The mutating left of Western Europe and the illiberal states of Central and Eastern Europe

Last week, Brookings published a suite of 20+ “Democracy & Disorder” papers covering democracy issues around the globe and implications for geopolitics and international order. Given the troubled state of Europe and the West these days, a number of them focused on the Old Continent. I co-authored two of them.

Célia Belin and I have followed up our March 2018 American Interest piece on the “Macronification” of Europe with a paper on how "the challenges of globalization, identity, democracy, and the governance of the European Union have weakened social democratic political parties over the past 20 years.” In the second half of the paper, we categorize political parties on or stemming from the left in Western Europe into four categories “based on radical versus mainstream ideology and experimental versus traditional methods” - the Established Left of the classic center-left social democrats (but also including Germany’s rising Greens, on the more experimental side), the Radical Left which yielded Syriza’s revolt in Greece four years ago, the Experimental Left which includes Italy’s Five Star Movement, now governing in coalition with the far-right League, and the Extreme Center embodied in Emmanuel Macron. We recommend U.S. policymakers do more to engage to the European left on Russia and understand its approach to sovereignty and that the American left engage its transatlantic counterpart.

We published another long-in-the-works report the same day, on “The anatomy of illiberal states,” analyzing the tools that illiberal leaders of NATO and EU member states have used to erode checks and balances on their power, which I co-authored with Alina Polyakova and Torrey Taussig plus Kemal Kirişci, Amanda Sloat, James Kirchick, Melissa Hooper, Norman Eisen, and Andrew Kenealy, who wrote case studies on Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Our many recommendations boil down to a tougher but not carrot-free approach for the U.S. Congress and executive branch, key actors in the European Union, and NATO to member governments which have damaged their countries’ democracies.

I encourage you to check out the reports, hope you find them interesting/useful, and welcome your thoughts.

Measuring Transatlantic Relations

Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe is out with the second edition of its quarterly Trans-Atlantic Scorecard. I’ve been involved in managing this project from concept to publication and promotion, and I’m looking forward to the picture that an increasing number of these snapshots of the troubled relationship between the United States and Europe will paint over time. That said, I’m not terribly optimistic for the near-term future of transatlantic relations. As my colleague Tom Wright argues, two years into the Trump administration, “observers can identify a unified, if still incomplete, Trump foreign policy in which the administration accommodates the president’s impulses and seeks to act on them.” That doesn’t bode well for NATO in the year the alliance turns 70 years old given Trump’s skepticism of alliances and demands for the Europeans to pay the United States more for their defense. The 70th anniversary summit will be held in Washington in April at the foreign ministers’ level in order to keep President Trump away and I fear he may show up at Secretary Pompeo’s show like the masque of the orange death. Wess Mitchell, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and a committed Atlanticist who particularly treasures ties with Central and Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltics, has resigned effective mid-February. If there was a policy reason for that (I’m not sure there is), I would assume it has to do with problems coming down the line for NATO.

Anyway, the second survey of Brookings experts, conducted at the beginning of January, shows a decline in the health of the transatlantic relationship compared to the low starting point of our September poll. That’s a rating of 3.5 on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent), down from 3.6. Security relations are down from 4.7 to 4.4. U.S. relations with France are down from 5.1 (the best score yet recorded in the survey in any category) to 4.3 as the Trump-Macron relationship has cooled off considerably. On the other hand, relations with Turkey have improved. In September, they scored at 2.5, the same as U.S. relations with Russia then and now. But they are now rated at 3.3. Trump also spoke on the phone with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan more than with all the other European leaders combined in the last four months (we track that). They had a few things to talk about (the Trump administration’s ultimately successful efforts to get Ankara to release pastor Andrew Brunson from custody; the Saudi government’s murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate; Syria).

The Scorecard also includes topical questions (a plurality expected that Britain and the EU would manage to avoid a “no deal” Brexit, a majority saw Jim Mattis’s exit as secretary of defense as weakening the Trump administration’s commitment to NATO), a timeline of relevant developments including notable speeches, figures charting information relevant to transatlantic relations (ie. America and Europe’s respective trade with Iran and U.S. LNG exports to Europe), and Tom Wright’s take on what to watch going forward. I hope you find it an interesting read and a useful resource.

NATO Braces for Trump

The fourth step of Donald Trump's first foreign trip as president is a NATO summit. Given Trump's track record of questioning the U.S. commitment to NATO (though that's been walked back), the organization and its members are bracing for the meeting and coming up with some symbolic deliverables for Trump. Foreign Policy and Politico had good stories on this in the past couple days - with Politico quoting NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying "The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span.” I'm quoted in John Hudson's BuzzFeed News scoop published on Thursday May 18 that Trump's disturbing nationalist advisor Stephen Miller, a former Jeff Sessions aide, is writing Trump's speech for the occasion:

I'd obviously feel much better if [Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia] Fiona Hill was working on the speech, but the foreign policy adults in the Trump administration don't exactly seem ascendent this month... NATO members do need to spend more and more importantly improve their capabilities... But if this is a tough speech saying ‘pay more or else’ from a US president hated by much of the European public and seemingly untrustworthy when it comes to Russia, it won't be productive.

The dynamics at the meeting between Trump and each of western Europe's big 3 countries bear watching. Germany is entering election season and the anti-Trump card is perhaps the Social Democrats' best hope at improving their share of the vote, though Angela Merkel seems near certain to win re-election at this point. Merkel's government has committed to increase German defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, but slowly; the Social Democrats are hedging on that. This will be Emmanuel Macron's first meeting with Trump, and he will need to try to build a working relationship. And with Britain on its way out of the European Union, NATO looms larger as a key institution connecting London with Europe and the United States.