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There’s little evidence that Trump’s reputation in Britain has improved since then, even though he, unlike Clinton or President Obama, backed the winning side in the country’s June Brexit referendum. Trump has called himself “Mr. Brexit,” an apparent allusion to his belief that he can shock the world with victory much in the way anti-E.U. activists did in the referendum.
The most bombastic of those activists, longtime U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, has become a highly visible Trump ally. Farage spoke at a Trump rally in Mississippi in August, and was Trump’s guest at Sunday’s debate.
Trump has found other friends in the ascendant populist movements of Europe, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Orban, who built a razor-wire fence along the country’s southern border to block refugees and migrants from entering the country last summer, has hailed Trump’s proposals to crack down on terrorism. “I myself could not have drawn up better what Europe needs,” Orban said in July.
But Orban’s stand places him firmly in the minority among European leaders. For other nations, particularly the four NATO members that border Russia, Trump is the source of deep, almost existential anxiety.
The Republican nominee has gone back and forth over whether he would come to the aid of U.S. allies if they were attacked, even as Russia has staged provocative military drills and air incursions in the two years following its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
Three of Russia’s NATO neighbors – the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – are together smaller than Missouri and stand no chance of defending themselves in the event of a Russian invasion. In that context, comments from top Trump adviser Newt Gingrich that “Estonia is in the suburbs of St. Petersburg” shook many in the region who have long counted Republicans as their staunchest advocates.
Concern over Trump runs so deep that Latvian lawmakers have started to reach out to Republicans in Congress, eager to build support among a constituency that might be a forceful counterweight to the would-be president’s isolationist impulses.
Ojars Kalnins, chairman of the Latvian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said Latvian lawmakers were in talks with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to lead a delegation of Baltic politicians that hopes to speak in front of a Senate committee during the lame-duck session of Congress. “The Trump comments and the Gingrich comments did prompt us,” Kalnins said. “It was a realization that people aren’t as attuned to the Baltic states as they used to be.”
But those modest steps are about as far as Europe has gone to prepare for a Trump presidency. The prevailing strategy for many diplomats and politicians is to hope he doesn’t win, and if he does, to simply wait and see what he will actually do, given his often-contradictory statements.
Some European analysts believe Trump’s foreign policy ideas are so radical that he would have trouble stocking the government with enough people committed to carrying them out. “We expect there would still be cadre diplomats, a lot of people who are not showing the opposition flag to Trump but who are the safe tier of professionals,” said Juri Luik, a former Estonian foreign and defense minister who runs the International Center for Defense and Security in the Estonian capital Tallinn.
But Luik also cautioned that Europeans “shouldn’t kid ourselves” and noted that in the United States, the president calls the shots on security policy. Indeed, far from being reassured, European leaders have often gone out of their way to stress just how worried they are.
“Trump is not only a problem for the EU, but for the whole world,” European Parliament President Martin Schulz recently told the German weekly Der Spiegel. “If a man is sitting in the White House . . . with no clue and describes expert knowledge as elitist nonsense, a critical point has been reached: Then an apparently irresponsible man is in a position which requires the highest sense of responsibility.”
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