Believe it or not, we are living through a rare moment of harmony and co-operation among the world’s major democracies. As the latest summits of the G7 and NATO have shown, rarely have so many developed countries put aside their differences to jointly face the world’s most difficult challenges.
But this is far from an optimistic moment, and the consensus feels forced and panicked.
These summer months are, in the eyes of many Western governments, the calm before the storm, or storms in plural: one blowing from Washington, one from within Europe. In the face of the potential breakdown of the international order, governments of democratic countries have tried to organize – to use a term that re-emerged in the French parliamentary election last week – a united front.
That front was visible at last month’s G7 summit in Apulia, Italy, which showed an unusually strong sense of shared purpose and commitment. John Kirton, who has analyzed 37 years of these summits as head of the Toronto-based G7 Research Group, concluded in his annual analysis that the countries together had achieved a “very strong performance” in providing support to Ukraine, and “substantial performance” on urgent issues including climate change and food security. The group found that the seven countries achieved 81 per cent of their ambitious goals.
This week’s NATO summit in Washington appears to have been equally unified and almost as successful. The 42 countries in the collective-defence alliance agreed to a surprising number of major investments and transformations, which is especially amazing because NATO decisions must be made unanimously, and one of those 42 NATO governments, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, is actively opposed to much of the Western democratic agenda.
Nevertheless, the members negotiated a consensus on an approximately $60-billion-a-year military-aid program for Ukraine; to meet, eventually, the persistent U.S. demand that member states spend a larger share of their national economies on their own defence; and, perhaps most significantly, on an ambitious plan to shift support and training for Ukraine from the United States to 200 officers in a Europe-based NATO command.
That last initiative, however, gives a glimpse as to why this moment of unity feels temporary and decidedly less than optimistic. It is premised on a widely held belief among democratic leaders that the United States is more likely than not to fall for a second time to right-wing authoritarian candidate Donald Trump in November’s election. Further, there’s a widespread worry that the political turmoil within major European countries will soon make some of them unable to participate fully or reach a workable consensus on such large-scale projects.
This has created a widespread view, in Ottawa and in European capitals, that now is the last possible moment to build a liberal-democratic coalition, a safety-net rump against a potential coming collapse.
“The U.S. is in a constitutional crisis, and I think also at the cusp of a huge generational and demographic transition,” says Constanze Stelzenmüller, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “That and the darkening global strategic landscape ought to stiffen the backbone of all Europeans – and, speaking as a friend, of Canadians as well. We must, urgently, shift the burden of our own defence to Europe.”
Trump-proofing the alliance
I first heard the idea in the autumn of 2021, during off-record briefings with officials in Germany and France. I was surprised at the time to hear a near-certainty from people in those administrations that Joe Biden’s comparatively co-operative internationalism was a temporary interregnum, and that they saw a second and even angrier Trump term, or something like it, as being inevitable.
That gloomy view contributed strongly, I believe, to key decisions. It led to a relatively conciliatory European stance toward China, one that angered Washington but was based on the assumption that the United States would not continue to be a reliable partner and alternative superpowers were worth cultivating. It provoked French President Emmanuel Macron’s assertive championing of a European military force separate from NATO and the United States – something almost every French president since the 1960s has endorsed in some way, but not with this immediacy. And it contributed to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s 2022 announcement of a sharp break from German reliance on Russia, and the drastic upsizing of its military. (Germany reached the Washington-friendly target of spending 2 per cent of its economy on defence in February; that spending would also make Germany less dependent on the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed within its borders.)
This year, the push to Trump-wall the democratic world has become more urgent, in part because Mr. Biden’s apparently mounting intellectual-capacity crisis has made a Trump victory seem more likely even to previous doubters.
The German conservative newspaper Die Welt and its sibling website Politico recently sent a team of reporters to interview more than 50 government officials in NATO countries to find out how they’re “laying the groundwork to manage Trump’s political resurrection.” Much of what they found was attempts at appeasement: relationship-building meetings with far-right figures in the U.S. by Canadian federal cabinet minister François-Philippe Champagne and his “Team Canada” Trump-preparation team; similar meetings by left-leaning foreign ministers David Lammy of Britain and Annalena Baerbock of Germany.
But aside from official statements, politicians in those countries do not really believe they can protect themselves from Mr. Trump’s vengeful extremism by winning his heart. During his 2017-21 term, the Republican was as brutal and economically damaging to conservative leaders such as Britain’s Theresa May and Germany’s Angela Merkel as he was to liberals such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Only outright authoritarians such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared immune.
