January 17, 2017

the wEnter Trump

By Julianne Smith

I’ll admit it. I did not expect to be writing a piece with this title. Like so many on both sides of the Atlantic, I did not expect Donald Trump to win on November 8. But he did. So now committed Atlanticists need to get to work and start sketching out a common transatlantic agenda for the Trump administration. That will not be easy, especially since the term “transatlantic agenda for Trump” sometimes feels like an oxymoron. Can there be a transatlantic agenda for a US president who, during the election campaign, called into question the utility of the NATO alliance, expressed an admiration for President Vladimir Putin’s leadership style, promised to get rid of trade deals like TPP and TTIP, and said he would dismantle the Iran nuclear deal – one of the shining achievements of the transatlantic partners in recent years? Yes, but it probably will not resemble the one we would have pursued had the election gone the other way.

Had Hillary Clinton won, we would have started with the big substantive questions facing the transatlantic partners. What to do with Russia? Do we add more sanctions? Do we replace the Minsk Protocol with something else? How might we collectively save the European project? How do we make the next NATO Summit a roaring success? What do we do with TTIP during 2017 when a number of European countries will be having their own elections? What about Turkey, an increasingly important strategic ally but one that is moving away from the core principles and values the transatlantic partners hold dear?

Read the full article at Berlin Policy Journal.

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