DDonald Trump, American president-elect, recently offered two faces to Europeans. Saturday, December 7, it was the Trump touched by the grace of Notre-Dame, kindly greeting the crowned heads of the Old Continent upon arriving in the nave, after having agreed to speak with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, through of Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée.
Sunday, December 8, it was the vengeful and threatening Trump who warned the Europeans once again, in an interview with the NBC channel: if you do not pay more for your own defense, do not count on the United States to come to your aid within NATO.
After lulling themselves with illusions about maintaining a Democratic administration in Washington, Europeans must now face reality. Trump returns with the same ideas as eight years ago on trade and defense. His first telephone conversations with European heads of state or government since his election confirm this: those whose defense budget exceeds 2% of GDP have been warmly congratulated. For Trump, the criterion of a good European student remains this.
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However, if Trump has not changed on this point, there is something new on the European continent since his first mandate: the war is here. The Russian war, devastating, murderous and destabilizing. Hybrid warfare too. And the American president-elect sent a second message to NBC: it will decrease ” probably ” military support for Ukraine.
Stubborn budget situations
Here it is finally, reality. If, as they say, they want to support Ukraine and block the Russian threat, the Europeans must spend more. Spend more? But the boxes are empty! The subject dominated the meeting of NATO foreign ministers on December 3 and 4 in Brussels. Compared to the meeting of defense ministers in October, the atmosphere had changed radically, noted one participant: in the meantime, there was November 5 and Trump's victory. This time, we got into the tough stuff.
Today, NATO's European members are feeling the wind, but the budgetary situation of most of them is stubborn. “If Trump asks us to devote 3% of our national budgets to defense spending and we tell him OK, we will do it. In reality, we are not credible”recognizes, lucidly, a European diplomat. Poland and the Baltic countries, the most exposed, have made this effort themselves, but others are still far from the 2% threshold: Belgium (1.2%), Italy and Germany (1.6%), to name just a few.
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