I hope this thread will sink into obscurity after November. But that's still a ways off, so
The Atlantic took a look at how the US' European allies are bracing for the second coming of TFG.
In capitals across the continent—from Brussels to Berlin, Warsaw to Tallinn—leaders and diplomats expressed a sense of alarm bordering on panic at the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection.
“We’re in a very precarious place,” one senior NATO official told me. He wasn’t supposed to talk about such things on the record, but it was hardly a secret. The largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II was grinding into its third year. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed, and Russia was gaining momentum. Sixty billion dollars in desperately needed military aid for Ukraine had been stalled for months in the dysfunctional U.S. Congress. And, perhaps most ominous, America—the country with by far the biggest military in NATO—appeared on the verge of reelecting a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance.
Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win.
The article goes into some depth, as The Atlantic does, and is quite enlightening.
Whether Trump wins or not, there’s a growing consensus in Europe that the strain of American politics he represents—a throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s—isn’t going away. It’s become common in the past year for politicians to talk about the need for European “defense autonomy.”
“We can’t just flip a coin every four years and hope that Michigan voters will vote in the right direction,” Benjamin Haddad, a member of France’s National Assembly, said at an event earlier this year. “We have to take matters in our own hand.”
