Despite his promises of retribution for their imagined economic sins against the much-maligned American working-class, they just love Donald Trump in Beijing. It might behoove Trump supporters to devote a moment’s thought to why that might be. From China’s perspective, Trump’s pledges of punitive economic justice meted out ruthlessly against the currency manipulators in the People’s Republic ring utterly hollow and will never materialize. His promises to abandon America’s East Asian allies, however, are not so far-fetched.
The Daily Beast noted on Tuesday that the Chinese national news agency Xinhua has touted with relish how Trump’s approach to foreign affairs would make Barack Obama appear hawkish by comparison and that the celebrity candidate has panicked Japanese officials. If America’s chief competitor in the Pacific is salivating over the prospect of a Trump administration, the Kremlin is positively giddy in anticipation.
Neither Donald Trump nor Vladimir Putin makes much of an effort to disguise their mutual admiration. True to form, Trump has contended that American relations with the Kremlin will be improved when he is president because he will make better deals with Moscow – the terms of which always seem to be favorable toward the interests of the Russian Federation over those of Washington.
Trump’s obsequious flattery of the New Tsar in Moscow extends to apologizing for his regime presiding over the conspicuous murders of journalists and opposition politicians. It’s not entirely clear that this means that a President Trump would seek to emulate this despotic behavior, but it is evident that a Trump administration would retrench in ways that would cede a substantial zone of operations to Moscow in Europe and Asia.
“I say there’s very little downside with Putin fighting ISIS,” Trump insisted following Russian intervention into the Syrian civil war. This was a particularly revealing comment, and what it revealed was not pretty. Russian forces went on to execute strikes on CIA weapons depots, target American-backed fighters on the ground, harass U.S. drones operating over Syria, and invade NATO-allied Turkish airspace resulting in the downing of a Russian warplane. When Putin announced the bulk of his forces were pulling out of the Syrian theater with ISIS for the most part still intact (but with anti-Assad moderate rebel forces in shambles), it should have prompted even the most credulous of Kremlin apologists to reconsider their position. That is, unless the aim of the West’s Putinistas was never to advocate for a new approach to the fight against ISIS but to provide Moscow with all the deference it needs in its quest to reassemble the Soviet Empire.
Just as Japanese and South Korean officials are breaking with tradition and openly fretting about deleterious effects a Trump administration would have on security in their neighborhoods, U.S. allies in Europe are uneasy about the increasingly provocative Russian Bear.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will convene a rare meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on Wednesday, the first of its kind in nearly two years. The extraordinary meeting comes amid a series of reckless maneuvers by Russian military assets that increase the risk of miscalculation or accidental conflict between Russian and allied Western European forces. Last week, Russian warplanes executed a mock attack on the USS Donald Cook. 48 hours later, a U.S. reconnaissance plane was intercepted by a Russian fighter which proceeded to perform a barrel roll over the top of the U.S. Air Force aircraft. Both incidents took place on or over the strategically vital Baltic Sea.
“[T]here is little doubt the incidents were warnings by the Russian military for the U.S. to keep its forces away from Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave that is home to critical military bases,” the Wall Street Journal reported. At a time in which Moscow appears set on reacquiring territory lost after 1992 — through invasion, annexation, or dubious referendum — turning up the temperature in the Russian enclave in Europe on the borders of NATO allies Poland and Lithuania is extraordinarily troubling.
Trump and many of his supporters insist that NATO’s members shift too much of the monetary burden for collective defense onto American shoulders and “it’s time for a new approach,” whatever that may entail. As Max Boot noted, even those nations that do not meet the required defense spending threshold (the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP) still contribute to what is collectively the second largest annual defense budget on earth ($300 billion, behind America’s $600 billion). Though the United States assumes the costs of almost three-quarters of NATO’s military operating budget, in 2015 that amounted to less than one-tenth of one percent of total U.S. defense spending. To gauge the value of peace on the content of Europe in dollars is a perverse way to measure the value of stability and continuity, but the actual figures in their proportions render it shallow analysis as well.
Provocative and revisionist great powers like modern Russia are paying attention. They take note of the fact that, amid its calculated displays of aggression and perimeter testing, the United States is contemplating retreat. That will only beget more dangerous displays, more opportunities for miscalculation, and more opportunities for accidental conflict to erupt. As Barack Obama drives the final nail in the coffin of his failed “Russian Reset” with the announcement of the deployment of a substantial deterrent force to Europe, Republicans flirt with surrendering their bona fides on national security to Democrats.
Donald Trump prides himself in his displays of strength. He contends that the American military he commands would be so strong “that no one will mess with us.” Why is it then that only America’s allies are quaking in anticipation of this development while U.S. adversaries appear joyful over the prospect of a Trump presidency?
