After a week of the worst barrage of insults yet from U.S. President
Donald Trump, the European Union is looking westward toward the White
House less and less.
Making it worse, Trump spent Monday cozying up to EU adversary Vladimir
Putin in an extraordinary chummy summit with the Russian leader in
Helsinki.
Never mind. In an age when Trump has made political optics
all-important, on Tuesday the EU struck back. Key EU leaders were in the
far east in Japan and China looking for the trust, friendship and
cooperation they could no longer get from a century-old ally.
Trump's embrace of Putin and the EU's Asian outreach highlight the
yawning rift, widening more by the day, in a trans-Atlantic unity that
has been the bedrock of international politics for the better part of a
century, as countless graves of U.S. soldiers buried in European soil
bear witness to.
Trump's abrasiveness and "America First" insistence had been a given
even before he became president. Europe's increasing resignation to
letting go of the cherished link to the White House is much more recent.
After last week's brutal NATO summit where Trump derided Europeans as
freeloaders, EU chief Donald Tusk spoke on Tuesday of "the increasing
darkness of international politics."
"This Helsinki summit is above all another wake-up call for Europe,"
said Manfred Weber, the German leader of the EPP center-right group in
the European Parliament, the legislature's biggest.
"We Europeans must take our fate in our own hands."
It was a startling sentiment coming from someone who hails from the same
German Christian Democrat stock as Angela Merkel, Helmut Kohl and
Konrad Adenauer, staunch supporters of the trans-Atlantic link over the
past three-quarters century.
There have been other signs of the growing European detachment from the
White House, especially after Trump pulled out of the global climate
agreement and the Iran nuclear deal the EU brokered.
"With friends like that, who needs enemies?" Tusk asked two months ago.
Soon, Trump had also piled on economic punishment with punitive tariffs on European steel and aluminum.
Then came the NATO summit. Already viewed with apprehension, reality turned out to be worse.
First, Trump called Germany, the powerhouse of the European Union,
"captive" to Russia. Then he suggested that Britain should "sue" the EU
over Brexit terms. Finally, he finished off by calling the 28-nation
bloc a trade "foe."
"For Trump, the categories of friend, ally, partner, opponent, enemy
don't exist. For him there is only his own ego," said the head of the
German parliament's foreign affairs committee, Norbert Roettgen.
So little wonder the EU has turned for friends elsewhere — and found one
Tuesday in Japan, where the bloc said it put in place "the largest
bilateral trade deal ever."
Up to two years ago, that was supposed to be the Trans-Atlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, trade deal between the EU and the
United States. But Trump quickly let it be known that such an
international agreement would not happen on his watch.
"This is an act of enormous strategic importance for the rules-based
international order, at a time when some are questioning this order,"
Tusk said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe.
"We are sending a clear message that we stand together against protectionism."
Despite it all, until last week there had remained hope that on the most
critical of geopolitical security issues, Trump would remain true to
American ideals. Instead, he unleashed unprecedented criticism at the
NATO summit.
Fully extracting itself from the United States, though, is a daunting challenge for Europe.
Militarily, with the exceptions of France and Britain, the European
allies have lived under the nuclear umbrella of the United States since
World War II. Defense cooperation outside of U.S-dominated NATO is only
now taking off and the blocked Brexit negotiations make such a prospect
fraught with uncertainty.
That military dimension, and the bond between Europe and the United
States, have a special resonance in nations like Poland and the Baltic
states, which had long been under the thumb of Moscow before the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hence, Monday's Helsinki summit was seen with apprehension that Trump
might make dramatic concessions to Putin and leave parts of Europe with
too little protection. In Poland, the 1945 Yalta Conference is seen as a
symbol of political treason because, without Poland's participation and
against Poland's will, it put the country under Soviet control for
decades, until 1989.
Read: EU, US relations sinking further after divisive Trump tour
