By Mike Nelson
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Few screenwriters may have crafted as many universally
quoted lines per movie as Mario Puzo. The Godfather movies elevated the
stories of mobsters from the brutality of petty thugs to a Shakespearean epic
about a king and his four sons. The timelessness is so well recognized that
other screenwriters have referenced it in their own movies
as “the sum of all wisdom.”
Perhaps the most famous of the many quotable lines from
the series is Michael Corleone’s retelling of his father’s advice: “Keep your
friends close, but your enemies closer,” the context being that one should not
tip one’s hand while attempting to intuit or understand the moves adversaries
are planning to make. In other words, one creates the perception of
being close to one’s enemies.
While I do not know if anyone in the administration is a
Puzo fan, one could look at recent events and conclude that the White House is
trying to enact a rewritten and misconstrued version of the famous quote. “Keep
your enemies closer by pushing your friends away” seems to be the way the
administration is framing its view of the world.
Last fall, the Defense Department issued its National
Defense Strategy, a document intended to align priorities and resources for the
military with larger national strategic goals. By de-emphasizing the collective
defense of Europe and countering Chinese regional ambitions in the Pacific in
favor of a focus on the Western Hemisphere, the document teased the potential
for a Trump administration acceding to (if not outright endorsing) a division
of the globe into three spheres
of influence—a welcome signal in Moscow and Beijing.
Since the publication of the NDS, the administration
seems to be backing its words with actions—withdrawing forces from Europe and
signaling a willingness to withhold approved support from Taiwan. It appears
the United States may envision a world in which we no longer guarantee global
order and stability and instead allow other forces to fill the void we leave in
the wake of our disinterest and lack of stewardship.
It’s also worth noting that Trump reserves his harshest
language for the Taiwanese people who had the audacity to build a vibrant
chip manufacturing industry and for the Europeans expressing concerns over the
war in the Middle East, yet somehow loses his famous pugnacious nature when
addressing Russian assistance to Iran or Chinese military or
industrial espionage.
American relationships with our transatlantic allies,
already strained for various reasons, have undergone more stress since the
start of Operation Epic Fury. The Europeans (to use a very broad brush for
several different political entities) seem to feel dubious about a poorly
defined war with shifting end states, about which they were not consulted, and
into which they are now being pressured to enter. And Trump has expressed
frustration that nations more dependent on trade transiting the Strait of Hormuz
are not jumping in to help him solve the problem that he created.
Much of the American side of this tension can be chalked
up to a conflation of and confusion about the functions and roles for NATO, the
EU, and the individual countries that are members of each. Frustration that
Spain and Italy have denied overflight and basing privileges has led to a
generalized handwaving anger at “the Europeans” for not supporting America’s
war. But these kinds of tensions and disagreements among allies, even NATO
allies, are not new.
France did not allow overflight for U.S. aircraft
conducting Operation El Dorado Canyon against Libya in 1986—a strike
in retaliation for a Gaddafi-directed terror attack against Americans stationed
in West Germany. NATO member Turkey did not allow U.S. forces to stage there in
preparation to invade northern Iraq in 2003. Further, the legal arrangements
that govern the U.S. bases (and the forces stationed there) in Italy and Spain
are bilateral agreements between the American and host governments, with NATO
playing no adjudicating role in their use. It’s also worth mentioning that,
despite Trump’s raging about NATO’s noninvolvement in the war, the United
States has not invoked Article 4—the consultative process by which NATO would
determine what, if any, actions it might take as a body.
While the president might be frustrated by our
Mediterranean allies, his ire seems to be directed instead at our partners
bordering the Baltic Sea. At the beginning of this month, the Pentagon announced the
withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany, and on Friday paused the already
started rotational deployment of another 4,000 to Poland. While the
administration claims this second decision is only temporary and may still
result in the deployment to Poland, the suddenness of the decision and the
confusion around it caused concern in Warsaw.
These two targets are odd choices for Trump’s
retribution. While no European countries have directly signed on to the
American war with Iran, Germany remains a major hub for support to it.
Countless C-17s worth of material transit through Ramstein Air Base en route to
the Central Command area of responsibility, and many of the more than 300
casualties of the conflict have been treated at nearby Landstuhl hospital.
Poland has been the model NATO ally in recent years, increasing its defense
spending to almost 4.5 percent of GDP, making it the alliance member spending
the most (proportionately) on defense. While limited defense budgets among
other NATO countries have been the administration’s key complaint about the
alliance, Poland spends a greater percentage of its GDP on its military than
the U.S. does. America is tied for sixth with perennial MAGA punching bag Denmark
in this metric, after Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Norway. The
Poles also provide much of the funding required for U.S. forces in their
country.
