European Leaders Panicking Over Trump

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On this 80th anniversary of D-Day, the allied invasion of France to expel the Nazi occupation, a lot of the coverage you've probably been hearing from either side of the Atlantic looks back, but McKay Coppins from The Atlantic and President Biden want to look forward just as much. Now, the president gave that 80th anniversary speech this morning in Normandy, where the troops came ashore. One of the things he said was this.

President Biden: What the Allies did together 80 years ago far surpassed anything we could have done on our own. It was a powerful illustration of our alliances. Real alliances make us stronger. A lesson that I pray we Americans never forget.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden this morning. We will hear more from the speech as we go, but here's the headline from a long new article in The Atlantic by staff writer McKay Coppins, who went on a reporting trip to Europe of his own. It's called What Europe Fears. American Allies in Europe see a second Trump term as all but inevitable. The anxiety is massive. McKay Coppins is also author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. McKay joins us now. McKay, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much in this article, including the fear that you describe as existential, also a grudging acknowledgement of things Trump may have gotten right as president in the context of Europe. By way of background, did you time this article to coincide with the 80th anniversary of D-Day?

McKay Coppins: We were aware that it is happening this week, but no. [laughs] There were a couple different news pegs, but I do think that once we realized that the story would be ready in time for the anniversary, we felt like it was a really obvious news peg, because a lot of the things that we are commemorating, paying tribute to right now about America's history and its relationship with Europe are really at risk from the point of view of a lot of the European officials I interviewed. I think it's an appropriate time to be talking about this.

Brian Lehrer: We'll talk about what's at risk and why it matters, but who does that subhead of your headline, sub-headline, refer to when you say America's allies see Trump's reelection as inevitable? Because the election is close in the polls, and of course, highly contested by President Biden.

McKay Coppins: Yes. This was one of the pretty surprising things to me as I was traveling throughout Europe and interviewing these officials. The sub-headline refers to pretty much every European elected official and diplomat I interviewed. In four different countries, dozens of interviews, all of them were starting from the premise that Trump was likely to win in 2024. It's funny. I've been giving a few interviews about this piece this week, and when I say that, the American audience often bristles at that assessment and they say, "Well, why do they think that? The polls are close," et cetera, et cetera.

I think there are a few different reasons. One is that a lot of them are still scarred from the shock of Trump's win in 2016. They had been assured by their counterparts in the US that Trump's victory was incredibly unlikely and then he won. His first term was about as destabilizing to the transatlantic relationship as anything in the past 75 years. They're reacting to that feeling they had in 2016 and on.

I think there's also an instinct among a lot of these officials to prepare for the worst-case scenario. We can get into this later, but European officials are not just speculating about who's going to win. They're making concrete policy plans around the outcome of the US election, and I think it makes more sense for them to prepare for the worst than prepare for the best.

There's also just the political reality. You're right that the polls are close, but Trump is leading in most of these swing-state polls at least within the margin of error, in some cases by more. I will tell you something that really stood out to me in my interviews is that these European officials are paying very close attention to this election. I met people in Germany and Poland, who could cite granular polling data from Michigan and Pennsylvania. They knew exactly how the electoral college worked. These were not people who were passively or casually paying attention to American politics. They are very plugged in because they believe the stakes of the outcome of this election could be existential for Europe.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what do they think the stakes are beyond what most people probably assume, which is if Trump is elected, he will let Putin have his way with Ukraine. Outside of Ukraine, and I realize that by itself is a huge thing, but outside of Ukraine, what do the leaders of Europe think is at stake?

McKay Coppins: Yes, Ukraine is a big deal, obviously, but they believe that Putin wouldn't stop with Ukraine if America elected a president who is not committed to NATO and who has professed his admiration for Vladimir Putin. The thing that a lot of the Europeans will point to as especially alarming from this year was when Donald Trump famously gave that speech in which he told a story about speaking to European leaders and saying that if these countries don't pay enough for their collective defense, don't contribute enough to NATO, that Russia should be able to do whatever the hell they want with those countries. I think in America that was a big deal that it got some news attention, in Europe that was a five-alarm fire. That was a massive red flag.

