Secret Meetings, Private Threats and a Massive Arms Race: How the World is Preparing for Trump
In 2016, no one in the world was ready for President Trump. America’s NATO allies aren’t making the same mistake this time.
In Brussels, NATO officials have devised a plan to lock in long-term military support for Ukraine so that a possible Trump administration can’t get in the way.
In Ankara, Turkish officials have reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy road map for clues into Donald Trump’s designs on Syria.
In Atlanta, Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska, top ministers from Germany and Canada have met with Republican governors to shore up relations on the American right.
And in Washington, Trump’s return is the dominant topic at monthly breakfast meetings of ambassadors from European countries. At one of those meetings, the top envoy from one country asked his colleagues whether they were engaged in a fool’s errand.
“Can we really prepare for Trump?” this person asked, according to another top diplomat. “Or do we rather have to wait and see what the new reality would look like?”
Folly or not, the preparations are underway.
More than six months before the next American president takes office, there is already an extraordinarily advanced effort across the NATO alliance, and far beyond, to manage a potential transfer of power in America. With President Joe Biden listing badly in his bid for reelection, many allies anticipate that at this time next year they will be dealing with a new Trump administration — one defined by skepticism toward Europe, a strident strain of right-wing isolationism and a hard resolve to put confronting China above other global priorities.
In the run-up to this week’s NATO summit in Washington, POLITICO and the German newspaper Welt embarked together on a reporting project to assess how the world is preparing for Trump’s possible return to the White House; reporters for both publications interviewed more than 50 diplomats, lawmakers, experts and political strategists in NATO nations and elsewhere. Many of those people were granted anonymity to speak about sensitive matters of diplomacy and international security.
What emerged from this reporting was a picture of a world already bending to Trump’s will and scrambling to inoculate itself against the disruptions and crises that he might instigate.
In many respects NATO member states feel far more confident of their ability to handle Trump than they did when he first came to power seven and a half years ago as a total amateur on the world stage. That is in part because these countries are laying the groundwork now to manage his political resurrection.
Their preparations fall into three categories.
First, there is extensive personal outreach to Trump and his advisers, in the hope of building relationships that will help minimize conflict.
Second, there are policy shifts aimed at pleasing Trump and his political coalition, chiefly by soothing Trump’s complaints about inadequate European defense spending.
Third, there are creative diplomatic and legal measures in the works to armor NATO priorities against tampering by a Trump administration.
Taken together, it starts to look like a plausible strategy for managing the turbulence of a Trump-led world. Still, even the NATO leaders driving this approach acknowledge that much of this project may ultimately be at the mercy of Trump’s individual whims.
“Of course, the biggest challenge is we don’t know — and I think nobody knows, exactly — what he will do,” said one diplomat from a NATO country.
When Trump first came to office, the West was in a state of relative calm, and U.S. allies mostly hoped that they could wait out an American political meltdown for four years. Their thinking is different this time, now that it is clear that Trumpism is no passing fad — and the NATO alliance is confronting far more immediate threats to European security.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is no widespread panic this time about Trump withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, as he has threatened in the past. But if allies do not see that as a likely scenario, the alliance is still in an anxious mood — a state of trepidation only sharpened by the rising power of right-wing NATO skeptics in France and elsewhere on the continent.
Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general and French defense official, said the alliance was approaching Trump far differently now than it did in 2017.
“Last time, it was much easier because there was no war,” said Grand, who is aligned with French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition. “Now, we are in an environment where the conversation is really, really different.”
Trump Politics is Personal
A scant two weeks before NATO’s leaders were set to descend on Washington for the summit, a rumor tore through the diplomatic world: Trump had a plan to bring peace to Ukraine.
The art of this deal was said to rest on a brazen threat: If Vladimir Putin refused to negotiate an end to the war, the U.S. would flood Ukraine with even more weapons. And if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to sit at a negotiating table with Russia, the U.S. would withdraw its copious military support.
There was one big problem. The plan was being pitched not by Trump himself, but by several of his many allies and self-described surrogates circulating through political and diplomatic circles — each purporting to speak for the former president, and in turn advertising a direct line back to him. Upon closer scrutiny, it became clear that there was no secret, Trump-approved blueprint to end the war.
