They're on the other side

Trump's Russia policy isn't about burden sharing

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Back in March of 2022, I wrote a piece titled “Europe Needs To Take Primary Responsibility for Its Own Defense.”

I believed then, as I believe now, that Russia is clearly the villain in the Ukraine war, and that Putin is driven more by narratives of Russian nationalism than sober-minded assessments of Russian national interest.

My rooting interest is and was in Ukrainian victory and Russian retreat. But I remember Obama-era disputes about Ukraine policy, back when Democrats were doves and Republicans were hawks, and I always sympathized with Obama’s reluctance to go all-in on assisting Ukraine. America’s European allies are much stronger economically and militarily than Russia, while our Asian allies are much weaker economically and militarily than China. Obama wanted to execute a “pivot to Asia,” and that required handing off some responsibilities to Europe.

In the emergency circumstances of 2022, that didn’t mean refusing to help Ukraine. But I thought that we should have articulated a clearer plan for large amounts of short-term aid that would taper, encouraging Europe to ramp up their own support for Ukraine. The Biden administration, it seemed to me, was always a little bit too proud to be playing an essential role in Ukraine. It bolstered a sense of the United States as “the indispensable nation,” while in practice perpetuating European underperformance as a strategic ally.

Donald Trump does not like to communicate his policy ideas in a clear and consistent manner. In The Art of the Deal, he writes that this illegibility is a deliberate strategy, one he believes keeps opponents off balance.

On Ukraine, in theory, this deliberate ambiguity leaves open the possibility that Trump’s views on Russia are aligned with mine: He’s willing to deliver tough love where Biden wasn’t, forcing European countries to engage in less NATO-induced free riding and make more of a concrete contribution to the defense of the west.

Some continue to hold to that line, even in the wake of the disastrous Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy — a meeting that to my eyes was clearly a set-up. Immediately following the blow up, a bunch of domestic-focused American conservatives on my timeline began talking about US versus European defense spending and Americans subsidizing the European welfare state. But as Tanner Greer writes, it’s extremely telling that the Trump/Musk/Vance power trio actually running American foreign policy rarely, if ever, articulates this viewpoint. They characterize Zelenskyy as a bad actor, not as a sympathetic one who they are simply unwilling to grant as many favors as he would like.

When faced with Franco-British efforts to put something together to support Ukraine, the Trump administration didn’t establish a timeline for them to implement this. They announced an immediate cessation of US military assistance, and Vance went on television to belittle European efforts. It’s the difference between me refusing to shovel my neighbor’s sidewalk because, even though I’m annoyed by the snow, I think it’s his responsibility, and me refusing to lend him a shovel because I’m an asshole.

But what I think has been even more telling and significant in this regard is that both Musk and Vance went out of their way to try to intervene in the recent German election on behalf of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD), a pro-Russian political party that opposed German re-armament.

The Trumpiest port in a storm

AfD is the most MAGA-coded party in the German political landscape.

They’ve gained support over the years for positions like their hard line against generous fiscal treatment of southern European countries during the debt crisis, skepticism of Covid restrictions, and other nationalistic and Trumpy stands. Most of all, they have benefitted from anti-immigration politics.

This is a party that, among other things, has ancestral roots in pro-Nazi politics. But when I met AfD voters during the 2017 German federal election campaign — a race in which they more than doubled their support — they were not Nazis. The people I spoke to at that time were older folks who’d voted for the traditional center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the past, and they were angry about Angela Merkel opening the doors to large numbers of refugees from Syria.

As context, it’s important to understand that traditional German immigration policy was extremely restrictive — much more restrictive than American policy.

The longstanding policy approach was that the children of legal immigrants from Turkey (and elsewhere, but mostly Turkey) who were born and raised on German soil were not German citizens by right and faced substantial barriers to naturalization. That stance is way to the right of any of Donald Trump’s proposals. Gerhard Schröder won election in 1998 with a coalition government between his Social Democrats and the Green Party. This was, essentially, the most left-wing government in German history. They came into office promising to make it much easier for these lifelong residents of Germany to secure citizenship, but ultimately had to water down their commitments to get the policy changed.

By the time Angela Merkel took office, the German right was no longer promising to reverse these citizenship changes. But the idea of a CDU-led government liberalizing immigration policy was shocking to people who had voted for Helmut Kohl and other pre-Merkel center-right politicians. Merkel’s habit of occasionally linking her more welcoming refugee policy to a sense of German historical guilt had the unfortunate side effect of legitimizing the anti-anti-Nazi stand of AfD, suggesting that only by challenging the historical guilt narrative could German voters get policies that were tough on crime and irregular immigration.

My AfD acquaintances aside, the party’s two biggest voting bases are in the economically depressed regions of the former East Germany and among young men. So sociologically, ideologically, and conceptually, it’s very much a political party that mirrors the MAGA movement, and the transatlantic resonance is understandable.

But one of the most important parallels between AfD and MAGA is that AfD received support from Russian propaganda media and opposed support for Ukraine.

Boosting AfD makes burden-sharing harder

The upshot of this is that even though AfD is the most MAGA-like force in German politics, them winning votes make it harder rather than easier to secure the nominal policy objective of getting Europe to contribute more to western defense.

Some of this just comes down to Russia’s direct influence over AfD. But some of it is driven by asymmetrical aspects of US versus European politics.