Because the worst-case scenario for Europe is that Trump comes into office, finally makes good on his repeated threats to withdraw the US from NATO, the alliance effectively collapses, and there is no bulwark against Putin's expanded territorial ambitions. You could see that the fear is that Putin could try to move into the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, that he could try to annex the Suwałki Gap in Poland that perhaps he could expand the war beyond Ukraine and that it would spill into Poland. The fears, especially in Eastern Europe, are that without an American president who's committed to the alliance, Putin's Russia will keep marching on beyond Ukraine.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I see some of you, including a few with ties to Europe, are already calling in. I want to make sure everybody has the phone number as we open the phones. First of all, any listeners right now with a foot in this country and one in any NATO nation or elsewhere in Europe, Ukraine perhaps, 212-433-WNYC. What do you think, what are you hearing from the country you came from or the other country that you have a relationship with? Are you hearing that there is a presumption that Trump is going to win? Are you hearing about alternative scenarios for what those countries would do? We'll get into that part of McKay's article as we go.

He already mentioned they're preparing for contingencies for the different scenarios. Some of them really interesting militarily, and we'll talk about those. Europeans welcome and encouraged to call or anybody who goes back and forth to Europe a lot, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. What do you think a Trump or Biden election would mean? I'll throw in here a one-question quiz. I was going to get to this a little later, but I'll throw it in just so you have it as we start taking calls. Article 5 of the NATO treaty, considered the most important part as McKay reminds us in his article in The Atlantic, was to make sure that all the NATO nations would have each other's backs militarily if needed, if one was attacked.

Article 5 has only been invoked once by one country that was attacked and the other NATO nations rallied to its side. What was that country? Who knows the answer? One-question quiz. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. McKay, maybe it's worth reminding people what NATO is, because this is the 80th anniversary of D-Day. This year was also the 75th anniversary of NATO. Maybe it's worth reminding people what NATO is and why it was formed after World War II.

McKay Coppins: Yes. NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was formed, as you mentioned, after World War II in 1949 by the US and, I think it was 11 other countries to start. The idea was effectively to never allow another conquest-minded autocrat to tear through Europe again. As Jens Stoltenberg, who is the Secretary General of NATO, reminded listeners at a reception that I attended in Belgium, the US fought in World War I and then made the decision to leave Europe. As he said in his Scandinavian understated way, that did not go so well.

It's important to remember the political context of that time. After World War I, there was an exhaustion with war, understandably, among Americans. A hard-edged isolationism was spreading throughout the United States, and there was an idea that Americans couldn't afford to continue to support and protect allies in Europe. They left Europe, and within a couple decades, another autocrat from Germany was tearing through Europe, conquering countries, and the US was pulled back into another war.

After World War II, the premise was if we form a strong, rock-solid alliance between North America and Europe, and given America's vast military, which had just shown its power in World War II, especially with the creation of the atom bomb, the idea was that they could prevent further war in Europe. I think it's worth pointing out NATO worked, the gamble worked.

Historically, Europe has been a very violent continent, by some accounts the most violent continent in the world, but after 1949, peace more or less reigned in Europe. Obviously, there were some smaller conflicts, but for the most part, NATO held. The alliance has expanded to 32 countries, and that peace that Europe has enjoyed over the past 75 years also benefited the US economically, geopolitically, the US has all kinds of trade revenue that comes from Europe. There's obviously a long history of travel back and forth, tourism.

The reason that Europe has always been seen as a very safe place destination for Americans to travel throughout is in large part because this alliance, the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, has held. When we talk about what's at stake, I do think it's important to remember, Brian, that this alliance has done its job, and pretty much everyone in both parties in America up until the last few years agreed that supporting NATO was not only important for political reasons and for idealistic reasons, but also was in the best interest of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: We have some callers on the line who want to help us report this story. The story being, if you're just joining us, folks, McKay Coppins's article in The Atlantic about the anticipation in Europe that Donald Trump is likely to win a second term and the existential disaster that would be for much of Europe, in many European leaders' opinions. We invited people with one foot here, one foot there, to call in and tell us if that's what you're seeing and hearing. Ella in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ella. Oh, let's try again. Ella in Manhattan, I think we have you. Are you there?

