Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. In case you missed it, the U.S.-U.K. special relationship is in a bit of hot water after a U.S. scientist recommended putting salt in your tea, causing an uproar in Britain. The U.S. Embassy in London then weighed in, denouncing the “outrageous proposal” but cheekily standing by the American penchant for microwaving tea. The Brits have now countered with military retaliation in the form of a video depicting U.K. soldiers, sailors, and pilots making a proper cup of tea on deployment. Next up: settling once and for all what constitutes a “biscuit.”
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Europe looks to ensure U.S. ties against a possible second Trump term, the U.S. Navy fends off more attacks from Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, and South Africa’s laundry list of saying “yes” to human rights no-nos.
The Trump Factor Looms Over Europe
Call it “Trump derangement syndrome.” Call it bracing for impact. Call it preserving the alliance.
Whatever you want to call it, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 11-point margin of victory over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday has put the onetime commander in chief atop the field for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
It’s also left current and former European officials who are still shell shocked from the first Trump administration scrambling to ensure that the transatlantic relationship can survive a second iteration of The Donald in the White House, which looks like more than a 50-50 proposition at this point, depending on which opinion polls you look at.
“With the Trump reelection looming, I think there is a behind-the-scenes brewing [conversation] of ‘OK, what can we do to make decisions, to lock things in, to commit to before that eventually happens,’” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary-general.
SitRep talked to a dozen current and former U.S. and European officials about how Trump’s reelection campaign will influence the tilt of transatlantic policymaking for the next year. Many of them requested anonymity, fearing retaliation from Team Trump.
“We’re getting a lot of the what-ifs,” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO. “What happens at NATO? They’ll say, ‘Do you think we here in the U.K. or in Europe are going to have to spend more on defense, because the U.S. isn’t going to be around? What is this going to look like?’”
“It’s discussed every time I meet with someone from Europe,” he said. “They start talking about that in hushed tones.”
Bad blood. Of course, these fears don’t come from nowhere. There’s a history. The first time out, Trump pushed for plans to remove 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany, the Pentagon’s second-largest overseas military deployment. Trump openly questioned whether NATO, the cornerstone of the post-World War II security architecture in Europe, should even exist. His bashing of U.S. allies even cost him his first Pentagon chief.
And we’re still not exactly sure what he told Russian President Vladimir Putin behind closed doors in an infamous two-hour meeting in Helsinki nearly six years ago that was only attended by their interpreters.
The art(icle 5) of the deal. On the flip side, Trump is all about the art of the deal and getting his name on things. Like many U.S. presidents before him, he pushed for NATO nations to spend more money on defense, and he boasted that he got them to cough up more money than his predecessors after playing brinkmanship with the alliance’s self-defense clause, Article Five. At the start of the Trump administration, just five NATO countries were hitting the alliance’s defense-spending benchmark of 2 percent of GDP. By the end, that number had nearly doubled, to eight countries.
Candidate Trump, at least the 2024 edition, has been a bit vaguer. His campaign website slams “the corrupt globalist class for dragging our country through endless foreign wars” and warns of a capital-A “nuclear Armageddon” if great powers go to war, but he only commits to “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose,” not to withdrawing from the alliance.
Trump has claimed he could end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in one day if he returns to office, but the comment has prompted eye rolls in both Kyiv and Moscow. The former president also appears to be maneuvering behind the scenes to kill the bipartisan supplemental budget deal on Capitol Hill that would link border security money with more U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Low priority. And even if Trump really wants to exit NATO, cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and put Putin in a bear hug and the allies on ice, experts and congressional aides think that Trump will end up being pretty busy with other priorities.
“If Trump were to come in on the first day, he won’t be talking about NATO. He’ll be talking about the [U.S.-Mexico border] wall; he’ll be talking about the woke; he’ll be talking about the culture war stuff,” Townsend said. “NATO and Europe and the transatlantic community, that’s not no. 1 or no. 2 or no. 3 on his list.”
