This year at the annual World Economic Forum’s gathering in Davos, one man dominated the conversations of some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful people: Donald Trump. The summit took place just a few days after his inauguration, but what the president’s return to power will mean for the world has had the ruling elite speculating for at least the past year.
While Trump’s approach to international politics is likely to affect every part of the world, many capitalists are especially concerned over what it could mean for Europe. The continent has been a target of Trump’s ire both in his last term as president and in many of his public comments about trade and military policy leading up to his return to the presidency. Trump’s speech at Davos (delivered virtually) was a first signal of what may be in store for the U.S.-Europe relationship.
A Return to Unilateralism
Trump barely talked about international politics in his speech, instead focusing on what he sees as the beginning of “the golden age of America.” From boasting about his election victory and slew of executive orders to rambling about trans people and immigrants, the speech easily could’ve passed as one meant for a solely American crowd, rather than the oil tycoons and bankers that filled the audience. But in saying so little about the rest of the world, Trump said a lot. Unilateralism is the order of the day.
Trump and his advisors describe their unilateral policy as “peace through strength.” The idea is that coalitions of partners that the United States has historically leaned on to shape the world now act as a hindrance to U.S. actions. Trump and the Far Right see it as much more effective to use U.S. economic and military power to go it alone in pursuit of foreign policy priorities, even if this risks tension with allies. In Trump’s first term, this played out in his questioning or outright withdrawal from the institutions that defined U.S. hegemony in the post WWII period, such as NATO, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the World Health Organization.
The support for a “peace through strength” foreign policy has grown among sectors of capital after Biden’s failed attempt to return to the traditional, multilateral approach to U.S. leadership. After all, Biden left office with the country bogged down in major military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, with no clear way out.
Trump’s unilateralism, however, should not be taken as a desire to abandon engagement with Europe. Rather, he will deal with European countries as individual nations, negotiating trade and military policies on U.S. terms. As the president put it during a Q&A exchange following his speech, “I’m trying to be constructive. I love Europe. I love a lot of the countries in Europe. But the process [of dealing with the EU] is very cumbersome.”
Using an example of his attempt as a developer to make a deal with a business in Ireland, Trump called into question the many trade regulations that the EU upholds. And it is not just Trump questioning these regulations — his anti-EU monologue was prompted by a pointed question from Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman, who said, “a lot of the European businesspeople have expressed enormous frustration with the regulatory regime in the EU.”
As the rise of far-right movements throughout Europe shows, there is growing demand from some sectors of European capital for their countries to prioritize national interests and eschew the EU and other multilateral institutions. Trump’s presidency will likely empower this trend. Hungarian president, Viktor Orban — who has been at the forefront of the continent’s authoritarian, right-wing movements — was among the first world leaders to congratulate Trump on his victory, calling it “a much needed victory for the world.” Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, another important leader of the Far Right in Europe, attended Trump’s inauguration, along with an array of right-wing politicians from countries across Europe.
Another pillar of Trump’s vision for an America-first approach to trade is his pitch for businesses to set up shop in the United States, an appeal he made candidly:
My message to any business in the world is simple. Come make your products in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on earth. But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff — differing amounts, but a tariff — which will direct hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars into our Treasury to strengthen our economy and pay down debt.
As I wrote last year, Trump is influenced by a sector of the Right that seeks to rebuild U.S. power by gutting worker protections, waging war on unions, and allowing big businesses to hyper-exploit American workers the way that they have reaped enormous profits from the hyper-exploitation of Chinese workers. This can be seen in Trump’s pitch to foreign business, and in his relationship with the capitalist tech bros, most notably Elon Musk, but also powerful figures newly cozying up to him including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. This sector of capital has used innovations in technology as a way to develop new forms of hyper-exploitation of workers such as the precarious logistics workers that make up Amazon or the Tesla workers who are subject to fervent union-busting. Trump is betting on this sector to put the United States back at the forefront of capitalist growth through ever-more-exploitative conditions for U.S. workers under the thumb of American and international businesses alike. No doubt European capitalists frustrated with EU regulations are salivating over his plans.
Strong-Arming Russia and NATO
Of equal importance to all who have been speculating about Trump’s foreign policy is his approach to European security which has been in disarray since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There has been fear that Trump will outright abandon the Ukrainian government and NATO. Some liberal pundits in the United States still view Trump as a friend, or even an agent, of Putin.