Ella: Yes, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, now we got you. Hi, Ella.

Ella: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hello.

Ella: Hi, good morning. First time, long time. I have a long-time experience with my friends in Poland. I grew up and graduated high school in Poland, and I'm occasionally in touch with some of my friends. I have to tell you, they are terrified. They are absolutely terrified. They're getting ready for the war, basically. They think that there's a very high likelihood. Somehow in Europe, my friends in Germany think the same way. They're like, "Well, we're getting ready. We think that this is what's happening. It's Trump." I keep on telling them, "It's not over, by far." I can tell you that people in Europe, especially west of the border of Russia, are absolutely terrified of them coming.

Brian Lehrer: McKay referred to Poland a minute ago. How are you hearing it in terms of what people fear Russia would do if Trump is elected?

McKay Coppins: Yes, I--

Ella: They fear that.

McKay Coppins: Oh, sorry. No, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: McKay, hang on. I'm asking the caller. Ella, go ahead.

Ella: What I am hearing from them is that they fear that the same way that he stepped over the Ukraine border, he will have absolutely no qualms about doing the same and claiming some Polish parts because after the World War II, when the borders were created, they were created in some ways with parts that used to be Russian back and forth. These borders have been liquid for the last, I don't know, hundreds of years. They are worried that they will be trying to reclaim those borders.

Brian Lehrer: Ella, thank you, and thank you for being a first time, long time. Call us again. Before we follow up with you, McKay, on Ella, let me get one more in here. Joe in Bushwick with ties to Finland. Joe, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Joe: Hi, thanks so much for taking my call. Yes, I went to high school in Finland, and I still keep up regularly with a lot of my friends there who have to do the conscripted service. I've noticed a trend where especially young people in Europe, despite being in Finland as they may be, and afraid of Russia, they have a kind of ambivalent sense about Biden versus Trump and are judging Biden largely off of his conduct in Gaza. That has turned a lot of left-leaning young people away from NATO as an important institution to maintain and away from worry about the Biden-Trump outcome, with Trump as a [unintelligible 00:16:59] conclusion that's acceptable.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. If they don't like how, let's say, far to the right, if we put it in left-right terms, Biden's support of the way Israel is fighting in Gaza is, would they not be even more horrified by the prospect of a Trump?

Joe: Here is the thing that I would expect as well, but they seem to be saying that Trump's, at least rhetoric towards isolationism, gives them hope that he would withdraw support and the arming of places like Ukraine and Israel, which they seem to put in one camp.

Brian Lehrer: Very interesting, Joe. Thank you very much. McKay, you want to comment on those two callers?

McKay Coppins: Yes, I'll say first that what I heard from Ella was very similar to the conversations that I had throughout Poland. Poland was an interesting place to visit at this moment because, as she mentioned, they are preparing for war. In fact, the Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has talked about how Poland is living in a pre-war era, and he is urging people to prepare for a conflict with Russia. This has trickled down into everyday life in Poland. I heard stories about people looking for apartments with basements that could double as bomb shelters, people are stocking up on gold, they're going to shooting ranges because they're realizing they might, for the first time in their lives, need to know how to handle a gun. Schools are running duck and cover drills.

One Polish woman I spoke to actually told me about a phone call she received from her aunt, who was wondering if she should restain her hardwood floors in her house or just save her money because her house might be destroyed soon anyway. That gets at the immediacy and sense of urgency people in Poland are feeling about this. I think terrified is a good word to describe it.

