Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.





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BERLIN—Early one February weekend, President Donald Trump let loose a cryptic complaint, followed by a barrage of Fox News-inspired tweets, about Sweden of all places. He made the Nordic country, home of gleaming lakes, cheap modernist furniture and one of the world’s highest standards of living, seem like a dystopian hellhole overrun with rampaging refugees.


Sweden was not amused.

“They thought the man had gone bananas,” says Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister and foreign minister, in a new interview for The Global POLITICO, our weekly podcast on world affairs. “It was a somewhat unsettling thing to see the president of the United States without any factual basis whatsoever lunge out against a small country in the way that he did.”

Bildt, an avid tweeter himself, trolled Trump right back, but the incident confirmed Swedes’ worst fears about America’s new leader. And Sweden is not alone: Three months into his presidency, the rest of Europe too is still deeply unsettled over this new president unlike any other, confused about whether he’s a dangerous ideologue or merely dangerously ignorant—and desperately seeking ways to stop him from pursuing the foreign policy of Russia-reconciling and European Union-bashing he promised on the campaign trail.

As Trump prepares for the first overseas trip of his presidency later this month, with European stops planned in Brussels for a NATO summit and Sicily, Italy, for a G7 meeting, it’s clear he’ll be coming to a continent whose political class both fears and loathes him to an unprecedented degree.

“Donald Trump is probably one of the least popular American presidents on this side of the Atlantic for a very long time,” says Bildt, a card-carrying member of Europe’s political class and charter member of the security institutions that have shaped its post-Cold War order.

Do Europeans dislike Trump even more than George W. Bush, I ask, recalling the hostile days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq that most Europeans opposed and which keeps Bush from visiting the continent to this day?

Yes, Bildt tells me. Trump’s “brutal” and “vulgar” campaigning, his disdain for the facts, his lack of “civility,” are much worse than the policy disputes of the Bush era; they’ve already “caused a gulf to open up between us.”



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And Bildt is just one of many top Europeans who are not getting any less nervous about the fate of the West as Trump hits the 100-day mark of his presidency. In conversations this week with a range of current and former senior European officials in Berlin, I heard a lot of anxious Trumpology, as leaders here try to figure out how to get inside the head of America’s unpredictable president—and swap tactics that might work to defuse a man they view as a volatile and uncertain partner. Their initial post-election denial has started to give way to anger and (unhappy) acceptance.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had just hosted Trump’s daughter Ivanka at a women’s summit the day before my arrival, a move that few saw as anything other than an attempt to curry favor with Trump through his family. Several officials relayed anecdotes about their countries’ respective efforts to find a way to Trump, and many said they had settled on Merkel’s plan of copious outreach to a president who loves picking up the phone (the chancellor, I was told, even called to solicit Trump’s “advice” on her upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia this week).

Several of those I spoke with hoped that Trump’s recent reversals on some foreign policy issues—from declaring he no longer viewed NATO as “obsolete” to his decision not to brand China a “currency manipulator”—combined with his growing reliance on an experienced team of generals for national security advice might produce a foreign policy Europe could live with if not love.

Still, several officials remained stunned at the level of ignorance displayed by Trump—and many of those advising him in an American government dominated by newcomers to international affairs. “I was told he had never read a book!” one senior European told me.

“There have been approaches, of course, to try to reach to him and give him the facts,” Bildt says in our interview. “There’s an understanding that he has far more knowledge than those European leaders about properties in New York and a couple of other places. And golf courses in Dubai and whatever. But it's fairly obvious that the level of knowledge about global affairs and European affairs is distinctly limited.”

All the outreach has hardly convinced Europeans that Trump has their back, and the overall feeling of gloom hanging over the relationship is palpable. A recent Pew Research Center survey of European thought leaders found 77 percent preparing for worsening diplomatic relations with the United States in the Trump era and 62 percent looking at troubled times ahead on security and economic issues. Eighty-five percent in the survey said Trump was “dangerous”—and another 87 percent said they had little to no confidence that Trump would do the right thing in world affairs, a far worse rating than even for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But Trump is hardly the only threat Europe faces these days; from rising populism at home to Russian meddling in its politics, its bigger problems are right here at home and in case after case, Trump seems to have come out publicly on the other side from those who run the continent.

