EUROPEAN publishing saw a sensational hit in the 1840s with “The Mysteries of Russia”, a Frenchman’s take on the supposed brutality of Slavic life. Its most lurid tale described a Russian peasant fleeing wolves on a sled, who—unable to outpace the slavering pack—escaped by hurling her children, one by one, to their deaths. Jump to 2017 and modern-day European leaders fear that President Donald Trump takes a rather similar view of allies, notably those in the 28-member NATO military alliance. European politicians, generals and diplomats have scrutinised Mr Trump’s interviews and speeches and concluded that, by instinct at least, should they ever hold America back, he sees allies as potential burdens fit to be thrown, wailing, into the void.

As part of an America First approach to geopolitics, Mr Trump has made clear that he resents the unconditional nature of Article 5, the treaty clause that treats an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all, committing members to a collective response. As a candidate in 2016, he growled that only those allies keeping a political pledge to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence—“paying their bills” as he put it—should count on America coming to their aid. Both before and after his election he has called NATO “obsolete” because it is not focused on fighting terrorism. Mr Trump has suggested that he might trade away sanctions on Russia, imposed in 2014 in response to the invasion of Ukraine and toughened as recently as December 2016, if “good deals” can be done with President Vladimir Putin—whether those involve agreeing to shrink nuclear arsenals, or encouraging Russia’s unsqueamish armed forces to smite the Islamic State (IS) terror network.

Mr Trump’s crudely transactional instincts are having at least one salutary effect. He is forcing Western allies to make the case to him, from first principles, for the international order that has protected them since the second world war. Rather than the usual Atlanticist pieties about solidarity and burden-sharing, and windy promises to spend more on defence one day, NATO members, especially Poland and the Baltic states near Russia, are beefing up budgets. With Russian planes, ships and submarines testing NATO defences in the Baltic and North Seas, members have welcomed tanks and troops from America, Britain, Canada and other allies to their territory, with the latest arriving in January.

Germany, long a laggard on NATO spending, wants Team Trump to understand that, with Britain leaving the European Union, the Atlantic alliance is now the last institutional framework for co-operation, and that, because members train and plan together, they end up buying lots of American kit. In a head-spinning reversal, the French president, François Hollande, lectured America’s president about NATO’s “indispensable” nature in his first phone call to Mr Trump—50 years after his predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, withdrew France from military co-operation with the alliance, a Gallic walk-out only reversed in 2009.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, bigwigs are working to craft arguments that might appeal to Mr Trump’s interest-based worldview. The alliance’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, is a former prime minister of Norway, so knows something about confronting wolves and bears. Interviewed at the alliance’s utilitarian quarters—think linoleum floors and corridor signs reading: “No Classified Discussion In This Area”—Mr Stoltenberg notes that America is the only superpower with so many formal allies, calling that a source of strength which China and Russia lack. “America First does not mean America alone,” he says. Mr Trump wants two things, above all, from NATO: more spending and more help with terrorism, and Mr Stoltenberg calls that reasonable. He stresses that defence cuts have mostly stopped, even if some big countries (eg, Germany) have a long way to go. He points to NATO missions to counter terrorism in Afghanistan and off the Horn of Africa, fly aerial surveillance planes over Iraq and Syria and train the Iraqi and other Arab armies. Nato has established a new intelligence division, and the alliance will soon fly surveillance drones from Sicily.

The secretary-general believes that multinational alliances, far from entangling great powers in enraging, Lilliputian constraints, offer a thrifty form of deterrence, precisely because a small international force serves as a tripwire for action by many countries. As a young conscript he was one of only a modest force patrolling Norway’s far northern border with the Soviet Union. But the point was that these were alliance forces: nobody doubted “for a second” that if Soviet forces turned up in the border county of Finnmark, all NATO would respond. Generally, grandees take comfort from James Mattis, the cerebral-but-fearsome former marine general chosen by Mr Trump as his defence secretary, who declared at his Senate confirmation hearing that “Nations with strong allies thrive, and those without them wither,” and averred that Mr Putin is trying to “break” NATO.

More than one art of the deal

A second NATO bigwig longs to see Mr Trump convinced that it serves America’s interests to have its first lines of defence far across the Atlantic. The official is mystified that the president might trust Russia to honour a deal that would exchange Crimea for help with IS. The same official especially fears a bad arms-control deal, noting the genius Russia has for drafting treaties that curb the West’s weapons systems while leaving its preferred technologies untouched. Above all, this NATO bigwig is astonished that Mr Trump might think it shows ruthlessness to abandon allies, saying that Russians “respect strength and ensuring that your friends are defended.” Amid cold-war nuclear tensions, America never recognised the Soviet seizure of the Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; to cede them now to some Putinesque sphere of influence would be “an expression of weakness”, at a time when Russia is working hard to deny NATO access to the Baltic Sea with anti-ship missiles and other weapons. Great powers do not throw friends to the wolves.