As for the other caller, I heard about Gaza too, and I guess I should say, I think this is an important nuance. As terrified as a lot of Europeans are of Donald Trump's reelection, there was not an overabundance of goodwill toward Joe Biden, from what I could tell. In general, at least speaking to European officials and diplomats, they certainly prefer the Biden administration's approach. It's much closer to a standard American attitude toward foreign diplomacy and geopolitics. They appreciate that a lot of the people he's installed as ambassadors or in the State Department are dedicated to reassuring European allies.

They also, I frankly will say, and I heard this from many, many people in Europe, are wondering why Joe Biden chose to run again. Part of their confidence that Donald Trump is going to win is that they just are not that impressed by Joe Biden. They feel like he's old. I heard more than one person describe him as feeble and out of touch, and his handling of Gaza has, I think, turned off a lot of Europeans as well. Certainly, they would prefer Joe Biden for the most part, but they're also not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Joe Biden's administration, from what I can tell.

Brian Lehrer: On the Gaza question, I was watching the President's speech in Normandy this morning, and some of the others who spoke around him. I'm going to play a clip of Biden right now that refers to Ukraine, but that I think people concerned with the Palestinians in Gaza, and who see Israel in a certain way in this war, which is a lot of the world, may be having a certain reaction to this clip from Biden this morning in Normandy.

President Biden: To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.

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President Biden: Were we to do that, it means we'd be forgetting what happened here in these hallowed beaches.

Brian Lehrer: Now, he was referring to Putin as a bully, and Ukraine as who is being bullied, and Putin as the dictator. He used the word dictator there, but we know a lot of the world considers Israel the bully [inaudible 00:21:38] Gaza, Hamas on October 7th, even not withstanding, and consider Netanyahu one of those authoritarians or authoritarian wannabes who are more in this Putin, Trump, maybe Netanyahu kind of camp.

McKay Coppins: Right. This is what makes the conflict in Gaza so complicated, and why it's not quite as clear cut for a lot of people around the world as the conflict in Ukraine is. In Ukraine, you have what most people see as a clear case of a bully, an autocrat who is violating international law to try to conquer a country. The conflict in Gaza is just more complicated. I'll add one more wrinkle to the European view of Gaza, which is that Europe lived through World War II, and they lived through the Holocaust.

In Germany, especially, while reporting there, it was interesting to talk to people there about the conflict in Gaza, because on the one hand, a lot of them were pretty opposed to some of the measures that Netanyahu's government is taking and were opposed to the US going along with it, but they kind of whispered that opposition. Whereas in America, you see a lot of people shouting it. In Germany, given their history, and that was a term I heard all the time, "Given our history," they felt like they had to at least show public tacit support for Israel, even while they oppose the way Israel was conducting the war.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, before my quiz question gets too stale, I invited people to call in if they know the answer to this one-question quiz. Article 5 of the NATO Treaty was only invoked once since NATO was formed, meaning only one time did the other members have to come to the defense of a member state that was attacked. Which ally was attacked? Beth on the Lower East Side, you're on WNYC.

Beth: [laughs] Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, it was invoked by the United States after 9/11.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly right. Sorry, Beth, you don't get any prize, but you do get the fanfare.

Beth: [laughs] That's okay.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much.

Beth: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: What does Trump say about that, McKay? Because the narrative is, the US is being taken advantage of by all these other NATO allies, largely in a financial way, which actually we're going to get more into in a little bit, and actually, a lot of Democrats agree with that. It was only when push came to shove, the United States that ever had to invoke Article 5, and of course, no matter what we think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, European allies came to fight.

McKay Coppins: Yes, that's right. This is why I think a lot of Europeans are frustrated with the way that Donald Trump and a lot of his Republican allies are talking about this alliance, because the implication is always that the US is the benefactor, and that everybody else is our supplicants, and that Europe is the only one that benefits from this alliance. The reality is that the US benefited from the alliance after 9/11 in tangible ways and symbolic ways, but more to the point, this alliance does protect the United States. The US obviously is in a different position.

We are flanked by oceans, we do not have hostile neighbors, we're not close to Russia physically, for the most part, Alaska, obviously. We're not in the same geographic situation that a lot of European countries are in. I spoke to one senior official from an allied country who asked to be anonymous so he could grumble about the tenor of this debate. He said to me, "They keep telling us how important it is to go and convince the housewives in Wisconsin and the farmers in Iowa."

