Donald Trump knows how to rattle the world. Since Friday, the President-elect has given two interviews that jolted governments from Brussels to Beijing. Many of his ideas disparage the principles, institutions, and alliances central to U.S. foreign policy. Some date back to the Republic’s founding, while others have been adopted since the mid-twentieth century to prevent global conflagrations.
In a joint interview with Britain’s Times and Germany’s Bild, Trump didn’t just laud the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union as a “great thing”; he predicted—and implicitly welcomed—the dismantling of the entire E.U., a bloc backed for sixty years by the United States as the key to healing the divisions that sparked two world wars. “I believe others will leave,” he said. “I do think keeping it together is not going to be as easy as a lot of people think.”
Trump called NATO—the centerpiece of trans-Atlantic security—“obsolete.” He charged that it “didn’t deal with terrorism,” even though its first deployment outside Europe was to Afghanistan after 9/11. From 2003 to 2014, NATO commanded the International Security Assistance Force, which, at its peak, included a hundred and thirty thousand troops from fifty-one NATO and partner countries. It was the longest and toughest single mission in NATO history.
Trump also put German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of America’s half dozen closest allies, in the same category as Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, seized the Crimea from Ukraine, and has warplanes bombing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. “I start off trusting both, but let’s see how long that lasts,” he said. “It may not last long at all.” He even took on BMW, warning that the German company and other foreign automakers would face a tariff of thirty-five per cent if they tried to import cars built at plants in Mexico to the United States.
In a separate interview, with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said that the long-standing “One China” policy—initiated by President Nixon in 1972 and a cornerstone of U.S. policy ever since—is no longer guaranteed. “Everything is under negotiation, including One China,” he said. He charged that Beijing manipulates its currency in ways that disadvantage American companies. China was one of Trump’s most frequent targets during the campaign. Shortly after he won, he had a telephone conversation with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen—ending a protocol in place since 1979 that froze communication between American and Taiwanese leaders.
“What he’s saying is so serious, so grave, that if you take it all seriously it’s a world crisis,” a senior envoy from a long-standing ally told me on Monday. “And he’s saying it all in such a reckless and ignorant way that I suspect everyone is praying that this is not serious.”
Over the next four years, Trump’s comments—made by an ingénue in foreign policy and national security, with no apparent respect for the nuances and niceties of diplomacy—could throw an already fragile world into disorder. It’s one thing to go after Meryl Streep and Hollywood, on Twitter, in polarized America after the Golden Globes. It’s quite another blithely to go after China (the world’s most populous country, with one of the two largest economies and the three strongest militaries), Germany (Europe’s largest economy), and twenty-eight allies (in the mightiest military alliance in world history)—and all at once and all on a global stage.
The pushback, on Monday, was fast and furious. At a farewell for departing U.S. Ambassador Jane Hartley, French President François Hollande warned that Europe “has no need for outside advice to tell it what to do.” France was the first formal ally of the United States, signing a treaty in 1778 that insured military and economic support during the Revolutionary War. Hollande added, “Europe will always be willing to pursue trans-Atlantic coöperation, but it will base its decisions on its interests and its values.”
After a meeting at NATO headquarters, in Brussels, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that Trump’s comments had caused “astonishment and commotion” among every NATO nation. He expressed “amazement” that Trump’s comments contradicted the testimony of his own foreign-policy team.
China was unusually blunt. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, chastised the President-elect as “stunningly confident in his ostensible knowledge of the job, though he speaks like a rookie.” The state-run China Daily, the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, warned of “a period of fierce damaging interactions” in which “Beijing will have no choice but to take off the gloves.” Abandoning the One China policy, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry said, “will be like lifting a rock to drop it on one’s own feet.”
In Mexico, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, the economy secretary, countered that his government and others have to act swiftly “to neutralize” the impact of crippling new U.S. tariffs. “It would be a problem for the entire world,” he said, on a Mexican news program.
Merkel, who Trump charged with making a “catastrophic mistake” by agreeing to take in a million refugees, was more gracious. “We Europeans have our fate in our own hands,” she told reporters, in Berlin. “I’m personally going to wait until the American President takes office, and then we will naturally work with him on all levels.”
Trump’s interviews were particularly jarring just days after confirmation hearings for his designated Secretaries of State and Defense and the head of the C.I.A., all of whom were respectful of the European Union and NATO during many hours of occasionally tough questions. Defense Secretary-designate James Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general who served, from 2007 to 2009, as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander of Transformation. “If we did not have NATO today, we would need to create it,” Mattis told a Senate subcommittee last week. “It’s vital to the security of the United States.”
Following the hearings, a senior Western envoy told me, “These are grownups.”
After the latest Trump interviews, however, diplomats in Washington were again wondering what to make of the new Administration. “Frankly, what he says doesn’t make sense—suggesting that the European Union was created against the United States,” one European ambassador told me. “The United States has been a major sponsor of Europe’s unity.” He called Trump’s comments “weird” and “destructive.” “People in Europe are devastated,” the ambassador said.
Since the election, embassies across Washington have been scrambling to deduce Trump’s foreign policy from his often contradictory campaign statements and undiplomatic tweets. “You have a conversation with someone, and then there’s a random Trump tweet at night and it’s not clear if it shows a policy shift or it’s just a middle-of-the-night thought,” one Western envoy said. “The bigger question is, What do we take from Trump, and what is he just freelancing off the top of his head?
“We’re bracing ourselves,” the envoy added.
Over the past ten weeks, more than one diplomat has told me of plaintive daily cables from their capitals appealing for guidance on wars, humanitarian disasters, and other crises in which they have common interests with the U.S., have supported American positions, and, in some cases, have personnel. Many in the diplomatic corps expected more clarity to emerge during the transition.
One ambassador told me, “Every day I send back the same cable saying, ‘We don’t really know.’ ”