Donald J Trump has stirred outrage and incredulity with a string of recent comments about Russia - from cyberhacking to sanctions. Yet nothing he has said has more practical significance than the suggestion that, should he win election in November, American allies would lose the protection of the United States unless they "pay" more for their defence. His warning is a reminder of how easily presidents can blunder their way into big trouble.
Mr Trump is right that European military budgets are too low. A vast majority of Nato members are not close to the target of two per cent of gross domestic product for military spending that the alliance reaffirmed at its summit meeting in Warsaw this month. President Obama himself has called the United States' allies "free riders."
Nor is the Republican presidential candidate completely wrong that Nato members have a little wiggle room in coming to one another's defence. The tiny bit of choice they have has sometimes worried allied governments.
All the same, Mr Trump clearly knows nothing about the allies that he specifically said the US might not defend. Together with Poland, the three small Baltic States - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - have been among Nato's star performers. Between 2010 and 2015, they increased their military spending by 45 per cent.
While complaining about their cost, Mr Trump also seems unaware of how significantly the US has cut back its own forces in Europe. American troop strength has dropped 75 per cent since the Cold War.
With this loss of usable military muscle, friends and enemies alike know that Nato might have trouble fulfilling some of its pledges. That's why the big-spending US has joined its small-spending allies in resolving to do more. American battle tanks, the last of which left Europe in 2013, have started returning, and the Obama administration wants to add $2.6 billion for Nato combat readiness to next year's defence budget.
Some of these gaps in Mr Trump's knowledge could surely be closed by a good briefing memo. But no memo can help someone who completely misunderstands the foreign-policy challenges that presidents face. To reach certain business goals - building a new casino, say - it may be enough to have a meeting of minds with another CEO. A clear contract, dinner and drinks, a firm handshake. Mr Trump's experience seems to have taught him that leadership is largely a top-down affair, a matter of closing deals, barking out orders to subordinates, and buddying up to other high rollers.
Yet many of the hardest international problems presidents deal with rise from the bottom up. The dangers of confrontation between Russia and the Baltic States are a good example. Some of Mr Trump's critics argue that by saying he might not defend Nato allies he is encouraging Russia to invade or pressure them. Mr Trump probably imagines that he can address this risk over drinks with Russia's president, Vladimir V Putin, and perhaps he can. (As he boasted to two Times reporters last week, "I think Putin and I will get along very well.") But with Russia having nearly doubled its defence budget in the past decade, the deal might not be so easy to close. In any event, only the top-down version of the problem can be solved this way. And the bottom-up version - the regional and domestic instability set in motion by abrupt American policy changes - would be much harder to handle.
Consider the case of Latvia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has managed an uneasy balance between its ethnic Latvian majority and a large Russian minority. Ethnic Russian leaders have pursued political accommodation and supported the country's Western orientation. Ignoring this success, Mr Trump would give pro-Russian hotheads an opening - an incentive to challenge their moderate rivals, to attract Russian aid and media attention, and to threaten national unity.
Those seeking to divide the country are not the only ones who might act differently if Mr Trump were president. I have heard Latvian security officials say that Mr Putin's overnight seizure of Crimea in 2014 altered their thinking about how to keep Russia's "little green men" from doing the same thing in Latvia. These officials now think they must be ready to snuff out threats before they materialise. Worry that Washington might not be with them in a crisis might well encourage harsher crackdowns. Hair-trigger policy is rarely smart politics, but that's where Mr Trump's ideas lead.
By telling Latvians not to count on the US, he encourages participants in an increasingly stable and legitimate political system to try confrontation rather than compromise. This pattern is hardly confined to the Baltic States. In Central Europe and the Balkans, doubts about American commitment could foster conflict. Tensions might build slowly, but by the time a problem came to the president's desk in Washington, it would be more dangerous than it is today. A President Trump might blame vulnerable allies. The real responsibility would be his.
American policy in Central and Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended has helped to create stability, prosperity, moderate politics and ethnic accommodation in countries that have rarely known them. These are remarkable achievements. It would be crazy to put them at risk.
The writer, a professor at Columbia University, was the US State Department's ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union during the Bill Clinton administration.
© 2016 The New York Times
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
