"Make America Hated Again:" 9 out of 10 Europeans don't see U.S. as an ally.

Donald Trump's relentless threats against traditional partners has left America close to friendless.

Photo: Robin Utrechtvia Shutterstock

I was wrong to say Donald Trump is a “danger” to America’s powerful NATO alliance. New data shows how he’s already destroyed it, without tearing up the treaty or even firing a shot.

The proof arrived this week with some truly terrible numbers. A new survey from the European Council on Foreign Relations finds that just 11 percent of Europeans across fifteen countries now regard the United States as an ally. That’s a record low. And the gut punch comes just days before Trump is slated to fly to France for a G7 meeting, which will be followed in a few weeks by a NATO meeting in Turkey.

Trump will go into those meetings as the most diminished American president in the history of the transatlantic alliance.

To put this into perspective, the number of Europeans who view America as an ally has plummeted 50 percent since Trump took office. The collapse, in other words, hasn’t been gradual. It’s accelerated, halving the world’s most consequential friendship in barely a year and a half. An optimist might say that such numbers are just the “mood” of a passing moment. That would be a mistake.

Alliances aren’t built on paper. Like a marriage, that’s just where they get documented. America’s most important alliances are built around shared belief, i.e. a conviction that when the worst comes, your friends will come for you. The genius of the postwar order that American diplomats Dean Acheson and George Marshall built was that it made that belief credible enough to deter the Soviet Union for forty years without a shot fired across the Fulda Gap.

Deterrence lived in the minds of our enemies. And it’s in the mind that Trump has done his damage.

The same poll found that majorities in every country surveyed now doubt America would actually defend them if they were attacked. That’s a stake in the heart of the NATO alliance. The core promise of Article 5 (that an attack on one is an attack on all, which is what our friends invoked when they ran to our defense after 9/11) is no longer believed by the very people it was written to protect. You can’t deter an adversary with a “guarantee” your allies now think is hollow.

Even if Trump doesn’t care about this or is too inept to understand these numbers, Vladimir Putin is paying close attention.

So Europeans are doing what frightened nations have always done. They’re arming themselves in the belief that our friendship is over. Support for higher defense spending is climbing, and nearly half of Europeans now back collective EU borrowing to fund their own protection. But they’re not buying American anymore. They’re shifting to European companies and European independence. I can’t overstate what this means for the long run. Our allies used to buy the same weapons as us, from us, because they anticipated fighting alongside us. Now they’re not. Because they don’t.

There’s one fragile point of light in the figures. In every country except Bulgaria, majorities of Europeans believe relations will improve the moment Trump leaves office. Europe hates what this president has made of America, and it’s counting the days until he’s gone, like the rest of us are.

But at that point, the damage to our transatlantic alliance may have already been done. If the general public doesn’t believe in the promise of NATO, then NATO itself is an empty promise. That doesn’t mean the alliance is gone for good. It just means that the next American president who cares about the fate of democracy will be forced to spend time building a bridge back across the Atlantic that shouldn’t have needed to be built.

Trump told us he’d put America first. Instead he’s taught the free world to live without us. I hope he gets an earful in Europe.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
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THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. TRUMP’S $70 BILLION DEPORTATION MACHINE JUST GOT FUNDED. The House narrowly passed a $70 billion reconciliation package funding ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term on a 214-212 vote that briefly deadlocked before leadership dragged one reluctant Republican across the line. Every Democrat voted no. The bill also carries the rotting corpse of Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization” fund (the slush fund he wanted to use to compensate his pardoned Jan. 6 allies), which Republicans declined to formally strike down — and which some Senators say will remain a political albatross. The deportation machine is now fully funded. The question is what it does next.

2. TRUMP’S SPY POWER GAMBLE IS BLOWING UP IN HIS FACE. Section 702 of FISA, which is the government’s warrantless surveillance program and one of America’s most critical intelligence tools, is on the verge of expiring. And Trump is the one who lit the fuse. By appointing Bill Pulte, a man with zero intelligence credentials and a track record of weaponizing databases against political enemies, as acting Director of National Intelligence, Trump has triggered a rare bipartisan revolt. Democrats are threatening to let the program go dark entirely rather than hand Pulte access to it. Even Republicans — including Senate Majority Leader Thune — are begging Trump to back down. And of course, Trump is rolling these dice amid a war with Iran, where a critical intelligence tool might be useful. Trump is now facing a choice between his ego and national security. If history truly does repeat itself, we already know which one wins.

3. ACT OF DEFIANCE — HOLLYWOOD HEAVYWEIGHTS ARE READY TO FIGHT. When Donald Trump returned to office, some of the loudest voices went quiet out of fear. The silence from Hollywood was deafening. But now thousands of celebrities are fighting back. Led by Jane Fonda’s “Committee for the First Amendment,” influencers are organizing for a moment they say is far worse than McCarthyism. “What’s happening now in this country is much more grave, much more serious than what was happening back in the late ’40s and early ’50s,” Fonda said in an interview with The Washington Post. On Sunday, the day of Trump’s birthday and UFC Fight, the Committee will host a protest celebration in New York called Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment.

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