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Mark Leonard is the director the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
We are experiencing the biggest crisis in transatlantic relations since Suez. But it is unfolding in such a bizarre manner that nobody can quite get their head around it.
The richest man in the world, who is about to become a quasi-official in the incoming U.S. administration, has declared he’s trying to overthrow the British government — and probably the German one as well. President-elect Donald Trump himself has already indicated he wants to overturn every single tenet of the U.S.-led order. And his recent comments on the Panama Canal and Greenland show he’s even ready to question principles like territorial sovereignty and the inviolability of borders.
The last time Trump was elected, many in the U.S. and around the world took comfort in the idea that Europe would step into the breach. They declared then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel the true leader of the free world — a role immortalized in an iconic G7 photo where’s she’s flanked by the leaders of the world’s major democracies, looming over a sulking Trump. But today, Europe has based its entire security, economic and political strategy on the existence of an American ally that Trump has now declared extinct.
However, a major opinion poll conducted by my organization, the European Council on Foreign Relations, shows that Europe’s anxiety about Trump is not widely shared.
After talking to 28,000 individuals across 24 countries, we found that the vast majority of people around the world think Trump is, in fact, good for the U.S., good for the world and good for global peace.
According to our data, in India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and South Africa, three in five people believe Trump’s promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. One in two believe he will achieve peace in the Middle East. And the prevailing view everywhere is that he’ll actually salve Washington’s relations with Beijing — a view that’s rather strikingly held by just a little under half of the poll’s Chinese participants.
Although many may welcome Trump’s return to office, they don’t necessarily believe he’ll make America great again. In fact, in 20 of the 24 countries we polled, more than half of participants think China is going to be the most powerful country in the world in 20 years’ time. Among major middle powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia and South Africa, almost seven in 10 people believe this.
It is ironic that the very things that make Trump’s return to the White House so scary for many Europeans are what make him attractive to the rest of the world.
Europe is panicking at the rhetoric surrounding “America First,” and the notion that the U.S. will cease to be an upholder of the global order in favor of pursuing its own selfish interests. But this is precisely what people — particularly those living in middle powers across the world — are impatient for. They no longer want the U.S. to be a self-appointed moral arbiter or global policeman. They’re much more comfortable dealing with it as the most powerful country in a more transactional world.
But our survey isn’t without a silver lining: Although Europeans themselves may take a dim view of their global standing in this new Trumpian era, the rest of the world has a higher appreciation of European power — the challenge is how exactly they go about using it. Our poll shows there’s no appetite for Europe to pose as the leader of the resistance against Trump, or to keep bossing about or lecturing other countries on how to pursue their affairs.
However, solid majorities around the world view the EU as a superpower that can hold its own alongside China and America and pursue its own interests. The real question is whether it can agree on what those interests are.
Only by overcoming its divisions will Europe be able to protect itself from divide-and-rule tactics, be they from Beijing, Moscow or Washington.
