The Finlandization of the United States

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The Finlandization of the United States



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/trump-nato-summit-europe.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region


By Roger Cohen


July 9, 2018


MADRID — Over the next week, President Trump will visit Europe to call on allies, get in some golf and then meet President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He’ll no doubt feel more comfortable with the Russian leader, whom he considers “fine,” than with freeloading NATO partners who, he says, treat Americans as “schmucks.”

If the issue were purely mercantile — European allies don’t pay enough for their defense — it might be manageable, even salutary. It’s not. Trump’s ideological sympathies lie with Putin’s autocracy and its democratic veneer. He’s in the Putin camp against the Western liberal democracy of, say, Angela Merkel in Germany. Trump’s a paid-up member of the growing illiberal authoritarian international movement.

The Finlandization of Trump’s United States is pretty much complete. Trump won’t oppose Putin’s Russia under any circumstances. In some way, it’s worse than Finlandization. Trump’s not neutral, as Finland was during the Cold War. He leans Moscow, but is still offset to some degree by the honorable Americans of the State Department and the Pentagon.

To fail to see this is to invite disaster. Trump is not an unusual American president with contrarian ideas. He is an off-the-charts repudiation of everything the United States has stood for since 1945: representative government, liberty, the rule of law, free trade, a rules-based international order, open societies, pluralism and human rights.


He refuses to see that as freedom and stability spread, undergirded by NATO and the European Union, American prosperity grew. For him, the European Union was “set up to take advantage” of the United States — a preposterous charge.

Traveling from Madrid to beautiful Segovia the other day, in a line of traffic full of Spaniards fleeing the capital for the weekend, I gazed out on a wealthy country. Spain was poor and under a dictatorship a little more than four decades ago. That’s what the European Union does. It’s a transformative peace magnet delivering democratic stability and prosperity to more than a half-billion people. That’s why the United States has always supported it.


A European who visited Trump recently tells me he was shocked by two things: the president’s venom against European allies that don’t buy enough American goods even as they ask the United States to protect them, and his paean to the new xenophobic Italian government that, in Trump’s view, is finally getting with the anti-immigrant program.

There is no talking the president out of his views, this visitor reports, say by mentioning the European contribution to the war in Afghanistan or the fact that the United States is the union’s biggest trading partner. No, Trump just knows.. ................................