In January 2018, Angela Merkel stood at the World Economic Forum in Davos and sounded a historic warning. She drew upon the collective memory of two world wars to emphasise the fragility of peace and the imperative of learned historical restraint. Merkel’s address was not a nostalgic invocation of the past. It was a sober legal and political statement about the nature of alliances grounded in shared norms, values and enforceable international commitments. Eight years on, with Vladimir Putin’s belligerence unsettling Europe’s eastern flank and Donald Trump seeking to turn Greenland into a transactional asset, it is evident that the normative foundations of the rules based international order are being tested as never before.
At the core of this epochal reckoning is a fundamental legal question: does the Trump administration’s approach to alliance commitments and international law amount to mere neglect or to a wilful dismantling of binding legal and diplomatic frameworks that have underpinned transatlantic cooperation since the end of the second world war? A meticulous examination of treaty obligations, customary international law, United States domestic law governing treaty implementation, and executive practice reveals a pattern that transcends impulsive policy shifts and suggests a systemic repudiation of legal obligations in favour of transactional unilateralism.
Merkel’s caution was rooted in an implicit understanding of law as stabiliser. The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 is not a casual declaration of friendship. Article 5, the cornerstone of the treaty, imposes a collective defence obligation that binds each member, including the United States, to consider an armed attack against one ally as an attack against all. This obligation is legally binding under the law of treaties as codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, to which the United States is a party by ratification and practice, irrespective of Senate advice and consent. The Trump administration’s repeated belittling of NATO, its demands that European allies dramatically increase defence spending to avoid losing the alliance’s protection, and its flirtation with the notion of NATO’s obsolescence, are not merely rhetorical excesses. They contravene the stabilising logic of treaty law, undermining the predictability that is the essence of legal obligations between states.
Under United States domestic law, treaties entered into by the United States become the “supreme law of the land” pursuant to Article VI of the United States Constitution. Moreover, the Implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty Act explicitly authorises the President to take all necessary steps to carry out the treaty’s terms. Thus, any executive posture that treats treaty commitments as optional or contingent on contemporaneous perceptions of fairness invites serious constitutional questions about the executive’s fidelity to the Constitution’s supremacy clause and statutory directives. Trump’s transactional demands, couched as fair burden sharing, ignore the letter and spirit of these legal frameworks, exposing the United States to reputational and legal jeopardy.
This juridical critique intensifies when one considers Trump’s 2019 flirtation with the purchase of Greenland. Under the United States Constitution, Article II confers upon the President the power to negotiate treaties, but the acquisition of territory historically requires congressional authorisation or ratification through treaty. The Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska Purchase were both effected through treaties approved by the Senate. No contemporary legal mechanism exists for the President to unilaterally annex foreign territory. Trump’s proposal was therefore not merely whimsical. It was constitutionally hollow. It demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the treaty process and the limitations on executive authority. It also underscored an alarming willingness to treat international borders as negotiable assets, a mindset antithetical to the postwar legal order founded on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The editorial narrative’s comparison of Trump’s ethos to the infamous Führerprinzip is not gratuitous dramatism. While the legal analogy must be used with precision and care, the Trump administration’s rhetoric and certain executive actions reflect an executive supremacist logic that conflates personal will with national interest. This is particularly evident in immigration and border enforcement policy, where executive interpretations of statutory authority have been stretched to erode procedural protections and due process rights. The deployment of force against individuals for perceived non compliance with immigration enforcement does not stand in isolation but forms part of a broader pattern in which legal constraints on executive power are treated as impediments rather than guardrails.
Internationally, the Trump administration’s selective respect for international legal institutions further illustrates a pattern of repudiation of multilateral legal commitments. The United States under Trump announced its intention to withdraw from the World Health Organization, sought to diminish the role of the World Trade Organization’s appellate body, and repudiated the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Each of these actions signalled a retreat from cooperative legal frameworks designed to manage global threats collectively. The abrogation or diminishment of these frameworks has real time consequences, including weakening global health governance, undermining the predictability of international trade dispute resolution, and eroding non proliferation norms.
Critically, these policy orientations have been clothed in a resin of “America first” nationalism that rejects multilateralism as inimical to national sovereignty and prosperity. Yet, this framing misapprehends the symbiotic relationship between sovereignty and international law. Sovereignty is not hollowed by participation in rules based institutions. Rather, it is reinforced by it. By binding states to predictable legal commitments, international law reduces insecurity and prevents the resort to force. The Trump administration’s impulse to repudiate or marginalise international legal regimes weakens the normative architecture that has constrained interstate conflict and protected human rights. This is not merely a theoretical concern. It is a practical threat to global stability.
The invocation of European history by Merkel was a plea for legal and institutional memory. Europe’s post second world war order, embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights and the myriad institutions of the European Union, is not merely relic of idealism. It is a living testament to what legal and political cooperation can achieve. Trump’s disdain for these norms, his cavalier treatment of alliance commitments, and his willingness to absolve autocrats at the expense of democracies pose a direct challenge to the viability of these structures. The danger is not simply diplomatic friction. It is the erosion of legal predictability, the very sine qua non of international relations.
From a legal perspective, the notion that no appeal to history or multilateral principle can restrain the Trump presidency reveals a deeper constitutional malaise. Checks and balances exist precisely to prevent caprice from becoming policy. Yet, in the current environment, the executive branch has repeatedly leveraged national security justifications to bypass legislative oversight and consolidate authority, whether in matters of trade, immigration or foreign policy. The Supreme Court of the United States has at times provided a bulwark, striking down aspects of executive overreach, for example in cases challenging discriminatory travel bans. But the fractured nature of domestic legal resistance has so far been insufficient to fully counterbalance the executive’s expansive interpretations of authority.
Ultimately, the critique must address the underlying normative inversion. The editorial posits that Trump does not neglect America’s old alliances. He despises them. This is not hyperbole. It is a logical conclusion derived from his administration’s pattern of legal and diplomatic conduct. Alliances, by definition, are mutual commitments underpinned by predictable behaviour. Trump’s conduct treats alliances as optional, as bargaining chips in a zero sum negotiation, rather than as legally grounded mutual security commitments. This undermines not only the specific treaties but the very concept of binding legal obligation in international relations.
For European allies and for the United States itself, the stakes are existential. A rules based international order cannot be sustained if its principal architect and guarantor repudiates legal commitments when they conflict with narrow short term impulses. The cost of complicity with the fiction that reason and legal obligation will ultimately prevail is too high. A candid legal and geopolitical appraisal demands recognition that America’s current posture is not a transient aberration. It is a fundamental challenge to the norms, laws and institutions that have made the postwar international order resilient. Only a recommitment to legal obligation, constitutional fidelity and multilateral cooperation can avert the grim trajectory outlined in this critique.
In the end, European leaders must confront the uncomfortable truth that enduring strategic patience may be insufficient. The legal underpinnings of alliances must be defended not only through diplomacy but through robust engagement with the constitutional and international legal frameworks that sustain them. The confrontation is not merely with a president. It is with a doctrine that seeks to subordinate law to caprice. If the values Europe seeks to uphold are truly universal, then they must be defended with legal clarity and unflinching resolve. Only then can the lessons of history be honoured and the future of the transatlantic alliance preserved.