Trump has long complained about the United States' outsized role in NATO and described President Biden's support for Ukraine's struggle to resist the Russian invasion as a liability that is costly to American taxpayers. These sentiments have captured a segment of the Republican Party, which has blocked attempts by the Biden administration to allocate about $61 billion in new funding to Ukraine.
To European observers, Trump's declared hostility is just a line in the sand. “Everyone should watch this video from Trump and then understand that Europe may soon have no choice but to defend itself,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior German lawmaker and former head of the German parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on his Facebook page. “We have to manage this because anything else would be giving up and abandoning ourselves!”
In the eyes of some European critics, Trump poses an existential threat to the Western alliance and its political spirit. “The current presidential campaign only confirms that he has not changed his reckless attitude towards the allies,” Markku Mikkelson, head of the Estonian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, told my colleagues. “Unfortunately, it is a very convenient tool for Putin’s Russia, which is waging war against the West.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement: “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the United States, and exposes American and European soldiers to increased danger.”
During his term, Biden has revitalized the transatlantic alliance, Reassure European counterparts of US commitments to their security, while coordinating a strong collective effort to support Kiev. European diplomats in Washington can hardly hide their confidence in the Biden administration, and their fears about what might happen if Trump defeats him in November.
But on the other major battle front in the global conversation, Biden has alarmed countless political elites with his apparent complicity in Israel's relentless war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli campaign, which has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians, many of them children, took another deadly turn on Monday with the expansion of operations in Rafah, a southern city along the Strip's border with Egypt that now hosts more than 1 million refugees from besieged Gaza. .
Biden is reportedly frustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line approach to the conflict. But she has resisted domestic pressure from her Democratic aides and allies to do more to curb the Israeli campaign — which followed the armed Hamas movement's invasion of southern Israel on October 7 — let alone impose conditions on future military aid to the Jewish state.
“Biden, who aides say has a deep connection to the Jewish state, tends to view the prime minister and the State of Israel as one and the same, according to several people familiar with his thinking, and has struggled with the idea of criticizing him. My colleagues reported that the current Prime Minister, especially in wartime.
Europe's top diplomat even offered a veiled rebuke of Biden's confused stance. “How many times have you heard the most prominent leaders and foreign ministers around the world say that too many people are being killed?” Josep Borrell, the European Union's foreign minister, told reporters on Monday, referring to Biden's recent comments that Israel's behavior in the war was “exaggerated.”
“If the international community believes that this is a massacre, and that too many people are being killed, then perhaps we should think about providing weapons,” Borrell added.
But Biden and many of his European counterparts have largely ignored calls by protesters and some lawmakers in their countries to impose a ceasefire or take measures to thwart the latest Israeli attack in Rafah. An injunction issued by the International Court of Justice, the highest court in the United Nations, requiring Israel to take steps to better protect the lives of civilians in Gaza, was also not heeded. Some UN officials already believe that Israel is violating these demands.
According to a UN panel, one in 100 people were killed in Gaza during the first 100 days of the war, a higher rate than in any other armed conflict in the 21st century. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia noted that “the ongoing war stands out as unprecedented in terms of the scale of death, destruction and suffering, with repercussions that will reverberate for generations to come.”
The outcome of the conflict has reached Public opinion shifted Against Israel in most parts of the world. It also sparked intense anger towards Western parties that help Israel, led by the United States, because of its selective approach to the “rules-based international order.” Biden has embedded this concept at the heart of the reasons why he claims the United States should defend Ukraine, arguing that Putin cannot be allowed to show that force is right.
For observers outside the West, especially in the Middle East and Arab world, the double standards have become more acute as the death toll of Palestinian civilians rises.
“The Arab and Islamic world has lost confidence in perceived Western norms: international law and institutions, human rights, and democratic values,” Mohamed ElBaradei, a former Egyptian diplomat and former head of the United Nations Atomic Agency, wrote in an article last month. From their point of view, the West itself shows that brute force trumps everything else.”
“As a less secure world becomes an acceptable price for loyalty to allies, the West’s claim to power as the political and military guardian of law and order looks increasingly weak,” Guardian columnist Nasreen Malik wrote.
The stakes are arguably as great, perhaps higher, than those that Europe is weighing when it comes to its collective security in the future. Renad Mansour of the Chatham House think tank in Britain suggested that if “the international rules-based order fails publicly again, by demonstrating its inability to agree on an end to the unprecedented bloodshed in Gaza, it will further undermine the world’s confidence in the institutions that “You support it.” It was built to serve it, and may contribute to its complete collapse. Western leaders must think carefully about this historical moment and what might come next.