Just a year ago, Britain presaged the Trump upset with its vote to leave the EU and now the contentious Brexit negotiations with the scorned Eurocrats are just getting underway—even as the wave of nationalist populism that fueled Brexit has led across the English Channel to a French presidential election in which Marine Le Pen, leader of a pro-Kremlin, EU-bashing party with Holocaust-denying roots, campaigned her way into the second round of voting. An establishment candidate, the 39-year-old former finance minister Emmanuel Macron, is now expected to win that second round next week, but several French observers who have been in contact with his team told me they believe Le Pen could well exceed 40 percent of the vote—a result that will hardly calm the rising panic within the embattled European establishment.

In both France and Great Britain, the recent elections have shown the collapse of the traditional parties that have run the government for much of the time since the end of the Cold War, while in Eastern and Central Europe newer members of the EU have in recent years elected their own brand of right-wing populists, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who has proclaimed himself a champion of “illiberal democracy.”

All of the populists across Europe complain about the wave of immigration that has sent hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East across their borders—and meanwhile, there’s NATO member Turkey on the fault line between Europe and the Middle East, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not only given up on joining the EU but is presiding over an authoritarian crackdown and just won a dubious referendum handing himself more powers.

And then there’s Putin’s Russia. Tensions with the onetime superpower on Europe’s eastern flank are at their highest level since the end of the Cold War, new NATO troops have in recent weeks taken up positions in Poland and the Baltic states, Russia still occupies the territory of Crimea it seized two years ago and Putin’s proxies are still fighting a low-grade insurgency in other parts of eastern Ukraine. The very concept of a Europe whole and free that the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to make possible 25 years ago has never seemed more threatened.

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For most of those 25 years, Carl Bildt has been in the middle of Europe’s security debates, helping to negotiate an end to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, endlessly working the problem of Sweden’s historical foe, Russia. Out of office as foreign minister since a left-wing coalition of Social Democrats and Greens took power in Sweden’s 2014 elections, Bildt these days is a globe-trotting fixture on the conference circuit and a devout Europeanist; his wife is a member of the European Parliament.

When we meet on the sidelines of a meeting hosted by a German think tank here, Bildt acknowledges the fracturing of Europe’s politics and rise of a new anti-immigrant “politics of identity” and “politics of blaming everything on Brussels.” Despite the “wave of disillusionment,” though, he insists it will hold together, that it is a “Europe of Necessity.”

A big part of the necessity over the past few years has been the resurgent Russia in the east—now joined by the unpredictable ally in the west. Will Trump follow through on his pledge to reconcile with Putin? Or will he veer wildly in the other direction, pursuing more confrontation with the tough guy in the Kremlin? Either move could come at Europe’s expense.

Bildt, a leading Putinologist, sees Russia’s leader as “unpredictable” and “opportunistic” and eager to seize on “weakness,” as he did in both Crimea and Syria. And while he praises Trump for going through with the new wave of NATO military deployments agreed last year at a NATO summit while Barack Obama was still president—“the biggest change in the history of NATO since the big mission of dealing with the Soviet Union faded away”—he and others aren’t sure how much to count on Trump going forward.

Right after the election, Bildt says, “there was the fear that he was headed for … a new Yalta agreement dividing Europe or something like that and there were fears in Europe that that was going to happen. And the Russians were clearly hoping that that was going to be the case and evidently, they had enough contacts in the Trump entourage in order to believe that that was a realistic expectation.”

Now, Bildt says, the opposite is more likely. There is, he says, “an increasing danger for actually entering a period of confrontation.”

Looking ahead to Trump’s first meeting with Putin, Bildt mentions the American’s apparent ignorance about the world, the fact that Chinese leader Xi Jinping in their recent summit at Mar-a-Lago seemed to school Trump on the basics of the Korean conflict. “Putin is clearly going to try to do the same in trying to influence a man who doesn't have very many core convictions.”

He is, Bildt notes, “a somewhat more, to put it mildly, experienced player” than Trump and he openly wonders whether Putin will “take Trump for a ride” when they finally do meet.

So is this, I ask Bildt, the end of the liberal international order? The one that steered Europe through the Cold War and 25 years beyond? That brought peace, prosperity and reunification in the 21st century to a continent that defined war and destruction in the 20th century?

“Yes,” he says, “if you were to take Trump on his words … then it would be the end of the liberal global order.”

Soon after we finish our conversation, Bildt is off to Brussels, capital of multilateralism and committee meetings and the center, whether it likes it or not, of the anti-Trump resistance.

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