Before getting to the world’s “disrupter in chief” and his antics at the recent horrifying Brussels NATO summit, let us have a look at the collateral damage the presidency of Donald Trump is causing to the transatlantic community that was developed during the last seventy years on both sides of the Atlantic. “U.S.-loving Germans planning life without transatlantic ties” and “Germany bids farewell to the post-war order” have been recent headlines of Handelsblatt Global.
As someone who first came to the United States in 1964 as a junior banker and took over the position of U.S. correspondent for the German financial and business daily Handelsblatt in 1967, working in New York and Washington for almost two decades, I have seen U.S. presidencies and administrations come and go.
The experience from Berlin of watching as Trump puts all his energy into tearing down the foundations of transatlantic relations as the “world’s disrupter in chief” is horrifying and depressing. What happened to Europe after World War I and leading to World War II is a reminder of why, for my generation, the European Union with all its failures is a peace project and NATO’s Western military alliance has provided its protection.
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