The Allies Have a New Word for America: Deterrence
From European troops in Greenland to a $1.776 billion slush fund at home, why NATO is running the one calculation no country runs twice.
Utterly stupid, morally wrong. Take your pick.
That was Mitch McConnell, not some lifelong antagonist of the right, passing sentence on a scheme cooked up inside Donald Trump’s own Justice Department. The nation’s top law enforcement officer, the former Republican leader said, had gone looking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. He was not reaching for a metaphor.
Here is what the department, run by the president’s former personal lawyer, actually proposed. It would set aside $1.776 billion of public money to compensate the supposed victims of weaponization and lawfare, and it would call the thing the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which is the sort of name you hang on a door so that nobody opens it. Open it. The victims it existed to make whole turned out to include the rioters who beat police with flagpoles on January 6, now first in line to be reimbursed for the inconvenience of having been prosecuted.
Nobody picks 1.776 by accident.
The number is the costume. It dresses a raid on the Treasury in the colors of the Revolution, and it does it for an audience of exactly one. And the sum was no abstraction: $1.776 billion is the kind of money that keeps a real army in the field through a hard winter, the artillery and the air defense and the back pay. There is such an army at this moment, holding a line in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, and it has been told the drawer is empty. The drawer was never empty. It was reserved for the people who stormed one capitol instead of the people defending another.
There was a second piece of paper, a single page signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, declaring the government FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from pursuing pending tax claims against the president, his family, and his businesses. (The capital letters are the government’s own, not added here for effect.) A federal judge froze the fund and set a hearing. Cornered by the courts and by a rebellion among the only people whose loyalty he can usually bank on, Blanche pulled the fund. The tax page stayed exactly where it was.
What deserves a long stare is how close this came to working. The fund did not collapse because the system has antibodies. It collapsed because a retired senator with nothing left to lose said the obvious in public, because a single judge in Virginia hit pause, and because even the president’s most reliable sycophants could not make themselves swallow this particular helping. Take those three accidents away and the money moves. The watchdogs built to bark, the guardrails, the party that holds the Congress, mostly did the thing they have trained themselves to do, which is to study the carpet and wait for the cycle to turn.
This is not a new instinct in a president who keeps the public trust and his private brokerage account in the same ledger. While American troops sat deployed near Iran, he logged more than 3,600 buy and sell orders in a single quarter, a healthy share of them in the very defense suppliers his war was busy enriching. Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the last Republican White House, told the Associated Press that a defense secretary who traded that way would be committing a crime, and that the president was guilty only of a fundamental breach of trust. Technically legal. That was the entire defense, offered as if it were a clean bill of health rather than the charge sheet.
For three generations the word the Atlantic alliance kept for its enemies was deterrence, and the enemy lived in Moscow. Listen to whom it describes now. Nader Mousavizadeh, once a senior adviser to a United Nations secretary general, said the quiet part without flinching: deterring Trump’s America is becoming a strategic priority of the allies, as much as deterring Russia ever was. Daniel Fried, a former American ambassador to Poland, watched European governments send troops to Greenland to guard a NATO member’s own territory against an American president, and wrote for the Atlantic Council that the allies had begun, if only by implication, to use the word deterrence about Washington itself. He called it a low point. He also called it necessary.
They had watched him do the rest in the open: threaten to annex Canada and to take Greenland from a treaty ally, open a war with Iran without a word to NATO and then demand that NATO haul him out of the mess, set the Russian aggressor on the same moral plane as the country it invaded, aim tariffs at nearly every friend at once, and thin out American troops along NATO’s eastern edge at the precise moment Putin, sensing the war slipping, leaned harder on it. None of it read as strategy. All of it read as appetite.
When your oldest friends start war-gaming you, the friendship is already finished.
Mousavizadeh’s counsel to the allies came down to two words, deter and diversify, and the warning beneath them was harder: no NATO government can ever again responsibly hand the United States the dependence it once extended on trust alone. (Somewhere in Moscow, an analyst is having the best year of his career.) The allies have finally read the doctrine off the wall, and the president had shown them the template himself: early in the term he made Ukraine sign over access to its critical minerals as the price of American help against the army trying to overrun it. The help came with a lien attached. Oppose him and you are tariffed; depend on him and you are extorted. Either way the invoice arrives.
In Portugal this spring, European executives have been describing the loss with something close to vertigo: faith in American institutions, and in the United States as the guarantor of the rules everyone else lives by, draining away after decades of being treated as permanent. They sound like hikers who have lost their compass. That is the asset the slush fund spent, and it does not come back with a press release.
The fund is gone. The page shielding the president’s taxes is not, and Blanche says it stays. The party that could have ended any of this studied the floor until a man with no reelection left to lose said it out loud. And the allies who built their security around American power have started running the arithmetic of defending themselves from it, which is the one calculation no country ever runs twice.
Related reading:
Even Mitch McConnell is mortified by Trump’s slush fund to pay people who assault cops
European troops arrive in Greenland as Trump throws another curveball