Ted Reinert

I have a piece out in The American Interest, co-authored with my Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe colleague Célia Belin, titled "European politics Is Turning French." (If you're blocked by the paywall, the full text can also be read at Brookings' Order from Chaos). We describe ongoing political realignment in Europe, with the pro-EU center consolidating against centrifugal nationalist-populists, a process that damages the center-left in particular given the center-right bent of economic governance in the bloc.

The 2017 French electoral cycle may be the textbook example of this overhaul of European politics... With Macron’s rise to power, French politics have gone through a process of “Macronification,” a unification of centrist constituencies around a pro-European agenda, leaving little air for anything but radical far-Left and far-Right parties adopting an anti-EU line... While both of France’s mainstream parties were badly wounded by “Macronification,” the Socialist Party (PS) was obliterated...

Indeed, in France and elsewhere, commitment to Europe feels increasingly like the kiss of death for social democrats. Although the European project is, fundamentally, a politically liberal idea—designed to transcend the dark forces of nationalism—to which the European Left is deeply attached, the European Union of today hardly resembles the leftist ideal of a “United States of Europe"... The European Left finds itself in the paradoxical situation of defending the symbolic value of the European Union while deploring its current policies. Paying a high price for their European commitment, leftwing parties either accede to power as responsible stakeholders stripped of their ideology and identity, or watch from outside government as the Right chips away at what remains of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy.

Where the left / center-left in Europe and America are going in this age of right-wing populists on the rise is one of my primary research interests and one I have in common with Célia, so expect more from us on this topic.

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.