Mr. Trump did not simply shun international bodies; he withdrew the United States outright from several important ones, including the Paris climate agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and several United Nations organs. Many believe the G7 and especially NATO could be outright targets if he takes office again (he has suggested in recent speeches that he believes NATO should not exist).
So those governments’ plans involve building pre-emptive defences against a world where the G7 has only six participating members and NATO is under attack from its largest member. The Welt team found that South Korea is pressing for early renewal of the treaty that pays for the 28,000 U.S. troops stationed there, which is due to expire in 2025. Unfortunately, Canadian and Mexican officials do not appear able to win a similar early renegotiation of the hard-fought three-country free-trade deal that replaced NAFTA after Mr. Trump trashed it – a deal that’s set to expire in 2026.
The threat within
When Mr. Trump threw the international system into dysfunctional chaos during his first term of office, one solution – gradually arrived at by Canada and Europe – was to find ways to work around the missing superpower. The G7 effectively became a G6. NATO, free from Afghanistan after 2014 and not yet providing much help to Ukraine, had little to do. Other international bodies found workarounds.
This time it’s a tougher struggle, because a number of those democracies are themselves teetering on the edge of chaos.
Warnings about European victories this year by far-right parties backed by Mr. Putin and opposed to much of the Western democratic agenda proved exaggerated: The European Parliament remains strongly dominated by the moderate-right and social-democratic parties that have led it for decades. And French voters managed to fend off a potential election win by Marine Le Pen’s extreme-right National Rally (RN) through strategic voting for a united front of left and centre-right parties, driving the RN to third place and dimming Ms. Le Pen’s presidential prospects.
The deeper worry is that these inward struggles to fend off domestic Putin-backed extremism will render their leaders and governing parties unable to take on a meaningful international role. That is certainly true of Mr. Scholz, whose efforts to prevent an AfD majority in key eastern German states this fall have all but erased him from world affairs. Mr. Macron, previously a forceful and controversial presence, may similarly be gelded by his lame-duck status and lack of a consensus government.
“The EU has become newly important in organizing resilience and defence procurement, but new hard-right groupings in the European Parliament will try to challenge and constrain the EU Commission’s leadership; they will do the same across European nations,” says Dr. Stelzenmüller, at Brookings. “Given likely political gridlock in France and electoral anxieties in Germany, it is time for other European nations to stop waiting for signals from Paris and Berlin, and come up with their own visions for future European security – hopefully with a constructive and pragmatic co-operation with London.”
Although Canada is sure to be participating in many of these rump-democracy initiatives (more so in the political and economic sphere than in defence, owing to Ottawa’s comparatively insignificant military spending), they are unlikely to offer much protection to Canada in the event of a vengeful, isolationist Trump resurrection. Canada’s economy is far too dependent on the United States for a muscular G6 or a firewalled NATO to offer it much succour.
Some warn that “Trump-proofing” endeavours have no chance of succeeding, at least in the military sphere. Steve Saideman, a defence analyst and professor at Ottawa’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, has argued that NATO (and other alliances such as NORAD) will not survive a second Trump presidency.
“NATO cannot Trump-proof itself because the United States is a dominating, central component of the alliance, built on a credible promise that an attack upon one is an attack upon all – and Trump could not make that promise to save his life,” Dr. Saideman told me. “He’s been very loud about not being willing to make that promise, and that’s before you even consider how much he’s compromised by the Russians.”
Although Europe now contributes more to Ukraine (in dollar value) than the United States does, many of those contributions are based on forms of U.S. co-ordination and organization that Europe is years away from being able to replace, Dr. Saideman notes.
The current state of affairs is similar, in a way, to the one that led Canada to become a member of the G7 in the first place, despite having a much smaller economy than the other states. At the time, in the mid-1970s, there were fears, especially in Washington, that Italy and even France could elect fascist or communist governments that turned their back on the democratic order; a number of NATO members, including Greece and Turkey, had fallen out of the democratic fold. Canada, meanwhile, had comparatively stable leadership. The G7 was created with a sense of urgency, and of potential future collapse, that seems familiar today.
That time, the convener was the United States, then seen as a rare pole of democratic stability. This summer, it is democratic governments that are scrambling to protect themselves from the United States – and sometimes from themselves.