Conspiracy theories about Trump’s relationship to Russia aside, it was fair to assume that Trump’s America First policy could lead him to pursue a “peace deal” with Russia that forces Ukraine to make some major territorial concessions. After all, Trump has consistently accused NATO countries of freeloading off the United States and even said publicly that he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO countries that don’t pay for the U.S. to defend them. Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has even drafted a plan to end the war by pressuring Putin and Zelenskyy to negotiate.
The Far Right is increasingly seeing U.S. military involvement in Europe as a distraction from other regions of geopolitical importance, most notably the Asia-Pacific and the Arctic. Additionally, Trump’s plans to use the U.S. military to enforce mass deportations and “seal” the U.S.-Mexico border is an extreme logistical undertaking which the U.S. Northern Command simply doesn’t have the forces to carry out.
But the Far Right’s desire to shift U.S. forces away from Europe to other regions is complicated by the fact that it’s plainly not in the interest of U.S. imperialism to allow Putin to win major geostrategic concessions from his invasion of Ukraine. Trump may seriously pursue a deal to end, or at least pause the war, but he won’t agree to any deal that gives Russia more room than the United States to dominate Eastern Europe. And currently Putin has no reason to agree to such a deal that would give the U.S. a clear advance in Eastern Europe. This reality is already leading Trump to take a more aggressive approach to the Russian president. Trump has already begun threatening Putin with sanctions if he doesn’t negotiate, and Kellogg’s draft for Russian-Ukrainian negotiates proposes that if Putin refuses to negotiate then the United States should supply Ukraine with even more military aid.
Trump doubled down on this tougher approach at his Davos speech. When asked if the world can expect an end to the war in Ukraine by next year, Trump didn’t miss a beat. “You’re gonna have to ask Russia. Ukraine is ready to negotiate.”
But if Trump is willing to take a more aggressive approach to Putin, he still sees a need to shift the U.S. focus away from Europe. Here, his approach is to demand that NATO countries supplement the U.S. presence by boosting their own military spending to 5 percent of their GDP, a demand he made directly in his Davos speech. As he has said before, and consistent with the strong-arming approach he takes to trade policy, countries that don’t meet these demands should expect to be punished with economic consequences and perhaps military consequences (though military consequences are more likely to be a denial of U.S. military support rather than an actual attack from the United States). This approach to demanding countries cave to plans for U.S. military strategy can already been seen in Trump’s talk of buying Greenland and threats to take it by force.
In fact, Europe has already been moving towards rearmament as a result of the Russian invasion. From Poland doubling its military spending to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO to Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and other major powers ramping up military spending and considering military conscription, the continent is barreling towards preparation for great power conflicts.
Crises and Class Struggle Ahead
While Trump is unlikely to abandon U.S. relations with Europe outright, the form that U.S.-Europe relations take will drastically change under Trump. The consequences of such a dramatic change in these relations will likely be far-reaching and unpredictable.
Leading thinkers have argued that absent U.S. leadership of “the old continent,” any number of crises could emerge, from China and Russia taking advantage of divides to a return to the military competition between European powers that ignited two world wars. As the geopolitical analyst Hal Brands argues in Foreign Policy, Trump’s return will transform Europe:
what is crucial to understand is that a post-American Europe would be fundamentally unlike the Europe we have come to know. The geopolitical shock absorbers provided by U.S. power and its umbrella over Europe will be gone. The destabilizing uncertainty over status and security will return. Countries will no longer feel so confident that they can ensure their survival without resorting to the behavior—the military buildups, the intense rivalries—that characterized earlier eras. Today’s Europe is the product of a historically unique, unprecedented configuration of power and influence created by the United States. Can we really be so sure that the bad old ways won’t reassert themselves once the very safeguards that have suppressed them for 75 years are withdrawn?
Missing from Brands’s analysis, however, is a very important factor that once shaped European politics and is beginning to re-emerge: class struggle.
From France to the United Kingdom, powerful European countries have been rocked in recent years by the return of the working class as a combative force at the center of world politics. Additionally, the movement for Palestine has radicalized whole sectors of students throughout Europe. This rise of class struggle comes at a time when the regimes that shaped European politics, like those in Germany and France, are imploding and unable to offer a path out of the crises facing European capital. Now, Trump is threatening to send shockwaves through European economies and demanding historic levels of rearmament which will require austerity to implement and which could further radicalize the emerging anti-imperialist youth.
In short, the future of Europe is open, and Trump is a catalyst threatening to set major international developments in motion. Workers, students, and leftists in the centers of imperialism must be prepared for these changes and use them to advance our own fights against war, economic misery, and nationalism.