Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishIt was not long ago that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was marshaling European allies to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He illustrated the point that a top American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, recently summarized as the way the United States wins the global competition for power and prosperity: “Be nice to your allies.”President Trump clearly has a different view. His antagonism toward Europe has been public for decades, seeing allies as economic competitors and geopolitical parasites. And his decision on Thursday to impose controversially calculated tariffs on America’s partners, including Ukraine — but not on Russia or North Korea — laid bare his willingness to fracture a trans-Atlantic alliance that has largely kept the peace in Europe for 80 years.Combined with Mr. Trump’s demand that NATO allies spend up to 5 percent of their gross domestic product on the military and his expressed desires to seize territory from Denmark, a NATO ally, the tariffs highlight long-term damage to American relations with Europe that are unlikely to ever be fully repaired.“The tariffs are another addition to the perception and assessment in Europe that the U.S. under Donald Trump is not only an unreliable partner, but a partner that cannot be trusted in any way,” said Guntram Wolff, an economist and a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “That changes 80 years of postwar history, when the trans-Atlantic alliance was the core of the Western world and of the global multilateral system.”As much as Brussels will try to preserve some of these key relationships, Mr. Wolff added, “It cannot on its own underpin the global system.”Mr. Trump’s effort to transform the global order also seems to benefit Russia, NATO’s chief antagonist, by potentially weakening the Kremlin’s adversaries in the rest of Europe, though plummeting oil prices on Friday hit Russia as well.“There seems to be no order in the disorder,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, on Thursday. “No clear path through the complexity and chaos that is being created as all U.S. trading partners are hit,” while “hurting the most vulnerable citizens.”Europeans are increasingly aware that Mr. Trump, unmoderated and even encouraged by more ideologically compatible and loyal advisers in his second term, intends to follow through on his intentions to distance the United States from Europe. But “the intensity, speed, aggression and imperialism of this administration has been a surprise to some people,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.Many European governments thought they could navigate Mr. Trump’s demands through transactional methods, such as buying more weapons and liquefied natural gas — major American exports — and doing more burden-sharing. The developments of the past weeks show the limits of that approach, including the Trump administration’s uneven application of tariffs on Britain and the European Union and its demand for Ukrainian minerals in return for years of military aid.“The challenge for Europe is how to deal with a predatory America willing to use the vulnerability of allies to extort them, whether it’s a mineral deal in Ukraine or attempts to annex Greenland or the open way Trump is trying to divide Britain from the E.U. with differential trade deals,” Mr. Leonard said.For now, the European Union is holding together, in large part because Mr. Trump applied the same 20 percent tariffs to all its 27 member states, including more ideologically friendly countries like Hungary, Slovakia and Italy. But Washington may also choose to use differentiated tariffs on certain sectors to pressure individual countries, like Denmark, over issues like Greenland.There is a general assumption that the tariffs are a prelude to a deal, as Mr. Trump’s son Eric urged in a message on X. “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “The first to negotiate will win — the last will absolutely lose.”Sophia Besch, a German analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, sees two fundamentally different messages from the Trump administration. “It’s not clear whether this is an opening offer to negotiate, or whether they really are remaking the world, with no interest in repairing it,” she said. “Different people around Trump are pursuing different things.”The issues of tariffs and security are distinct but hardly separate, Ms. Besch and others said, displaying Mr. Trump’s willingness to use American power crudely and even uncaringly against friends, their economies and the poor, who are most likely to suffer from inflation and higher consumer taxes.Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to be reassuring in Brussels this past week, at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers, as he mixed emollience with warning. He denounced “hysteria and hyperbole” in the media and insisted that Mr. Trump supports the alliance and its commitment to collective defense. “President Trump’s made clear he supports NATO,” Mr. Rubio said. “We’re going to remain in NATO.”But not any NATO.Mr. Trump expects European allies to take the main responsibility for their own security and for Ukraine’s as America turns toward Asia, Mr. Rubio warned. “He’s against a NATO that does not have the capabilities that it needs to fulfill the obligations that the treaty imposes upon each and every member state.”Yet the economic impact of the tariffs, expected to cause inflation and lower economic growth, will make it only harder for European allies to increase military spending to the 3.5 percent of G.D.P. goal that NATO is considering for its summit in July, let alone the 5 percent that Mr. Trump has demanded.For Germany alone, a rich country, the impact will be considerable, with Germany’s finance minister, Jörg Kukies, estimating a 15 percent reduction in German exports to the United States. He says Germany will continue to try to negotiate better terms with Washington, even as Brussels retaliates forcefully if carefully for the bloc. Still, the German Economic Institute estimates the possible costs of these tariffs to Germany alone at around 200 billion euros ($218 million) over the next four years.Europeans will now search for other markets and more free-trade deals, like the ones it has with Canada and Mexico, said Maggie Switek, an economist and director of research at the Milken Institute. “There is still room for cooperation with the U.S. and U.S. companies as we think through how to navigate this new situation and new American theory,” she said.But for Moscow, which does little unsanctioned trade with the United States, the tariff blow to American allies was another gift. The former president of Russia Dmitri Medvedev crowed happily on X about the damage done.Invoking an old Chinese proverb, he said Russia would “sit by the river, waiting for the body of the enemy to float by. The decaying corpse of the EU economy.”
