Post-war western alliance in doubt 75 years after D-Day

ARROMANCHES-LES-BAINS, France — This town on the northern coast of France wore the scars of World War II with grace ahead of Thursday’s 75th D-Day anniversary celebrations.

The remains of a Mulberry harbor — a kind of temporary, portable harbor that was so vital to the Allied invasion — are clearly visible from nearby cliffs, covered with daisies and purple clover. The hulking concrete structures built in secret and ferried over to the coast of Normandy allowed the Allies to pour in troops, weapons and supplies vital to liberating Europe from Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

The mood is celebratory in Arromanches, but like the sirens wailing from WWII reenactors’s jeeps trundling along the town’s wide beach, an alarm is sounding across Europe over the future of the Western order built from the ashes of WWII.

Canadian troops patrol along the destroyed Rue Saint-Pierre after German forces were dislodged from Caen in July, 1944.National Archives of Canada / Reuters file

Ties between the U.S. and its traditional European allies have become strained under President Donald Trump. This is a bitter pill for many Europeans, but particularly former enemies who were embraced after the war, according to Norbert Röttgen, a former minister and senior member of Germany’s parliament, for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU party.

“We are beyond that period that we have seen the transatlantic alliance as a United States-led community trying to shape international order from a point of values and interests,” he said.

Trump has “deliberately and voluntarily said, ‘I am not going to be the leader of the Free World,’” Röttgen added. “He substituted the international and unipolar and unique leadership role with the America First policies.”

These alliances have brought peace and relative stability to Europe. Still, Trump has blasted NATO — the military alliance of 29 countries across North America and Europe formed in the aftermath of World War II in response to Soviet Russia — for allegedly shortchanging the U.S.

German coastal batteries firing at Allied forces landing in Normandy in Arromanches-les-Bains. France.ullstein bild / Getty Images file

The White House has taken a hard line on trade, putting tariffs on steel and aluminum from the EU. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and the historic nuclear deal with Iran, which European countries are committed to. He has branded the the continent a “foe” and expressed support for the U.K. leaving the European Union.

The Trump administration has also spooked many in Europe’s liberal democracies for his apparent embrace of hardline leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and autocrats like the rulers of Saudi Arabia.

This is not an abstract thing in the economic powerhouse of Germany. A deep bond with the U.S. emerged after what Röttgen termed the “catastrophe” of World War II, when instead of punishing all of Germany for the Nazis’ atrocities, the country was given a second chance. Under the Marshall Plan, Western Europe was rebuilt. And the U.S. stood at Germany’s side in vital post-war struggles, including facing up to the Soviet Union, Röttgen said.

source: nbcnews.com