While the decision to halt the deployment to Poland came
as a complete surprise and with no specific reason stated, the decision to
withdraw troops from Germany was in part because German Chancellor Friedrich Merz committed the unforgivable
sin of expressing concern about Trump’s plan for the Iranian conflict.
Even if these are not punishments, but rather decisions
that reflect different priorities for American forces, they communicate that
America places less importance on preserving the balance of power across the
Atlantic and deterring Russian attempts to gain dominance and threaten Eastern
and Central Europe. This is further reinforced by reports that the Pentagon may
both reduce the number of forces it would allocate to a major
European crisis and downgrade the Army command responsible for operations on
the continent—after the command was already reorganized in 2020 to split its focus between Europe and
Africa.
Much of the animosity (at worst) or apathy (at best) has
been based on the idea that America has no vital interests in maintaining
European stability or that Europeans have been freeloading with their minimal
defense spending, exorbitant social programs, and generous summer vacation
schedules. Surely, Europe has to do more to provide for its own common defense,
and the Trump administration has been correct in pressuring the members to
agree to (and eventually fulfill) new spending targets.
But there is another explanation for some of the desire
to shift away from Europe within the administration: Officials just don’t like
the Europeans, or at least not the ones with whom we have decades of firm
relationships. Vice President J.D. Vance’s primary concern with Europe appears
to be less about maintaining the relationships and alliances that have kept the
peace since 1945 and more about punishing “wokeness.” Vance has never traveled
to Ukraine, the country currently defending itself against Russian aggression,
but has made personal stops to tacitly or overtly campaign for illiberal
right-wing parties in Europe: the AfD in Germany and Fidesz
in Hungary. Last year, during the initiation of Operation Roughrider to prevent
further Houthi attacks on maritime traffic in another Middle East chokepoint,
Vance’s objection seemed to be that, despite the fact that opening the flow of
traffic might be in America’s interest, the Europeans might benefit more from it.
The Europeans are not the only ones who are right to
worry about their security and America’s commitment to it. During the
high-profile Sino-American summit in Beijing last week, President Xi Jinping’s
framing of the Taiwan question—and President Trump’s responses—have to be
causing some cold sweats in Taipei. While America has long adopted the policy
of strategic ambiguity regarding the defense of Taiwan, that ambiguity has been
more, well, ambiguous in the past.
The president’s repetition of Chinese talking
points about the validity of their claim on Formosa, the ease with which
they might be able to conquer the island, or the difficulty America might have
in intervening does not convey the kind of resolute commitment one would hope
for.
As if this weren’t enough, Trump suggested he would
consult with Communist China on whether to provide previously authorized lethal
aid to the Taiwanese, and then suggested Reagan’s forceful denial that China
would ever have a say in America’s support to Taiwan was no longer relevant.
It probably does nothing to bolster Taiwanese confidence
that some close to the administration talk
of the semi-independent island as nothing more than a supply chain issue to be
hedged against. This line of thinking argues that, once mitigated, the United
States has no interest in either bolstering the virtuous cause of a people
wishing to remain free, nor in opposing the communists who wish to oppress
them.
Credible deterrence exists when one side makes
unequivocally clear that it will go to war if certain conditions occur, as was
the case with American troops deployed in a divided Europe: The presence of
conventional forces combined with the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured
destruction kept the Cold War cold. Deterrence can also happen if one side is
vague about what it may do but, within that murkiness, is the fear that the
most aggressive response is possible and credible, as has long been the thinking
with strategic ambiguity with Taiwan.
Regardless of how Trump might respond to an actual
conflict in the Baltics or Taiwan, his constant rhetorical support of the
would-be aggressors and the underlying arguments they make for their
territorial aims undercuts the security concerns of our partners and allies and
demonstrates a general disinterest in either preventing or contesting these
attacks. In short, it increases the likelihood of war. Taken with global
assessments of the president’s resolve
based on his handling of the Iran war, it’s cause for concern.
If the White House is staffed by Godfather aficionados
enacting a twisted version of the Corleone quote with which I began, perhaps
they missed the fact that Michael Corleone is drawing adversaries closer in
order to eventually defeat them; the goal is not just to become closer out of a
sense of global communion. Perhaps they would be better reminded of a different
quote, also from The Godfather Part II, this one from Frankie Pentangeli
when speaking of the same enemy Michael said he would keep close. “Your father
did business with Hyman Roth, your father respected Hyman Roth, but your father
never trusted Hyman Roth.”
We will obviously have to communicate, trade, and
negotiate with the Chinese and the Russians, and we should respect the power
they hold and the threat they represent. But we should never extend them our
trust, as the president appears to do when he blends his personal affinity for
strongmen with his belief that friendly chemistry is the basis for determining
the forces that align continents. Nor should we forget the first portion of the
original quote; we should actually keep our friends close.
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