A restive West warily watches U.S. election

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American elections are long, drawn-out affairs. Europe, conversely, often has “snap elections,” like last week’s in Britain and France. While the systems are different, this year’s results might be the same — because voters themselves seem to have snapped, finding it incumbent to throw the bums out, regardless of ideology.

That much was apparent in the United Kingdom (on the U.S.’ Independence Day, no less). Brits — the majority of whom now regret Brexit — rejected the Tories who tore the country out of the European Union. Voters instead gave the most Parliament jobs to Labour Party candidates, including new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Across the channel, French voters channeled the same anti-incumbency sentiment, sending many members of President Emmanuel Macron’s party packing in legislative elections that saw a tacit, temporary alliance of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition combine strategy with Macron’s Ensemble alliance to thwart the rising right-wing National Rally from gaining a majority in the National Assembly. While Macron himself wasn’t on the ballot, his centrist sensibility was, and it did not hold.

Across the pond (in the swamp of Washington, D.C., as supporters of former President Donald Trump would call it), there’s also an anti-incumbency mood and movement afoot. Including from the incumbent’s own party, worried that President Joe Biden’s debate debacle depletes down-ballot support. Biden tried to stanch the internal political bleeding on Thursday at what Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dubbed a “big-boy news conference.” The results read like a Rorschach test: Some saw not a big boy but an old man, while others perhaps perceived a wise old owl opining competently and comprehensively on foreign policy.

The domestic dramas drowned out some of the global focus at this week’s NATO summit, said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Kendall-Taylor, a former senior intelligence officer focused on Russia, said that “there is a lot of good news coming out of the summit that unfortunately is being overshadowed by the political turmoil that we’re seeing in many Western capitals.” She noted the number of allies who are now meeting spending commitments (nine at the end of the Trump administration, 23 now), solid progress on revising regional defense plans, Sweden’s first official summit as a NATO nation and a new secretary general, among other developments. But, she added in a briefing with reporters, “the bad news is that the political turmoil is undermining the strength of the signal of unity and cohesion that the alliance is seeking to project.”

It’s “easy fodder now for the Kremlin to be able to point to the political turmoil in Western capitals to underscore how [they] have weakened domestically to demonstrate the rise of the far right and the polarization within our societies,” Kendall-Taylor said. “We’re giving [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in many ways easy targets to undermine the key messages of strength that are supposed to come out of the summit.”

Indeed, Biden cited Putin — and Trump’s relationship with him and other authoritarians — as one of the issues at stake in the election.

The stakes were high in Europe, too. But the British and French results allayed allies’ fears, particularly in France, which avoided its first far-right government since the Vichy regime during World War II.

France had its highest turnout in decades. What electrified the electorate, and what’s motivating British and European voters in general, echoes in America.

“The issues voters and leaders have on their minds are the same as here,” said Catherine Guisan, a University of Minnesota visiting associate professor of political science. Guisan mentioned immigration as top of mind, as well as family policies, education, health care, foreign policy, and war right on the continent, as well as “non-liberal populism.” And for France and the U.K. (and the U.S., albeit to a lesser extent), “it’s also who we are, this new world where we no longer have supremacy?” There’s “a lot of rethinking going on and needed in the U.S. as to its role in the world, and that’s very much something the French and the British are wrestling with.”

Americans grappling with geopolitics in general and the alliance in particular perceive NATO and its unity on Ukraine differently per party, according to a May Pew Research Center poll. Three-quarters of Democrats and those leaning Democrat have a favorable opinion of the transatlantic pact, compared with just 43% of Republicans and those leaning Republican. And Pew reports that “the partisan gap on aid to Ukraine has shifted significantly since [the] start of the war,” with a full 49% of Republicans/Republican leaners saying the U.S. is providing too much aid to Ukraine, compared with just 16% of Democrats/Democrat leaners.

Much if not most of the split reflects the divide between Biden and Trump themselves. The current president is an unflinching defender of the pact and its role in aiding Ukraine, while Trump has warned he would encourage Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO nations that don’t meet the objective of spending 2% of GDP on defense. After the summit, the alliance’s most adversarial member, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who to many allies’ anger had just jetted to Moscow to meet with Putin and to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping — flew to Mar-a-Lago to huddle with Trump.

Allies are warily watching the U.S. election. “Trump creates tremendous anxiety among Europeans; his attitude toward Russia, his attitude toward Ukraine, and also the fact that he’s so unpredictable,” said Guisan.

Accordingly, they have been trying to “Trump-proof” NATO, Kendall-Taylor said. “Most of our European allies and partners when Trump was elected initially kind of could accept the outcome, strap up their seat belts, and recognize it was going to be a bumpy ride for those four years.” But once they got through it, “they all breathed a collective sigh of relief and thought that we had put that episode behind us and the United States they had grown accustomed to was back — and that was President Biden’s message. But if President Trump is re-elected, then it really forces you to think long and hard and deeply about what their future relationship is with these United States that puts Donald Trump back in the White House a second time.”

If so, the people have spoken. Just like they did in Britain and France and routinely do in the rest of NATO’s 32 democracies.

But hopefully no Western election eclipses the most important throw-the-bum-out mission: ejecting Putin from Ukraine.