European leaders were not entirely convinced, still reeling from the earlier comments by Trump in which he described NATO as "obsolete" and praised Britain for its referendum decision last year to exit from the EU bloc. In particular, Trump's scathing attack on Germany for using the EU as a vehicle to boost its national economy at the expense of others has caused deep wounds in Berlin.
Despite reassurances from the senior US officials, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that the Trump presidency must not undermine European cohesion through its seeming predilection for populist, nationalist parties wanting to break up the bloc.
Trump's ambiguity partly stems from his personal style of doing business. Trump appears to be running the White House and US government as if he is still commanding a private business. He is surrounded by a coterie of unelected advisers ranging from the populist Steve Bannon as chief strategist, to his son-in-law Jared Kushner as "special adviser." Trump also has a tendency to drive competition for attention among his aides.
That enigmatic style is how presidential positions on any number of issues can seem to cut across those of his cabinet. For example, Bannon is understood to share political sympathies with anti-EU political parties, such as Marine Le Pen's Front National in France.
The trouble is that in trying to smooth out Trump's policies into a more traditional form, US officials are at risk of overcompensating, to the point where it has unintended damaging impacts.
As if to prove President Trump's commitment to NATO, Pentagon chief James Mattis described the alliance as the "bedrock" for transatlantic security and called on European members to boost their military spend. Mattis said that the US could no longer shoulder the financial burden of maintaining the pact and that EU members would have to step up to the plate. He gave them one year to lift military spending from an average EU level of 1.4 percent to 2.0 percent of GDP.
While some European politicians, like British defense secretary Michael Fallon and German counterpart Ursula von der Leyen publicly endorsed this US rallying call, other EU figures were leery. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU must resist American pressure to boost military expenditure. The bloc's foreign policy chief Federica Morgherini said that the issue of "security" should be measured not just in military terms, but in social and economic development for the EU and regions.
If European members were to respond to Washington's galvanizing NATO calls, extra annual spending would be in the order of $100 billion. That will inevitably levy disastrous strains on European economies already struggling with austerity, stoking even more populist revolt.
The American officials visiting Europe this week also appeared to overcompensate for Trump's mixed signals by taking an adversarial line on Russia. Trump has repeatedly called for normalizing relations with Moscow and has even spoken about "trusting" Germany's Angela Merkel equally with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the Munich conference, Merkel said Washington should not put Russia on the same footing as European allies -- in a thinly veiled riposte to Trump. This European lament seemed to result in Mattis and Vice President Pence talking tough on Russia. Mattis provocatively referred to an "arc of instability on NATO's periphery," while Pence warned that Moscow would be held accountable for Ukraine's conflict.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stood out as the only adult in the room, when he told the Munich gathering that the US and Europe needed to move beyond a West-versus-the-Rest view of the world. Lavrov inferred that this Western order was not only anachronistic, but was destabilizing and counterproductive to the reality of a functioning multi-polar globe.
Trump's ambiguity -- or administrative chaos -- is hardly going to stop unnerving European allies. Reassurances by his top officials seem rather to only complicate matters further. And there is a real danger that overcompensating for Trump-induced turmoil might, regrettably, undo a much-needed opportunity to normalize relations with Russia.
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