As the election has approached, it has become a full-time mission for U.S. allies to parse who is an authentic Trump emissary and who is a pretender. One embassy staffer confirmed that they had been in contact with several people claiming to speak for Trump, “but it’s not always clear how close they are to him.”
But, the staffer said, “we need to take the meetings.”
The result has been a frantic quest for access to the people closest to Trump — and to Trump himself.
“It’s a race to be the last person to speak to him before he makes a decision,” said one European defense official.
One lesson that American allies drew from the first Trump administration is that personal relationships are paramount with the former president and the people closest to him. Trump formed warm bonds as president with an eclectic range of leaders, from Shinzo Abe and Jair Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson and Kim Jong Un, all of whom used that direct personal link to their own advantage.
Since Trump locked up the Republican nomination, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, and Japan’s former prime minister, Taro Aso, have paid respects to him in person. So has David Cameron, the former British foreign secretary and prime minister, who used a visit to Mar-a-Lago to make the case to Trump for supporting the war effort in Ukraine.
Overtures are underway to other quarters of the Republican Party: François-Philippe Champagne, a Canadian minister helping lead preparation for the U.S. election, has met with Republican governors including Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Jim Pillen of Nebraska, emphasizing international stability as a shared concern, according to a person briefed on the meetings. Last fall, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Texas to meet with Gov. Greg Abbott, a powerful Trump supporter, making a friendly overture but also airing her stark disagreement with Abbott on abortion rights.
In recent weeks, several diplomats from NATO member states quietly traveled to Washington to meet with conservative academics and people associated with think tanks that they believed could have some influence on Trump’s policy. The meetings seemed to be productive, said one ambassador. But there is an air of contingency around them.
“We don’t know if the people we meet will actually still be there if Trump is elected president,” said one NATO official during a conversation at headquarters in Brussels.
Perhaps the most ostentatious outreach to Trump and the MAGA coalition came this spring from David Lammy, Britain’s shadow foreign secretary at the time, who was appointed the U.K.’s top diplomat last week after elections there. During a visit to Washington in May, Lammy met with Trump allies and MAGA luminaries, including Sens. Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance. In public remarks, Lammy said Trump’s criticism of NATO had often been “misunderstood,” and that the former president mainly wanted Europe to spend more on defense.
This was a dramatic U-turn for Lammy, who previously described Trump as a racist and a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath.” But his Washington tour seemed to have a clear purpose: to open the way for a relationship with Trump in government — and to make sure British voters knew he was doing it.
His meeting with the Trump campaign emerged from quiet, persistent outreach, and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, rearranged his schedule to meet with Lammy at the offices of the RNC.
It was a breezy conversation, according to people familiar with the exchange. Lammy explained his role as shadow foreign secretary, a position with no equivalent in the American system, and talked about how he has family ties to the United States. LaCivita briefed him on the state of the Trump campaign.
Minutes after the meeting concluded, stories about it hit the London Times and the Daily Mail, startling the Trump campaign.
One Trump adviser, recognizing the point of the conversation was for the Brits to be able to say they had the conversation, marveled that Labour had leaked the news before Lammy even left the building: “They had this whole thing pre-written.”
Lammy’s MAGA-friendly tour frustrated some center-left leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including in the White House. One British diplomatic figure said there were senior Democrats who were “very, very upset with David,” particularly given his warm relationships with Democrats including Barack Obama. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said the Biden White House had been unconcerned.
This British diplomat said Lammy’s trip was, on its own terms, a mission accomplished.
“In the world of the embassy and Foreign Office, Lammy was seen to have done a good job, and that it was a smart move for Labour to hedge their bets in case they have to deal with a Trump administration in six months or so,” the diplomat said.
Money, Money, Money
If much of Trump’s transatlantic agenda seems fluid and impulse-driven, he has been entirely consistent on one point: He wants European countries to spend far, far more on their own defense.
Increasingly, Trump is getting his way.
Europe has good reasons to increase defense spending that have nothing to do with Trump. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered the illusion in many European capitals that Putin could be treated as a quasi-friend, or that his imperial ambitions could be contained to Crimea and a few marginal precincts of Eastern Europe.
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