Trump Disrupts World
By Robin Wright
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By Robin Wright
Donald Trump knows how to rattle the world. Since
Friday, the President-elect has given two interviews that jolted governments
from Brussels to Beijing. Many of his ideas disparage the principles,
institutions, and alliances central to U.S. foreign policy. Some date back to
the Republic’s founding, while others have been adopted since the mid-twentieth
century to prevent global conflagrations.
In
a joint interview with Britain’s Times and Germany’s Bild, Trump didn’t just
laud the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union as a “great thing”;
he predicted—and implicitly welcomed—the dismantling of the entire E.U., a bloc
backed for sixty years by the United States as the key to healing the divisions
that sparked two world wars. “I believe others will leave,” he said. “I do
think keeping it together is not going to be as easy as a lot of people think.”
Trump
called NATO—the centerpiece of trans-Atlantic security—“obsolete.” He charged
that it “didn’t deal with terrorism,” even though its first deployment outside
Europe was to Afghanistan after 9/11. From 2003 to 2014, NATO commanded the
International Security Assistance Force, which, at its peak, included a hundred
and thirty thousand troops from fifty-one NATO and partner countries. It was
the longest and toughest single mission in NATO history.
Trump
also put German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of America’s half dozen closest
allies, in the same category as Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who
controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, seized the Crimea from Ukraine,
and has warplanes bombing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
“I start off trusting both, but let’s see how long that lasts,” he said. “It
may not last long at all.” He even took on BMW, warning that the German company
and other foreign automakers would face a tariff of thirty-five per cent if
they tried to import cars built at plants in Mexico to the United States.
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