He's speaking of the encouragement that NATO countries in Europe have gotten from the US State Department to convince average Americans when they're making diplomatic visits or giving interviews to the American press, that the alliance benefits them. What this official said is, "How many Americans are going to the housewives of southern Estonia, or the countryside in France to tell why Europe should stand by the United States?" The source of frustration is just basically that this alliance protects everyone.

It's been good for the United States, it's been good for Europe, and to accept the terms of the debate that Donald Trump has introduced, is to almost already concede defeat, and just say that the isolationists have a point, and now we have to do what they say to make sure that they keep protecting us.

Brian Lehrer: Right. You mentioned Estonia, a lot of our listeners couldn't even find Estonia on a map, though a lot of you could. The Estonia part of your article was really interesting to me. One of the things that I will take away from that article after today is, somebody told you, you can have all these intellectual conversations, like frankly, you and I and our callers are primarily having right now about NATO, good and bad, what should the US responsibility be? What should European nations' responsibility be? It's an intellectual exercise. When you are an Estonian living near the Russian border, it is a whole other thing.

McKay Coppins: Yes. This is not an intellectual exercise. That was actually the Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, who said that to me. She said, "For some countries, talking about security and defense is a nice intellectual discussion, for us, it's existential." I got to see that firsthand, being in Estonia. I went to the city of Narva, which is right on the border of Russia. It's separated by a river and a single heavily guarded road bridge. A guy who worked at the border checkpoint took me out onto that bridge, and I was talking to him.

He was this kind of tough, young Estonian guy, had a gun, and he was telling me his stories about working at the border checkpoint. At one point, as we were out on this bridge, and it was snowing and we were looking across the border, and actually a Russian border guard had come out to suspiciously size us up. While we were out there, I asked him if he could ever envision the day when Russian tanks were rolling across that bridge. All of a sudden, the bravado evaporated, and he got really quiet. He said, "Putin has always said that they would never attack the Baltics, but that's also what they said about Ukraine." He told me, "When they tell us they will not do something, it means for us that they can do it or will do it."

Brian Lehrer: You know that line struck me as so Soviet, like Soviet era, right? When they tell you they won't do something, it means they can do it, and they might.

McKay Coppins: That's exactly right. It really just drove home for me how precarious life feels when you're living on the Russian border in Putin's shadow, and how not academic or abstract these conversations are for them.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute on this 80th anniversary of D-Day with McKay Coppins from the Atlantic. When we come back, we will talk about the parts of his article in which European leaders grudgingly acknowledge a couple of big things that Trump got right when he was in office. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue on this 80th anniversary of D-Day with McKay Coppins, staff writer from The Atlantic, and his new article, What Europe Fears. American allies in Europe see a second Trump term as all but inevitable. The anxiety is massive. Here's another 30 seconds of President Biden's speech at Normandy this morning celebrating the 80th anniversary.

President Joe Biden: America has invested in our alliances and forged new ones. Not simply out of altruism, but out of our own self-interest as well. America's unique ability to bring countries together is an undeniable source of our strength and our power. Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago and is not the answer today.

Brian Lehrer: A knock against Trump, isolationism, without saying his name, but also, McKay, I wonder if you see an arc of history here where the ones who cheer US military alliances have moved from more to the right to more to the left. Because when Biden talks there about, "This isn't just altruism, this is also in the US interest," he's talking to Trump supporters who feel like Europe and other countries frankly get over on us with the military support that we give them.

Whereas for a lot of the Cold War era and certainly the Iraq and Afghanistan war era, a lot of people on the left would say, "Hey, the biggest problem in the world militarily is US imperialism and we're getting over on everybody else." Why? It's for the sake of money, corporate profits, and general US standards of living. Do we want the US to retreat militarily from the world? A lot of progressives for a long time would've said yes, much more than people on the right, and that script is flipping.

