caused anxiety among America’s allies with a simple shrug.
Trump has regularly denigrated NATO and even threatened to withdraw from it, but he did nothing in the debate to assuage European concerns about anti-NATO sentiment.
When asked by Biden if he would withdraw from NATO, Trump shrugged and did not answer.
“I was very worried before this debate, but I’m even more worried now,” said Jana Puglielin, director of the German office at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump may want to formally withdraw from NATO, but he has all the tools to weaken it.”
At the heart of NATO is Article 5 of the NATO Charter, where each member state commits to defend the others. “Deterrence is all about credibility, and the nature of Article 5 always depends on how you interpret it,” Puglielin said. “So it depends on whether the president of the United States makes it a credible threat.”
Given Trump’s skepticism of alliances, European countries that rely on U.S. protection worry he will try to build bilateral relationships with Europe “and make it more transactional,” she said.
Camille Grand, a former NATO deputy secretary-general, said that in a second term Trump would be surrounded by “people who want to turn his instincts into policy, rather than say, ‘This is a bad idea, Mr. President.'”
“But the worst part is his unpredictability. Europe is at war,” he added. In peacetime, he said, there are always chances for summits and relationship building. “But when you’re at war and he suddenly, overnight, hints at a peace agreement or makes U.S. security guarantees hollow, it becomes much harder to deal with,” Grand said.
Trump bragged Thursday night that he had forced European countries to increase their military spending, which has increased under Biden. Grand said European countries already understand they have to do more to defend themselves, and are in fact spending $130 billion more each year than they did in 2014.
But whoever becomes president, “we need to weaken America so we can defend Europe.”
NATO supporters aren’t the only international observers unsettled by the debate: The exchanges between an assertive Trump and a weak Biden have analysts worried — and not just about who will win the November election.
“This election has discredited American democracy even more than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping would like,” Sergei Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, wrote in X, referring to the leaders of America’s most powerful rivals, Russia and China.
“I’m concerned about the image that’s being projected to the outside world,” he continued. “It’s not an image of leadership, it’s an image of terminal decline.”
No matter who becomes president, the United States will face huge global challenges: in Asia, a rising China and Putin’s recently strengthened nuclear North Korea; in Europe, Russia’s war with Ukraine; and in the Middle East, Israel’s war against Hamas could spill into southern Lebanon and Iran.
There was little substance on foreign policy in the raucous debate, with Trump insisting without explanation that he could have stopped Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ invasion of Israel, and that he could have brought both conflicts to a swift end.
“We have 50 countries around the world that support Ukraine, including Japan and South Korea,” Biden said, referring to his efforts to rally allies to support Ukraine and counter Russia.
French analyst Francois Heisbourg said the debate made a Trump presidency, already considered a high probability, seem more likely to some. “So on all issues, this debate confirms European concerns, some of which are already embedded in people’s thinking.”
“People have heard Trump say he wants to cut aid to Ukraine and that’s going to be a central part of the discussion,” he said, adding that Trump’s expressed preference for Putin as a strong leader will also be a central part of the discussion.
But when it comes to Israel and Gaza, “I’m not sure it would make much of a difference,” Heisbourg said. “You can’t move your embassy to Jerusalem twice.”
The debate further underscored existing concerns about the unpredictable Trump, plus new misgivings about Biden’s ability to govern. One of the harshest assessments came from Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who in a social media post likened Biden to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who “blundered his succession by handing the baton to his incompetent son Commodus, whose disastrous rule sparked the decline of Rome.”
“It’s about managing the journey into the sunset,” Sikorsky added.
Uproar over the debate rang out in Ukraine on Friday.
“His main task was to convince voters of his energy and readiness to govern,” popular radio host Bogdan Butkevich wrote on social media about Biden, but added, “He failed to achieve that, which is why it is becoming increasingly likely that another Democratic candidate will take his place.”
Some took some solace in Trump’s statement that it was unacceptable for the Kremlin to keep the occupied territories. Ukrainian news outlet Kyiv Independent ran a headline that read, “Trump Rejects Putin’s Peace Terms, Biden Upsets Democrats.”
Russian media portrayed the debate as a sign of U.S. weakness and confusion. Dmitry Novikov, a Russian lawmaker, said on a state TV talk show on Friday that the outcome was “good for us.” “Internal destabilization of an adversary is always a good thing.”
In Asia, the debate has resurfaced serious questions about how U.S. politics will affect stability. Trump’s term has deeply shaken alliances in the region, and countries hoping the U.S. can balance Chinese influence and blunt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions have spent the past four years trying to rebuild ties with Washington.
“It was clearly a victory for Trump and a fatal blow to the Biden campaign,” said Lee Byung-cheol, a professor at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul.
“We must now prepare for a second Trump administration,” he added.
In Japan, a key U.S. ally in Asia, government officials have always been eager to say they are willing to work with whoever the U.S. elects. But Trump’s comments at the debate about not wanting to spend money to protect allies are likely to rekindle fears that he treats international relationships as transactional rather than permanent.
“I think Japanese policymakers are thinking, ‘OK, there’s a good chance that Trump will become president, so we have to make the institutional ties as strong as possible so that he can’t destroy them,'” said Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University. “It’s like tying yourself to a mast that may sink at any moment, and it’s a false illusion of safety.”
India has expanded military and trade ties with the United States in recent years, overcoming years of mistrust. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a warm relationship with Trump during his presidency, but Indian officials see Biden as a stable leader who understands how alliances work and how to contain geopolitical risks.
Dr Tara Kaltha, a former senior official in India’s National Security Council, said Trump is unpredictable and could change his stance, including reversing his current hardline stance, if China offers better terms on trade. That uncertainty complicates the calculations for India, which shares a border with China and is a long-standing rival of Beijing.
“We’re hedging with China right now,” she said, “because we really don’t know what’s going to happen with the U.S.”
In China, the presidential debate was a top story on the social media platform Weibo, and official Chinese media reported it almost verbatim with little commentary, including what the candidates said and the lack of a handshake.
Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar, said the debate only reinforced what Beijing has long believed: U.S. policy toward China is likely to be tougher, regardless of who the next president is.
What was clear after Thursday’s debate was that few Asian analysts were optimistic about America’s electoral options.
“Where are the good people? Where are the brave people?” said Kasit Piromya, a former Thai foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, adding that Southeast Asian countries needed to have their own foreign policy vision.
“Why wait until Trump gets bad?” he said.
The report Damien Cave, Swee Lee Wee, Choi Sang-hoon, Vivian Wang, Camille Jeremiah, Mujib Mashal, Segolene Le Stradic, Mark Santora and Oleg Matznev.
[ad_2]
Source link
