So… there’s a good chance that NATO – the pillar of global peace in the post-World War II era – is a spent force. Trump has probably broken NATO by saying that if Russia starts a war with European nations over Ukraine, they’re on their own, including the US’s NATO allies. It looks like the US is working on a pro-Russia peace settlement and forcing it on Ukraine without input from anyone else. Regardless of what happens in Ukraine, the message is loud and clear: The US is more on the side of Russia than its NATO allies in Europe.

The stated bone of contention is that European countries don’t contribute more to NATO. This is a perfect example of why Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House. There is this one good reason why maybe, just maybe, European nations shouldn’t have too many weapons. I am, of course, talking about the two biggest wars in human history, both started due to European rivalries. Y’know. World Wars 1 and 2.

Right now, European countries are going, “Gosh, we’ve spent generations shorting our militaries to provide this big safety net for our people, and spending money on the military will cut into that.” Soon enough, though, they’ll remember how the money flowed in when they had these big, world-spanning militaries. Tomorrow, Belgium might wake up and remember how much of their country was built by rubber from Africa, France might recall all the money made from its spice trade and the UK… well, the UK might remember that it once had an empire on which the sun never set that made it the most powerful nation in the world.

Likewise, Trump has no idea how many of the preferential deals that the US gets from other countries are because of our gunpowder diplomacy. Empire, when it works right, is immensely profitable. Low energy prices in the US are a function of US imperialism in the Middle East, where most of the Persian Gulf states are de facto clients of the US. Saudi Arabia doesn’t last a week without US support, and the same is true of the UAE and Iraq. Low-cost imports of food from all over Latin America are built on the US military and economic dominance of the hemisphere built on the Monroe Doctrine that says, hey, Europe, you gotta stay out of the Americas, and came to be a critical component of US foreign policy during the Cold War, allowing companies like United Fruit to run roughshod over the region. (1) The US profits from its empire, built on the back of its preposterously large defense spending and willingness to covertly or overtly attack small countries.

But by kicking Europe into the cold, one of the very real possible scenarios is the creation of new rivals to US power and interests. In aggregate, the EU is both richer and more populous than the US, even without the UK. A pan-EU military coalition would have immense money and industrial resources at its disposal, not to mention deep ties with most of the global south and long legacies of imperialism. It is important to remember that much of the European empire was dismantled by rising humanist sentiments in Europe after the world wars and the vulnerabilities caused by those wars.

These days, Europe isn’t a desolate wasteland after two enormous wars. There’s plenty of rightwing, revanchist sentiment kicking around the continent to go around. Encouraging Europe to grow its military is encouraging a return to a more imperialist mindset where it will clash with both the US and China in international arenas. Independence from the US military means independence from the US military, after all. Out in the cold, European powers won’t ask for American permission to act aggressively in foreign arenas. The US has made itself clear: you can’t rely on us for support. The corollary is that, now, Europe need not share in the spoils. In such a world, the rise of European militarism would be making headlines. (2) As noted by Thomas Jefferson, a large standing military is seductive, a constant inducement to its use, and threatens the capture of the government by military interests. He wanted it to be in the Bill of Rights that the US shouldn’t have a standing army! (3) The dangers of having a standing army are well-known and have been known for centuries. Encouraging Europe to rearm is a fool’s errand.

US foreign policy in Europe may have passed the point of no return. Europe was exhausted by the first Trump adminstration jerking them around. After the Biden election, they wanted to believe that the US had returned to, at least, business as usual. Trump’s re-election – with actual victory instead of the weird shenanigans-based win of the first time – and Trump siding with Russia over the long-standing alliances the US has had in Europe (France and the UK have been allies of the US for well over two centuries!) and the breaking of NATO has forced a long term rethink of European political relationships with the US. Even if the Democrats win big in the next Presidential election (assuming there is one, I mean, c’mon, we’ve got to be honest about that and acknowledge that Trump is going to look for and possibly find a way to be president-for-life, let’s not be naive, but also assuming that the Democrats can win anything should there be free elections,) Trumpism will remain one of the driving forces in US politics for the middle-distance future. The whiplash foreign policy of the US – the wild oscillations between Democratic and Republican administrations – isn’t reliable. An inconstant ally is no kind of ally at all. Europe will have to make its way without the US both militarily and economically.

This is a very big deal, even beyond what happens in Ukraine (which will probably be all bad.) This could be a long-term reordering of international foreign relations worldwide, which is, in fact, Trump’s aim, though he does not understand the forces he’s playing with. He wants to be feared and loved in a futile attempt to fill the bottomless hole where humans have a heart.

The future is going to be one of weird bedfellows. Of US-Russia-Chinese alliances (doomed to be short-lived and fraught, since all of the involved countries are using each other for nationalist gain) at the cost of our European friends, who will be looking for alliances – and finding them – all over the world but in places yet unimaginable, to ends yet unknowable. For the past eighty years, NATO has been a steady ship of state, the North American-Western European alliance so militarily, economically, and politically powerful as to be unassailable. But… poof. It is gone, I fear, replaced with military and economic uncertainty.

Each grand conflict on the world stage gets bigger, fought with more dangerous weapons, killing more people, involving more countries. The military order that NATO represented was an attempt to stop the next grand conflict – the next world war – which could easily include thousands of nuclear weapons and whatever new madness cooked up in the national labs all over the world. (Eco warfare, space-based kinetic weapons, bioweapons, AI-based weapons, the list of potential new weapons, all well within our technological reach, is long and disturbing.  Our destructive imagination doesn’t end with fusing hydrogen.) Civilization doesn’t have more than one world war left in it, if even the one. Do your best to stay safe and work for a better, peaceful world.

Notes

(1) The list of US interventions in just Central and South America is long. In 1952 and ’54, the US tried to depose the democratically elected ruler of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, eventually replacing him with the strongman Carlos Castillo Armas. Of course, the Bay of Pigs and US efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro are well-known. The US assassinated Raphael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s strongman, and sent troops in the subsequent civil war to prevent leftists from winning. The US ran black ops to prevent Cheddi Jagan in Guyana from gaining power, including election fixing. US covert ops in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a coup against Salvador Allende and the rise of Augusto Pinochet, who would go on to murder tens of thousands in camps all over the country. In the Reagan years, the US supported the Contras in Nicaragua with illegal arms imports in the Iran-Contra Affair. US involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War ended with the murder of democratically elected Prime Minister Maurice Bishop while, in the same year, 1983, the US invaded Grenada on the pretext of holding “free elections.” In 1989, the US invaded Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, who, absurdly, had been one of the figures in the Iran-Contra Affair, giving US weapons to the Contras so the US would overlook his drug dealing. That’s not even counting the purely police interventions, like US efforts to capture or kill drug dealers in Columbia.

(2) It would be amusing to see, in Trump’s administration, them decrying Europe’s increased military spending after encouraging them to do it. Usually, the US is unhappy when other countries increase their military budgets. Trump is such a fucking idiot. A militarily stronger Europe obviously means a relatively weaker US military unless the US wants to start an arms race *with Europe,* which is a sentence so preposterously stupid my hands find it difficult to write! But, here we are, with Trump kickin’ off an arms race with American allies. Not US enemies, not US rivals, but US allies. Great plan, you stupid bastard.

(3) In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land and not by the law of Nations.” It’s like a list of things Trump hates. Americans should read what the Founders wrote. It isn’t much like the right-wing lies that Republicans spread.