Trump has long grumbled about the United States’ outsize role in NATO and casts President Biden’s support for Ukraine’s struggle to resist Russian invasion as a costly drag on the U.S. taxpayer. The sentiment has captured a segment of the Republican Party, which has blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to earmark some $61 billion in fresh funding for Ukraine.
To European onlookers, Trump’s stated hostility is a line in the sand. “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German parliament, wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be surrender and self-abandonment!”
Trump, in the eyes of some European critics, is an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political ethos. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards allies,” Marko Mihkelson, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Estonian Parliament, told my colleagues. “Unfortunately, he is therefore a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.”
“Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement.
During his term, Biden reinvigorated the transatlantic alliance, assuring European counterparts about U.S. commitments to their security while coordinating a robust, collective effort to support Kyiv. European diplomats in Washington barely disguise their confidence and trust in the Biden administration, and their apprehensions of what may come should Trump defeat him in November.
But on the other key battlefront in the global conversation, Biden has unsettled myriad political elites with his perceived complicity in Israel’s relentless war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of whom were children, took another deadly turn Monday with the expansion of operations in Rafah, a southern city along the territory’s border with Egypt that’s now hosting more than a million cornered Gazan refugees.
Biden is reportedly frustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s uncompromising approach to the conflict. But has resisted internal pressure from aides and Democratic allies to do more to restrain the Israeli campaign — which came after militant group Hamas’s invasion on southern Israel on Oct. 7 — let alone condition future military aid to the Jewish state.
“Biden, who aides say has a visceral attachment to the Jewish state, has tended to view the prime minister and the state of Israel as one and the same, according to several people familiar with his thinking, and has struggled with the idea of criticizing a sitting prime minister, particularly during a time of war,” my colleagues reported.
Even…
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