Trump will exploit fear of Russia to dominate Europe’s security policies: Scholar

By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal

LONDON (AA) – US policies toward Europe under President-elect Donald Trump will aim to “continue to control, dictate and dominate European politics with respect to security,” according to a British academic and human rights activist.

“The new Trump administration is taking its gloves off,” Maung Zarni said in an interview with Anadolu.

“The US policy towards Europe will be anchored in the Americans’ attempt to make Europeans feel insecure about Russia.”

He said there is already a rising “sense of anxiety and insecurity” because Russia “has been made to look like a serious threat.”

The narrative propagated has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin “will invade and snatch European countries on the eastern side of Europe,” he said.

“So, that is the main driver,” added Zarni.

- Will US pull out of NATO?

One of the main sources of tension between a Trump-led US and Europe could be the future of NATO.

Zarni pointed out that Trump, during his first term from 2017 to 2021, repeatedly threatened to abandon NATO, terming the alliance “obsolete.”

However, he believes that there is little substance in Trump’s posturing and threats.

“Trump’s rhetoric that he will dismantle NATO and let Putin do whatever he wants with Europe is really scaremongering, because the US, its economy and its influence has largely been based on the war machine,” said Zarni.

“In his first administration, Trump had to make repeated threats, preying on the European sense of insecurity without the American security umbrella.”

Neither of the EU’s two leading members, France and Germany, “feels capable of defending itself in the unlikely event of war with Russia,” he added.

He said the “American military establishment is too big for Trump and his advisors to come in and say: ‘We’re going to pull out of NATO, or we will dismantle NATO.”

“That’s not going to happen, because … the American economy is also very much benefiting from massive military and war spending, and so billions and billions of dollars have always come back to the US arms industry,” he asserted.

“It will be against the American interest to sever ties with NATO.”

- Gaza genocide and ‘major internal societal upheavals’ in Europe

Zarni thinks that the situation in Gaza and the ongoing genocide by Israel will be a test for ties between the Trump administration and some European governments facing backlash from their own publics.

“The conflict is going to be the reality that Israel is making on the ground by expansion of land, and now they’re officially, openly talking about annexing the West Bank,” he said.

“Trump, we have to remember, is also a businessman. His own family, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been involved in investing millions and millions of US dollars into real estate developments. This is the guy who talked about Gaza, in the middle of genocide, as ‘prime real estate,’ ‘seafront properties.’

“So, I think Trump is also going to benefit from bringing a brutal end to the Israeli genocide, and letting real estate developers from New York and other places to go in and invest billions of dollars in the land where Palestinians have been killed by the thousands.”

Such a policy will “create major disruptions across European countries like Germany, Netherlands, France, where there is a sizable population of the Palestinians and other Arab diaspora,” he added.

“There is a considerable segment of Europeans … who have a conscience and who have compassion for the Palestinian people and what they are going through,” he said.

In countries like the UK, Spain and other Scandinavian nations, there has been a “massive outpouring of support for Palestinian people’s liberation,” said Zarni.

Those people and civil society networks and movements are “not going to just simply lie down and let their governments go along with Trump’s authorization or backing of Israel taking over the entire Palestine,” he emphasized.

All these Israeli actions are “openly and blatantly against repeated United Nations resolutions, (UN) General Assembly resolutions that call for a withdrawal from the occupied territories and the removal of all the settlements,” the activist added.

“I think it’s going to create major internal societal upheavals within European society.”