In a US election day News Special, “Trump vs. Harris: Is Europe Safe?,” America’s top foreign policy experts and presidential advisors paint a troubling picture for the future of NATO and European security generally.
The bleak assessment comes as Putin’s war in the Ukraine grinds forward while American voters go to the polls Tuesday in the most divisive election in recent memory to elect the 47th president of the United States.
The show’s guests, recorded over the last few weeks – including a renowned British scholar and a former senior NATO intelligence official – argue that candidate Trump brandishes an unknowable ‘peace plan” for the Ukraine. For her part, Vice President Harris talks about an extension of an ill-defined Biden doctrine in a war where time now favors Putin and everyday Americans tire over its costs.
“Putin thinks he’s (Trump) is an easy mark. He knows how to manipulate him. He flatters him. And I think He thinks he can get what he wants from Trump” says Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“This is a huge concern for Europeans when they look at the US election. With Trump they don’t know what they’re going to get. Is Ukraine simply going to be abandoned? Is he going to call up Putin and say, “you can have it”? Is he going to pull out of NATO? Those are the nightmares that European leaders have. (…) The ultimate threat to Europe is that NATO itself is exposed as a paper tiger. And that is, I think, obviously, Putin’s ultimate war aim.” adds historian Niall Ferguson
“Putin believes that his win is inevitable in Ukraine, that eventually NATO will crack…and the United States will lose interest” wondered General Wesley Clark
“The ultimate win for Putin would be to take a chunk of a NATO member and have the United States say, “sorry… Article 5, which supposedly binds the US to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, doesn’t apply in this case.” Ferguson said.
“I do worry about the idea of Russia challenging countries in NATO in Europe that quite honestly, most Americans couldn’t really identify on a map. And the idea that we have given treaty commitments to them is known by less than one percent of Americans.” Dr. Richard Haass, President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations said.
The 75-year-old NATO alliance, the experts argue, is at risk to unravel as a new generation of American leadership comes to power in the context of the US tilting towards the growing rivalry with China as well as other world crises.
The interviewees include: Niall Ferguson, the historian and author, recently rated as one the 100 most influential people in the world; General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, one of the senior military negotiator in 199 for the Balkan Peace Accords in 1995 and who is often in Kiev; Ambassador John Bolton, Trump’s past US National Security Advisor; and Dr. Richard Haass, the long-time serving President of the influential Council on Foreign Relations; and Major General Paul Hurmuz, former Deputy Director of Intelligence for NATO in Brussels.
“When it comes to European security, the message is a cold shower. If the US withholds its support, NATO will find itself at a severe disadvantage. To make matters worse, only a fraction of Americans know about Article 5, the lynchpin of NATO, according to which an armed attack against a member country will be considered an attack against all,” said John M. Florescu, the program’s Executive Producer.
Mr. Florescu’s interviews were recorded from mid-September to late October across the United States, London and Bucharest. “Trump vs Harris” also includes interviews with Kamala Harris’ first employer and the top political editors in the San Francisco Bay who tracked Harris’ rise in Californian politics.
The program is a production of Chainsaw Films Production and ProTV, the leading broadcaster in Romania. In 2016, Chainsaw produced “Trump vs Clinton: What They Mean to Europe?” that aired on ProTV and over a group of Time-Warner owned stations in Europe. Previously, Florescu produced two editions of “The Next President with David Frost” for US on network television.
