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There is a good chance that Donald Trump will return to the US presidency in 2025. That would endanger European interests, but Europe is not investing in mitigating the risks, writes Ian Bond.
In less than a year, the next US president will be inaugurated. Donald Trump, who has just thumped his Republican rivals in the Iowa caucuses, seems almost certain to be the Republican candidate.
The majority of recent opinion polls show him leading Joe Biden, or the two candidates level.
Most European leaders hope that Biden will be re-elected, but as military leaders, politicians and business gurus have said for decades, “Hope is not a strategy”.
In 2016, most Europeans did not take Trump’s prospects of winning seriously enough. In 2024, they have no excuse for repeating their error.
To be fair to EU leaders, Trump himself did not expect to win in 2016. It took him time to assemble a team.
He did not come into office with a coherent programme, but with a set of instincts.
Over the intervening years, his instincts have if anything become more violent and undemocratic but as Charles Grant and I heard in Washington at the end of last year, there are now people in influential think-tanks and elsewhere working to ensure that Trump’s ideas can be turned into implementable policies.
This time, Europe might not be able to rely on Trump’s chaotic approach to governance, which meant that in his first term many policy announcements never led to action.
Sometimes, his ideas got nowhere because they were blocked by the so-called grown-ups in the room – people from outside Trump’s circle, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defence Secretary James Mattis.
Trump is unlikely to appoint such independent figures this time.
Biden has been far from perfect, from a European point of view. He has been slower than many would have liked to provide military support for Ukraine.
He is no fan of free trade. He only belatedly considered the interests of America’s allies in offering subsidies to industries involved in combating climate change, such as those manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles, to encourage them to invest in the US – which many EU leaders fear will come at the expense of investment in Europe.
But in general, Biden represents democracy at home and a belief that America must remain fully engaged in the world, including on issues such as climate change where US action or inaction can have a disproportionate impact on what happens in the rest of the world; Trump represents authoritarianism at home, coupled with extreme unilateralism in the conduct of foreign policy. Some of his most vocal supporters in Congress espouse isolationism of a kind that had been marginalised in the US political establishment since World War II.
For Europeans, there should be at least four areas of particular concern if Trump wins a second term: defence and the future of NATO; transatlantic economic relations; Trump’s approach to the rules-based international order; and US internal strains and their international impact.
In November 2023, the editor-at-large of The Washington Post, Robert Kagan, wrote “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”.
That may be too pessimistic – there is still time for Biden to turn the polls round, or the US courts t disqualify Trump – but European governments need to plan on the basis that Trump is more likely than not to win. If he does not – so much the better.
But even if Trump loses this time, the scale and nature of his electoral support in 2016 and 2020 show that a significant part of American society has turned away from democratic values and international engagement in favour of populism, protectionism and isolationism.
The Author, Ian Bond, is the Deputy Director of the Centre for European Reform
