When abroad, Americans can often be parochially attentive to their own politics, boring their foreign counterparts with long discussions of party politics in the Senate or the prospects of a new governor. But this time, I find it’s the Americans who are weary of their country’s political drama while foreigners are panicking about what might happen in November.
The U.S. election is taking place at a crucial moment. Around the world, we are seeing several challenges to the rules-based international order that has served humanity well for decades. In Europe, the bloodiest war the continent has seen since World War II threatens to upend its security system. In the Middle East, Iran and its allies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others — are testing their ability to disrupt the balance of power in the region. And in Asia, the rise of China remains the largest long-term disruption, to which one must add North Korea’s accelerating arms buildup and increasingly belligerent rhetoric.
All of these have become tests of will for the United States, which is scrambling to mobilize its allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East to help deter these threats and resolve crises. But many allies worry that in November, the United States could decide that it has had enough — that these many problems perhaps do not centrally threaten U.S. security and are therefore not worth confronting. Much of the rhetoric of Donald Trump and some of his closest ideological soul mates — from Tucker Carlson to Vivek Ramaswamy — feeds into this fear.
So if Trump were to win the election and practice what he preaches, what happens to U.S. allies that have stuck their necks out to partner with Washington?
“Consider my country and Finland,” Bildt told me. “We have taken a huge step in joining NATO, one that puts us in a confrontational pose against Russia. We did this under the assumption that we had the backing of the armed forces of the United States. What happens if Trump wins and decides to pull out of NATO? We would be left exposed and have to think long and hard about our options.”
Finland, for its part, abandoned a policy of neutrality that had served it well for more than 70 years but could find itself deeply vulnerable to Russian attacks along its 830-mile border with that country. Its capital, Helsinki, is less than 200 miles from St. Petersburg.
I detected similar concerns when I was in Australia a few weeks ago. On the surface, Australian officials and analysts were bullish about their newly strengthened alliance with the United States and proud that they would now be trusted by Washington with nuclear submarines, a technology that so far the United States has shared only with Britain. But underneath the bravado, there is an unease. In recent years, Australia has moved decisively to ally itself with Washington, and in the process enraged China, its largest economic partner. This is a balancing act that makes some strategists nervous.
Sam Roggeveen is a scholar at the Lowy Institute, Australia’s leading think tank on international affairs. He has written a book, “The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace,” that best articulates this nervousness. Roggeveen argues that Australia is making a major mistake by relying on the United States to be there for it over the next few decades. He believes Americans will over time conclude that it is not worth the enormous and sustained cost to confront China in Asia, that the United States’ security does not require it, and that the United States will scale back its foreign commitments. That will leave Australia in a terrible place, having angered and alienated the Chinese but without the United States’ security umbrella to show for it. (He advocates turning Australia into an Echidna, an Australian version of a porcupine: hard to attack, even harder to digest.)
Ever since World War II, Washington, on a bipartisan basis, has adopted an expansive vision of its own security, one that recognized that it alone could help undergird stability in key regions of the world. That global role has helped create what historians call “the long peace” and the open global economy. If Trump wins in November and rejects that broader view of the United States in the world, a retreat could create power vacuums, leave allies exposed, and tempt adversaries to accelerate their attacks and heighten their ambitions. And that is why this time around, it is foreigners nervously watching and obsessing about the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
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