Jeffrey Herf (#4: On Transatlantic Alliances)

(University of Maryland)

Trumpism, “America First” and the Assault on the Atlantic Alliance

The Atlantic Alliance began in 1940 as an Anglo-American connection with the signing of the Atlantic Charter by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The “special relationship” amounted to a revolution in American foreign relations based on the idea that the national security of the United States depended on preventing any one power from dominating the entire continent of Europe. After the war, as the Alliance expanded to Western Europe, including the former enemy, now ally, the Federal Republic of Germany, its purpose remained intact, namely the defense of liberal democracy in Europe.

The belief that the Soviet Union posed a threat to democracy in Western Europe was decisive for convincing American conservatives and liberals, as well as Europeans of the center right and center left to support keeping American, British, and French troops in Western Europe and in West Germany. Their presence not only deterred the Soviet Union as well as any effort for a revival of Nazism in the Federal Republic. This duality of anti-Nazism and anticommunism, of the legacies of both the Nuremberg war crimes trials, as well as of recognition of the nature of the Soviet and Communist dictatorships, is an underappreciated aspect of the Western Alliance.

The Atlantic Alliance was one necessary condition for the prevention of a Nazi revival in the postwar decades.

While the defense of liberal democracy and free societies lay at the moral core of the Atlantic Alliance, its strategic core was the doctrine of extended nuclear deterrence, the seemingly implausible idea that the United States would retaliate with nuclear weapons if the Soviet Union attacked Western Europe. The public doctrine aimed to convince the leaders of the Soviet Union that, in contrast to the years before World Wars I, and II, the potential aggressor would be in no doubt that launching a war of aggression in Europe would mean being at war with the United States from the very first minutes of hostilities. As bizarre as all of this sounds, it worked brilliantly not only to ensure the longest period of peace in modern European history but also to bring about a Western victory in the Cold War. Just as the American diplomat George Kennan had hoped in 1946, a long, patient policy of the containment of the Soviet Union eventually lead to the internal reform and of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and then the implosion of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, for the first time since the establishment of the modern state system in Westphalia in 1648, an entire empire collapsed without a major war. NATO was astonishing success.

Donald Trump gives no evidence of understanding these past accomplishments, or of how the Atlantic Alliance facilitated both economic recovery and democratization in Western Europe and Japan and benefitted the United States enormously. Instead, his views on foreign policy appear shaped by the political and moral blunders of the American right wing in the 1930s. Its slogan “America First” lay in the American right-wing opposition to entering the war in Europe against Nazism. The logic of appeasement that America Firsters applied to Hitler resurfaces in Trump’s refusal to recognize, denounce and deter the aggression of the Putin dictatorship in Ukraine. In contrast to the core of American conservative foreign policy views for decades, his affinities with Putin’s cultural conservatism displace American opposition to the Soviet communist legacies that Putin also represents.

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