And his brand of isolationist thinking is not unique

Nato without America is out of the question and reports that the death of Nato is imminent have been greatly exaggerated, as is loose talk that the US is destroying the rules-based international order.

The rules-based order is contained in a number of treaties established between 1945 and 1960, the most important of which are the UN Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) and the Treaty of Rome.

The UN was the successor international body of the League of Nations set up by the allies of the grand alliance to preserve peace. Nato was a defence alliance to defend against Soviet communist expansion. Gatt was designed to lower tariffs in various rounds that became the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995. Finally, the Benelux France Germany and Italy set up the European Community became the EU of 27 states after 1991.

There are others, but these are the main international treaties of the rules-based order and none of them are under any real danger from the present US administration.

The problem that’s arisen since January 20 is that in Donald Trump the US has elected a very rare bird to be its president. He is unpredictable and talks too much; but he is also refreshing: he engages in open government and keeps the promises he made to get elected.

He is otherwise unsuitable to be president of the US. So what? That is the way of democracy, whose great advantage over all other systems of government is that leaders like Trump are as here-today-gone-tomorrow as those who precede them. The point here is that Trump may be a difficult and unreliable president but the US is a reliable ally that has protected Europe for 80 years and its current panic over Trump’s schoolboy manoeuvres is hysterical.

America and Nato will survive Trump and history will judge him as a necessary corrective from the excesses of political correctness. The historical ties between America and Europe are as strong as they are complex: they are not just political, they are ancestral and cultural and bound as much by sentiment as by military alliance.

Nato has always been considered an American alliance and in many ways it has been dominated by the US, which is its strongest military power, but also the only ally to have activated Nato’s collective response mechanism under article 5 which the US government invoked when America was attacked by al Qaeda on 9/11.

On the other hand, the US was ambivalent about becoming treaty-bound to engage in foreign wars. The Nato treaty was drafted by the US with an armed attack by the Soviet Union against western Europe in mind. Under the US constitution, the treaty needed the advice and consent of the Senate that was given on the understanding that the US would only be treaty-bound to collective defence under the UN Charter, provided always that it retained “complete freedom of action with respect to the evolution of events”.

The US insisted that the obligation of Nato allies to respond to an attack on one as an attack on all under article 5 was limited to an obligation to assist by such action each country deems necessary. In other words, the defence provided by membership of Nato derives from the fact of a collective response rather than the nature of the response, which is bound to vary between the Nato allies.

According to Trump, the US does not deem it necessary to defend Europe over Ukraine let alone to defend Ukraine except on its own terms. Ukraine is not a Nato country and Europe’s fear that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is the thin end of the wedge that could potentially engage Nato’s collective defence is not deemed reasonably likely by the Trump administration.

This is not to justify the bullying and humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine by Trump and JD Vance last Friday but an attempt to explain US policy and set it in context of its treaty obligations.

Although both Trump and Vance were incredibly insulting to a friendly head of state, Vance gave their reasons the day after when he told Fox News that Zelenskiy had come to the White House with “a certain sense of entitlement” that angered them because “a lot of our European friends puff him up ‘you are a freedom fighter, and you need to fight forever’. Fighting forever with what? With whose money and whose ammunition and with whose lives?”

The previous US administration under Joe Biden, and Britain and Europe, were prepared to provide Ukraine with military aid and target intelligence inside Russia indefinitely. The indefinite support for Ukraine did not feature much in recent UK and European elections – probably because the US was paying for it – but Trump was elected on an isolationist promise to stop the war in Ukraine.

It is well known that historically the US has had bouts of isolationist populism for generations and the election of Trump for a second term was nothing if not isolationist. And neither is Trump’s brand of isolationist thinking unique except that modern communications make it ubiquitous.

President Franklin Roosevelt who entered the war against Japan and Germany in 1941 was reluctant to get involved in World War II and exacted a heavy price for helping Britain before entering the war. Not only was the US slow to go to war against Germany, at the end of the war in 1945 at Yalta in Crimea, Roosevelt often sided with Joseph Stalin against Winston Churchill over Soviet territorial claims in Eastern Europe and Germany.

So, Trump’s bromance with Putin is nothing new and may not necessarily last beyond the exigencies of the war in Ukraine. After Roosevelt died, the grand alliance of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union disintegrated into the Cold War within two years.

Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part-time judge