McKay Coppins: It's such a good point. It's one of several issues where the American politics have been scrambled in the last eight years. It's also an example of horseshoe politics where the far right and far left come around to meet in the middle on an issue. Donald Trump's isolationism, it is not exactly the same, but does overlap with left-wing critiques of American hegemony. You definitely have examples where the most hardcore isolationists on the right are linking arms with left-wingers who also are isolationists and think America should withdraw from the world.

One of the interesting things about this is that speaking to people in Europe, they were often most surprised by, exasperated by how much the Republican party had changed. Because, for example, in Poland, the Republican Party that they're aware of is the party of Reagan and George HW Bush. Those guys are heroes in Poland, or at least to a lot of people in Poland. They are seen as key figures in tearing down the Iron Curtain, liberating Poland from the Soviet Union. The Republican Party they knew was the party that stood up for democratic values around the world, often to the point of error, often to the point of foreign adventurism.

A lot of the justifications for the war in Iraq, for example, were based on the same ideas of defending democratic values abroad and fighting autocrats. It's not as if this is always a cleanly idealistic argument, but what I will say is that Europeans are coming to terms with the scrambled politics here and realizing that a lot of the people in the Biden administration sound more like people in the previous Bush administrations than they do in the Trump administration, at least when it comes to foreign policy.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Bob in Manhattan with a second-generation post-D-Day memory I think we're going to hear. Bob, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Bob: I was born in April of '45, the beginning of the baby boom, and my dad resigned up. We were in Canada. After Pearl Harbor, he was transferred up there and then he got married and then we resigned. We went to Europe. I grew, from the age of 5 until I was 11, in Germany during the Marshall Plan. It was totally devastated. I can remember playing in a construction site. Actually they were just bombed out buildings, finding bones under bricks, rocks and finding a skull and putting it on a broom handle and marching around as an 8-year-old, 9-year-old.

The people my age will remember, people in the '60s and '70s in Europe, they remember that it took over 15 years. Marshall Plan went on all through the '50s until the early '60s to rebuild war-torn Europe. [unintelligible 00:35:35] we didn't experience that until 9/11 when we saw the devastation at the World Trade Center. That kind of devastation took years to rebuild and they would remember that now.

Brian Lehrer: You and Trump were the first baby boomers.

Bob: My mom was a Roosevelt Democrat, of course, all her life, but she met Trump down in West Palm Beach at a movie theater. He was very gracious to her and she thought he had a good heart. I couldn't believe that she changed and she became a Trumper in the end, in her 90s.

Brian Lehrer: Bob, thank you so much for that memory. I appreciate it. Dinusha in Patterson, American born, but father and mother from Europe. Dinusha, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Dinusha: Hi. My dad was Polish, my mother was Slovak. I've gone back and forth and I get very emotional about this because I feel like my fellow Americans don't understand what's going on. As your guest is saying, I think that Polish people understand all too well. I'm a double hater. I don't like either Biden or Trump, and I planned on throwing my vote away, but after Trump said Putin can do whatever the hell he wants, ever since then, my hair has been on fire. I'm going to try and do everything I can to help Biden get elected.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Dinusha, I hear how personal and obviously emotional this is for you. Thank you very much for sharing that. I think that call took some courage, McKay. A couple of interesting calls there.

McKay Coppins: Yes. I get a little emotional listening to that second caller as well because, again, part of the reason I wanted to go to Europe and write this story is that I wanted to help Americans see this from the perspective of people for whom these issues are very real. Again, we talked about it with Estonia, these are not abstract issues. I'll say, look, one thing I want to say at the top of this story and what I want to make this point in this interview is that I understand the Americans who say, "Why can't Europe just take care of themselves? We've got our own problems, these are advanced industrialized countries, why can't they just develop their own defense system and defend themselves?"

