Donald Trump represents a greater threat to Nato than Vladimir Putin, one of the alliance’s former commanders has said in a blistering attack on Washington’s foreign policy.
The US president has sparked alarm after a series of aggressive moves this year including the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, threats to invade Greenland and the controversial claim that European troops in Afghanistan “were not on the front lines”.
General Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s former deputy supreme allied commander for Europe, said that Trump’s threat of military intervention in Greenland was “absolutely not bluster” even after the US president pledged not to use force to seize the island, which is a territory of Nato member Denmark.
“We have to take him literally. We have to assume with Trump, as with Putin, that the worst case will happen,” he told The Independent. “Trump is the greater threat [to Nato] if you want to make the comparison. It’s Trump who gets the prize.”
Shirreff, who is now chair of the Healix International Security and Risk Advisory Board, said that Trump had “destroyed the international order” in the first year of his second term. “He is also on the way to destroying the one alliance that has guaranteed transatlantic security for 77 years,” he added.
The former British Army officer said that Trump had presented Putin with two of his most cherished foreign policy objectives “on a plate”.
“He has decoupled America from European security and he is effectively holding Nato below the waterline because of his threat.”
Shirreff said that, while Putin poses an “existential threat” to Europe, his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had united Nato and “brought the international order closer together”.
Trump, meanwhile, has turned the global rules-based system “into a dead duck”, he added. “Clearly Putin threatened it massively but Trump has attacked the one alliance which grants our security.”
In the US, Trump has been ridiculed for what critics call a “TACO” approach to policy – meaning Trump Always Chickens Out. He has recently threatened military intervention in both Greenland and Iran – before appearing to back off and seek diplomatic solutions.
But Shirreff said that the threats alone, particularly to Greenland, are enough to cause serious damage to Washington’s alliances in Nato.
“The lead nation of the alliance has threatened the territorial integrity of another member of an alliance… how do you move on and rebuild trust? Nobody will trust Trump again, and we’ve got another three years of it.”
In response to the instability, Shirreff advised Nato to “Europeanise” and seek strategic and military independence from the US, particularly for the remainder of Trump’s tenure.
Other experts have disagreed with Shirreff’s conclusion over which leader poses a greater threat to Nato.
