President Donald Trump is letting the world know that the days of American foreign policy malaise are over. European leaders, the left-wing propagandists are predictably aghast. There are clear echoes, however, of both former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in this new era of American foreign policy. It’s a resonance that should be reassuring for Americans.
European leaders can sit at hastily-arranged dinners and hold their multilateral confabs all they want, but they can’t escape history. Europe has been fractured by culture, language and ancient animosities that have kept the region in some stage of conflict for centuries. In the last century, European conflicts ignited two world wars that were the deadliest in human history.
Today, European leaders have allowed their nations to be overrun with refugees from the Middle East, bowed to the climate mob at the expense of their competitiveness and most relevant to the present Ukrainian situation, allowed Russia to continue its energy blackmail of the continent. They just backed a Gaza reconstruction plan that was developed without Israel and backs the Palestinian Authority.
What Trump is doing is asserting U.S. leadership after years of American retreat. During the Obama and Biden administrations — 12 of the last 16 years of U.S. foreign policy — a principal tenet of the Left’s ‘lead from behind’ strategy was to allow the European Union and the fragmented powers of NATO to assert greater control over the strategic direction of the Western alliance. During that time, the world has undoubtedly become more dangerous and less secure.
Mr. Trump’s more forceful approach to Europe may be causing palpitations in the press and on social media, but in reality, is backed by strong precedent.
When Nixon took office in 1969, in his first meeting with European leaders, he made clear the uncomfortable point that the U.S. would be engaging with the Soviet Union on a range of issues. President Nixon wasn’t inviting Europe to the table for those discussions. While that didn’t sit well with our friends across the pond, it was necessary for the U.S. to lead against the Soviets.
In today’s environment, Nixon’s diplomatic strategy would be lambasted as the president “kowtowing to dictators.”
During the Reagan administration, there were significant disagreements, however polite, between then-United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government, the European mainland and the U.S. on how to deal with containing the Soviet threat. President Reagan listened to his counterparts, but there was never any doubt that he was driving the strategy that would end the Cold War.
Mr. Trump’s position that Europe should take a greater role in its own security also echoes Nixon, who made it clear during his first term, that as the U.S. attempted to extricate itself from Vietnam, Asian nations would be expected to better handle their own security affairs unless threatened by a nuclear power.
That’s not abandoning a U.S. leadership position. It’s reinforcing it.
President Trump is right to blast Europe for its hypocrisy and its impotent attempts to curtail Moscow’s imperial designs.
Former President George W. Bush advocated for Georgia’s inclusion in NATO to help protect it from Russian invasion. Europe said no and Putin rolled across the border.
Of course, more recently, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, EU nations have spent more than $220 billion on Russian gas, that’s a lower average figure annually, but still, Russia is the second largest exporter of LNG and natural gas to Europe.
The Trump administration is further justified in reclaiming the lead on policy, not only because the American taxpayers are paying a massive bill for the security costs, but because many of even our closest allies appear to be slipping back from the basic values that characterize the free, Western nations.
Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich made that point plain and it was completely appropriate. He cited instances in Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Britain and Scotland among others, where freedom of speech, religion and conscience are now under constant attack. When you can be arrested for praying in public in Great Britain or for posting a meme in Germany, “thoughtcrime” as Mr. Vance called it, we are seeing the symptoms in Europe of the kind of breakdown of basic values that led to the conflagrations of the 20th Century.
Despite all the data and historical benchmarks, we’ve been so conditioned to think that Europe is some exemplar of values. That’s the result of the media embracing the Eurocentric policies of former Secretary of State John Kerry, former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, among others, over many years.
The subtext to Mr. Trump’s approach to Europe, is that European values and the continent’s sclerotic approach to international affairs — will no longer be considered to have primacy or even equality with those driven by the United States.
Americans should wholeheartedly embrace that approach.
Make no mistake, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a killer and an imperialist who has repeatedly attempted through direct conquest and asymmetric tactics, to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
The American public and the world will be waiting to see how President Trump advances Ukraine negotiations with an approach that girds against future Russian aggression. But the notion that Europe should lead on those negotiations or should be trusted to provide any meaningful measure of direction without US guidance is not only unrealistic, it is unwise.
Mr. Trump is committed to ending the killing in Ukraine started by Putin’s nature and Biden’s inaction. His European reset may be jarring to some, it will likely yield results.
Europe can’t escape its history of dithering and division. It also can’t look East for friends. And it is in the East, in the effort to cage the bear and tame the dragon, that both Europe and America together will face their greatest challenge.
Tom Basile is the Host of ‘America Right Now’ on Newsmax, conservative columnist, speaker, author of Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq and a former Bush Administration official. Follow him on X @Tom_Basile. Learn more at www.TomBasile.com
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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