It ain’t over till it’s over. Moreover, a second Trump presidency is anything but set in stone. Haley—who supports giving U.S. military aid to Ukraine—is licking her wounds from New Hampshire, her best shot at taking a win from the Trump column during the early primary season, and skipping Nevada. But she’s not throwing in the towel just yet.
Haley plans to reconstitute her efforts around South Carolina, where she served as governor before Trump picked her to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She is trying to make the case to less fringe general election voters—a wide majority of the American public still views NATO and Ukraine favorably—that she can be a steady handy at the tiller.
Some European officials, who don’t think the Biden administration is applying enough leverage on Congress to break the deadlock over the $60 billion proposed U.S. military aid package to Ukraine, think President Joe Biden should also be trying to cut through the noise of pro-Trump voices on Capitol Hill.
“When it comes to the Democrats, our message has been: Use some muscle. Stop bunkering down. Don’t let the Republicans set your agenda on foreign policy,” a British lawmaker who traveled to Washington told reporters last week.
Point, counterpoint. Congress already passed a bill in 2023 preventing any U.S. president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO without a two-thirds majority of the Senate or congressional action. The British lawmaker said that congressional staffers have indicated that Ukrainian accession to NATO will not be on the table in a second Trump term.
And in some parts of Eastern Europe, where Trump warmed to putting a U.S. military base in Poland named after himself, the former U.S. president is remembered a little bit more fondly. In fact, some officials are worried that Europe will knee-jerk into anti-Americanism if Trump is elected without feeling him out first.
“What I’m afraid of is that if Trump is elected, without Trump doing anything, European leaders will turn their backs to him,” said one Eastern European official. “And then, you know, we’re up for grabs for Russia and China.”
Let’s Get Personnel
Biden has tapped Tracey Jacobson to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Tamara Cofman Wittes will join the National Democratic Institute as its new president in March, the nonprofit and U.S.-government funded organization announced this week. Wittes was director of foreign assistance at the State Department, and before that the Biden administration’s pick to be a top U.S. Agency for International Development official for the Middle East until her nomination in the Senate stalled due to Republican opposition.
The Asia Society has announced that Kyung-wha Kang, former South Korean foreign minister from 2017 to 2021, will join the organization as its next president and CEO.
Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO and head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, has joined the influential public affairs firm WestExec Advisors as a senior advisor.
Biden made a bunch of appointments to federal boards and commissions after we published last Thursday, too, but let’s be honest: That’s not why you’re reading this newsletter.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Undeterred. A U.S. Navy warship downed two missiles launched from Yemen by the Houthis, the latest sign that the militant group remains undeterred from attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea, despite the ongoing joint U.S.-U.K. military operation intended to do just that.
USS Gravely, a destroyer, shot down the two anti-ship ballistic missiles on Wednesday, according to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). CENTCOM said in a statement that the Houthi attacks are “fully enabled by Iran.” Back in Washington, the Treasury Department on Thursday announced new sanctions against four senior Houthi officials.
Desperate for friends. Russian ships were caught by U.K. eyes in the sky loading up supplies at a North Korean port, another indication that Moscow is stocking up on North Korean munitions to fuel its war in Ukraine. The United Kingdom sent satellite photos of Russian cargo ships that are under Western sanctions docking and loading up at North Korea’s Najin port to a U.N. panel of experts on North Korean proliferation.
Russia has cozied up to North Korea in its desperation to get more weapons and ammunition to its forces bogged down in Ukraine, and so far North Korea has been accused of providing ballistic missiles and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to Moscow. Putin recently met with North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui in Moscow.
Cleaning house. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is privately venting about the failure of India’s armed forces to curb cost overruns and project delays. In a Jan. 13 meeting with a handful of top national security officials, Modi called on the Indian Armed Forces to conduct a wholesale audit of the weapons it already has in production before asking for more money, according to an account of the meeting in the Hindustan Times.
The dressing down comes after a scathing internal report called out India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, charged with researching new platforms, for undertaking ambitious, costly projects that may already be technologically obsolete.
