Several weeks ago a circle of European political leaders, high-ranking diplomats and foreign policy thinkers gathered for a private dinner.
Given the recent developments in Ukraine and the United States, the mood around the table was glum enough to begin with. Then, participants say, one senior minister reduced the gathering to a shocked post-prandial silence with a single question: “Is this how Europe ends?”
The scenario the minister had in mind was not so much a President Trump taking the US out of Nato but a President Trump who simply questions whether America would come to the defence of its European allies.
This nightmare vision became reality in the space of 20 seconds on Saturday night. Trump not only shrugged off the American promise that has underpinned Europe’s security since 1949 but he also said that he would “encourage” Russia to attack Nato members that had not spent enough on their own defence.
The reaction in European capitals has unfolded on two levels.
The first and most obvious is sheer horror.
The central point of Nato is its Article 5 mutual defence clause, which is founded on American power and American willingness to deploy that power in Europe. As much as anything it is fundamentally an article of faith.
With no iron-clad guarantee of this promise, it would not be impossible for the Europeans to deter a Russian invasion but it would be inordinately expensive and demand a level of urgency, self-sacrifice and political co-ordination beyond anything the continent has collectively mustered up to now.
This explains the strength of the rebuke with which Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, responded to Trump’s comments: “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, also bristled. “Let’s be serious,” he said. “Nato cannot be an a la carte military alliance.
“It cannot be a military alliance that works depending on the humour of the president of the US. It exists or it [does] not exist.”
The second kind of reaction, however, is to take Trump’s blithe disregard for 75 years of American diplomacy seriously but not literally: as an appallingly cavalier but necessary wake-up call.
After all, many European leaders concede that he basically has a point. Defence budgets across the continent have gone up quite a bit since the last Trump presidency but are nowhere close to where they need to be if Europe is to take primary responsibility for its own defence.
This is a structural imperative that will hold true regardless of who winds up in the White House at the beginning of next year.
The struggles in the US Congress to pass the latest $60 billion tranche of aid to Ukraine are a foretaste of a future in which Washington’s attention will be split between at least three theatres of geopolitical competition: Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific rim.
Trump’s remarks will catalyse the contingency plans European governments are already carrying out for the eventuality of a Republican victory in November, which suddenly seems like a very real and very alarming possibility.
Some hope is riding on leaders such as President Duda of Poland and the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who may be able to build or revive working relationships with Trump based on their political common ground.
Ultimately, though, it will be a question of money. Germany already hopes that some imaginative accounting will allow it to scrape past the Nato threshold of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence this year. Now, however, officials in Berlin fret that even 3 per cent or 4 per cent may not suffice if Trump wins.
