Europe's Breakup With America

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. So the way the NATO Summit ended in Turkey yesterday between President Trump and European leaders, maybe you could hear it one of two ways, as a kind of new love affair, or maybe the beginning of an amicable divorce. President Trump at a closing news conference made it sound like after all the harsh things he's had to say about the US's European allies, they're weak, NATO is obsolete, they're ripping off the United States by not funding their own military is enough, by climate policy, they're cowards or disloyal for not joining the war with Iran. You've heard that one recently. Despite all that, at the end of this week's summit, Trump said love was in the air, lots of love, much of it directed toward him.

**Donald Trump** (0:53)
They like the job I'm doing. They said, we love, sir, we love you. These are grown people saying that, isn't that nice? Maybe, I don't know, maybe they're trying to get to me.
And the way they did, because there was tremendous unity in that room.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:09)
Trump before leaving Turkey yesterday, and here's Mark Ruda, if you think Trump is off on his own private island with that. NATO Secretary General Mark Ruda yesterday basically saying, hey, Mr. Trump, you were right about us ripping you off.
Thank you for that.

**Mark Ruta** (1:28)
President Trump has been able to finally get done, but since Eisenhower, American Presidents tried to do, which was to equalize defense spending between Europe and the United States, it is now happening.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:41)
We'll hear another clip of the NATO Secretary General in the context of the Iran War starting up again. But is less European dependence on the US military a new kind of teamwork or a version of breaking up? And what about Europe's ambivalent relationship at best with the Iran War? With me now the Wall Street Journal reporting team of Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Their latest article published before yesterday's Verbal Love Fest was called There Is No Going Back, The Inside Story of Europe's Rupture with America. Now, Drew Hinshaw is a senior reporter with the journal who has reported for more than 50 countries for the paper since 2010
Among many other things, the Society of Publishers in Asia gave Drew and his colleagues its Public Service Journalism Award for their reporting on the origins of COVID-19.
And he's the co-author of Bring Back Our Girls, An Account of the Rescue Effort to Free 276 Teenage School Girls Who Had Been Kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Joe Parkinson, based in Europe, leads the journal's World Enterprise Team. He was previously the journal's Africa Bureau Chief and Turkey Bureau Chief. And he's co-author with Drew of Bring Back Our Girls. Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, welcome to WNYC.

**Drew Hinshaw** (2:56)
Thank you for having us, Brian.

**Joe Parkinson** (2:57)
Thanks for having us.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:58)
So you two can decide since you wrote everything together, who answers what questions here. But your article begins with an emergency meeting of European leaders back in January with a single theme for discussion, how to manage a breakup with America. Why was that meeting called at that time?

**Drew Hinshaw** (3:17)
That meeting was extraordinary. There has been very few meetings in the history of the European Union ever called like that. The leaders, nearly 30 heads of government, were given barely 48 hours to make their way to Brussels. They had to drop their phones off. They couldn't bring their phones into the meeting, no aids. It was heads of government and heads of state only. And the reason they were meeting is because just days earlier, Trump had been using, threatening, proposing, talking about using military force to capture Greenland. This was a breaking point for the world's most powerful military alliance. For a long time, there's been frustrations on the US that Europe has been more on defense, frustrations in Europe that the US is unpredictable, unreliable. One minute you've got Joe Biden or Barack Obama in office, the next minute you've got Donald Trump.
That was manageable. What's not manageable is when your strongest ally wants to seize your territory and those leaders got together to discuss what Europe is going to do about it.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:15)
The quote in your headline, there is no going back.
There were first words of the headline. That's a quote from French President Emmanuel Macron at that meeting. What was the context for that line?

**Joe Parkinson** (4:28)
Well, President Macron was just one of the President's Prime Minister's Heads of State, who were standing there to really be able to speak frankly about what was going on. Now, the French have for a long time, been a bit ahead of the curve on this one. They've been perhaps the European country that has most vocally said that Europe particularly needs to take more responsibility for its own defense, and they have a word for this strategic autonomy. So this was both, I think, a call to both clarify the crisis from Macron, but it was also a bit of an I told you so moment, because the French believed that they had warned for some years that there was too much dependence on the US as the principal security guarantor. And Macron's words, that there is no going back, were followed by other words that were arguably even more dramatic. I mean, the Belgian Prime Minister said, if this continues, we won't allow ourselves to be a miserable slave of the United States.