Snapshot
The remains of posters of Israeli hostages on a wall in central London on Jan. 24 in London, England. In an attempt to galvanize support, Artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid designed the now ubiquitous posters, which can be seen in cities across the world. Many of the posters however continue to be torn down by those opposed to Israel and its response to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.The remains of posters of Israeli hostages on a wall in central London, on Jan. 24. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Hot Mic
South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) party, which has governed the country since Nelson Mandela was elected president in the first post-apartheid election in 1994, is leading the legal charge against Israel’s actions in Gaza. But Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, argues that its voting pattern at the United Nations reveals a poor record when it comes to supporting human rights.
One of Russia’s key friends in the global south and a leading critic of Israel, South Africa has abstained on more than two-thirds of contested and condemnatory U.N. votes on human rights situations in nations like Syria and Iran, according to an analysis Meservey released last week. South Africa also supported all 99 anti-Israel resolutions it could vote on.
“Bottom line is that no one should take South Africa and the ANC’s claim to be principled actors seriously,” Meservey told SitRep in an email. “They are deeply cynical about human rights as evidenced by their consistently awful record at the U.N. and their defense and support of the likes of Hamas, [former Sudanese dictator] Omar al-Bashir, [Gen. Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo], ZANU-PF, and Iran.”
Put on Your Radar
Thursday, Jan. 25: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s four-country tour of Africa proceeds to its final stop: Angola. Blinken has been pitching African nations on U.S. military aid as an alternative to Russia’s Wagner Group. In Angola, high on the agenda will be continuing the Lobito Corridor railway initiative, a key linkup to get elements such as cobalt and copper that are vital to building electric car batteries into Western markets.
French President Emmanuel Macron begins a two-day trip to India. Just north of that, Nepal will be holding elections for its upper house of parliament.
Sunday, Jan. 28: NATO member Finland is set to head to the polls to elect a new president, after 12 years under Sauli Niinisto, who is term-limited. Former Prime Minister Alexander Stubb of the center-right National Coalition party is neck-and-neck in the polls with the Green League candidate, former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto.
Monday, Jan. 29: Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian makes a high-stakes visit to Pakistan, just days after a lethal round of tit-for-tat missile and airstrikes between the two neighboring countries.
Meanwhile, over in South America, Colombia’s latest six-month cease-fire with the Marxist insurgent National Liberation Army group is set to expire.
Tuesday, Jan. 30: Macron is back on the road, this time traveling to Sweden, just a week after Turkey’s parliament ended its holdout and voted to ratify Stockholm’s NATO accession. (The last remaining holdout is Hungary.)
Quote of the Week
“[A]s ridiculous as it may sound, it seems that North Korea is a more efficient partner to Russia than friends who try to supply Ukraine with artillery ammunition. And that’s ridiculous.”
—Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba gives North Korea a backhanded compliment about its artillery supplies to Russia in an interview with the German tabloid newspaper Bild.
This Week’s Most Read
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Inscrutable. Finns are known for their long periods of silence—and then quickly getting right to the point—and that hasn’t changed after joining NATO last year. After winning the U.S. Army’s annual competition to find the best European snipers, a Finnish team was as deadpan as ever about becoming card-carrying members of the alliance. “It’s good,” the Finnish snipers said.
Wardrobe malfunction. Pope Francis is once again lighting up social media after the wind lifted up a section of his robes, making the pontiff resemble a dog returning from the vet wearing a “cone of shame.” While one viral tweet pushed the notion that popes only conduct such a move in “extreme distress,” FP’s James Palmer responded on X that Francis is simply “signaling to predators that he’s poisonous.” James, seriously, get back to work.
Pizza? Or a cornbread biscuit? In honor of the news that comedian Jon Stewart will return to his old seat at the Daily Show once a week this year for the 2024 U.S. election, we are doing our due diligence and resurfacing his classic rant on Chicago-style deep dish versus New York-style pizza. You can guess which one the New York City native dislikes. “It’s a cornbread biscuit which you’ve melted cheese on, and then, in defiance of God and man and all things holy, you poured uncooked marinara sauce atop the cheese,” Stewart protested. “Atop!”
