Not many people in Britain hope for a Trump victory in the US Presidential elections next week – except perhaps some UKIP supporters and some hard-line eurosceptics buoyed up by Donald Trump’s welcome for the outcome of the EU referendum in June and Nigel Farage’s appearance on one of his election platforms. Even they should be careful what they wish for.
Have no doubt the consequences would likely be destabilising and dangerous both to NATO, on which following the referendum result we depend more than ever, and to the EU we are planning to leave. What Trump has already said about NATO, creating doubts about his administration’s willingness to sustain that crucial deterrent capability for the alliance – taken together with hints of a cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin, no friend of NATO – mean that there will be serious strains within the alliance from the outset. That’s even before Trump starts the process of putting flesh on the bones of his so far non-existent foreign policy. Keeping everyone guessing, Trump’s favourite tactic, is no sensible recipe for handling nuclear deterrence. The risk is that Putin, relying on Trump’ s complicity, will push his luck too far in eastern Europe, precipitating a major crisis.
The risks from a Trump presidency in the Far East are just as worrying. The seeming insouciance with which he spoke about the possible acquisition by South Korea and Japan of nuclear weapons is hardly reassuring. That would sound the death knell of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) re,gime, already severely strained by North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons capability. The NPT regime is a cornerstone of our own security policy, so the damaging consequences of its breakdown would be felt far beyond north-east Asia.
And then there is Trump’s aggressively protectionist attitude which could well trigger a trade war with China and which would lead to a bonfire of all those projects for freer and fairer world trade on which our own government is planning to base its exit from the EU. The idea that Trump, with his protectionist reflexes, would negotiate generous bilateral agreement with the UK is surely pretty fanciful.
Hardly, you might think, the best moment for Britain and the EU to be embarking on a possibly bad-tempered and adversarial negotiation over Brexit. The European members of NATO will need all the mutual solidarity they can summon up if they are faced with a Trump presidency. It may not be that easy to find in which case we will all suffer the consequences.
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Edited by Hugo Dixon
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