There's an understandable logic to those arguments, and it's why Donald Trump keeps using them, because a lot of Americans hear them and say, "Yes, that's a good point." I get it, but apart from the arguments in favor of US self-interest, and I think there are a lot of those arguments, I get into some of them in the piece, beyond that, the transatlantic relationship, the relationship between Europe and the US since the World War II, for the past 75 years, has been rooted in these shared democratic values. There was this idea that we collectively believed in Western democracy. We believed in liberal values.

This relationship is built to protect those things. It has worked. I'm not going to say NATO is perfect. There are all kinds of problems with NATO and like any organization, there's bureaucracy and inefficiencies and all of that. More or less, that alliance has worked. It has preserved peace in Europe, it has allowed Western democracies to flourish, and it has allowed millions and millions of people to live meaningful, productive, happy lives, and free lives because their countries have been kept free.

I think when you hear the emotion and the voice of those callers, I would hear that same emotion in Poland especially, because that is a country that the last century has seen them occupied by Nazis, occupied by the Soviets. Their national anthem is called Poland Is Not Lost Yet. That is a country that has seen a lot in the past century and that's why they're bracing for the worst now because they know from their own history how bad things can get.

Brian Lehrer: Not just an intellectual exercise to some of our callers today to be sure. In our last couple of minutes here, and I said we were going to talk about this, let's not sugar coat a part of this that you acknowledge in your peace. Trump accomplished at least two things that other US presidents who weren't as tough on Europe could not, getting more European countries to live up to their treaty obligations to spend 2% of their GDP on defense so the US doesn't take on a disproportionate financial share of that common defense burden, and getting Germany to rethink a big pipeline making it more dependent on Russia for energy.

If you think about it, both of those things, pressuring Europe to spend more on defense and pressuring Germany, even though I think it was just to make Merkel look bad in relation to him, but still pressuring Germany to become less dependent on Russian energy. Both of those things work against the interests of Russia and other American presidents from both parties couldn't get Europe to do it.

McKay Coppins: Yes, you can try to parse and analyze the motives there, but the reality is on those two positions and especially on pressuring NATO countries to spend more on defense, that was a win. It's something that a lot of European officials I spoke to grudgingly gave Trump credit for. In fact, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General, told me that Trump wasn't only right about that, he was effective. He said European allies have not spent enough for many years. When Trump took office, only three allies plus the US were spending at least 2% of their GDP on defense, which was the standard NATO collectively agreed to in 2014.

This year that number is expected to rise to at least 18, probably more. That's in large part because Donald Trump really pressured these countries in a way that past presidents haven't. Barack Obama and Joe Biden and George W. Bush have all made the same points. They've all called on European countries to spend more. Trump actually got it done, but there is a but here, [chuckling] and the but is that there was a cost to Trump's approach. That cost is that by bullying our European allies into compliance on this issue, he lost their trust. A lot of these European countries are spending more not because of Donald Trump's miraculous persuasive powers, but because they realize that America might not be a reliable ally in the future, especially if Trump comes back.

Brian Lehrer: From the view of Trump that says he'll say anything to win the next day's news cycle and then his actions bear no relation to what he says on a given day. None of that means the United States is going to spend less on defense just because the European countries are spending more. He tries to make it sound that way, but one of the differences that Trump always touts between him and any of the democratic presidents he contrasts himself with is that he's for a big military buildup in this country more than the Dems. You can scratch your head at that whole mix of positions and go, what? In a way none of it makes sense, but it certainly doesn't mean that we're spending less on defense because of the way he's dissing Europe.

McKay Coppins: No, Trump in fact has made a political issue out of knocking Obama for not spending enough on defense. I think the difference is and to accurately state the Trump era Republican position, he wants to orient American defense spending around a great powers conflict between China and the US. Not that he is calling for war, but he believes that that's the next frontier and that's what the US should be spending their defense money on, not on Europe.

Brian Lehrer: McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, where his latest article is What Europe Fears. Actually we have an article since then, but from just a few days ago, the very prolific Mackay Coppins wrote What Europe fears. American Allies in Europe see a second Trump term as all but inevitable. The anxiety is massive. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

McKay Coppins: Thank you Brian.

 

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