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A Worried Europe Finds Scant Reassurance on Trump’s Plans

Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference.Credit...Johannes Simon/Getty Images

MUNICH — They came from all over — diplomats and generals, policy experts and security officials — seeking clues to President Trump’s ideas and intentions. They left without much reassurance.

As the Munich Security Conference, the world’s pre-eminent foreign policy gathering, ended on Sunday, it was notable that even the foreign ministers of China and Iran had taken questions, while Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis stuck to prepared statements.

An audience anxious for signals about the Trump administration’s stances on NATO, the European Union, Germany and the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Trump so openly admires, was only minimally soothed. It mostly heard boilerplate assurances about United States commitments of the kind that previous American administrations had rarely felt the need to give.

Even Mr. Pence, who could say that he carried a direct message of reassurance from Mr. Trump, did not manage to comfort many of the experts here. Keen observers of Washington, they were deeply disturbed by Mr. Trump’s difficulty finding a pliant national security adviser to replace Michael T. Flynn, and by Mr. Trump’s long and rambling news conference on Thursday, which was followed on Saturday by a campaign-style rally where he suggested, wrongly, that something terrible had happened in Sweden.

“People were not reassured,” said Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “They think that Trump is erratic and incalculable. We all want to hear what we want to hear. But everyone knows that any Trump official could be gone tomorrow, or undercut in another tweet.”

Senator John McCain, a conference regular who has been one of the most prominent Republican critics of Mr. Trump’s young presidency, said that the administration was “in disarray,” and added: “The president, I think, makes statements and on other occasions contradicts himself. So we’ve learned to watch what the president does as opposed to what he says.”

But Ms. Schwarzer said that words were also deeds. “What he says also changes reality,” she said. “If you put NATO or the European Union into doubt, it changes their credibility and damages them.”

Julianne Smith, a former Defense Department official and deputy national security adviser to Mr. Pence’s predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., said people would be reassured “for about five hours, or maybe through the weekend.” What remains unresolved, she said, is who will come out on top in what she called a battle among the three centers of power in the Trump White House: Mr. Trump, the adviser Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.

Europeans were “chilled” when Robert S. Harward, a retired vice admiral, turned down an offer to replace Mr. Flynn because he would not be given autonomy over his staff, she said. “Our allies don’t know who is their interlocutor and what phone number to call,” Ms. Smith said. “And talk of hedging NATO commitment on financial contributions did rattle the alliance,” even if European members acknowledge that they need to pay more for collective defense.

R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and former under secretary of state who advised Hillary Clinton, gave Mr. Pence credit. “The vice president said what he had to say, and I applauded,” Mr. Burns said. “But there were very few specifics, and everyone noted that Mr. Pence did not once mention the European Union, which for most Europeans is the central institution, not NATO. Europe is going through a very tough time, and they expected a big public embrace of these institutions from the leader of the West, the United States.

“They know that President Trump has repeatedly questioned the relevance of both NATO and the E.U. and has encouraged Brexit, and many Europeans fear he may work for a weakening of the E.U. itself,” Mr. Burns said. “All this ambivalence makes them very nervous, and it’s hard for Pence to overcome.”

Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington who runs the conference, asked if Mr. Trump would “continue a tradition of half a century of being supportive of the project of European integration, or is he going to continue to advocate E.U. member countries to follow the Brexit example? If he did that, it would amount to a kind of nonmilitary declaration of war. It would mean conflict between Europe and the United States. Is that what the U.S. wants? Is that how he wishes to make America great again?”

On Monday, Mr. Pence will meet in Brussels with officials from the European Union and NATO to try to reassure them about the new administration’s commitment to Europe.

“But they have to hear this directly from Trump because of everything he has said about Russia and Germany,” Mr. Burns said, citing a joint interview with the German newspaper Bild and the Times of London, in which Mr. Trump compared Mr. Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and said he was not sure he would trust either of them.

Mr. Trump appears to many Germans to be ambivalent at best about Ms. Merkel as she heads into a tough re-election campaign at the same time as the Kremlin and Russian media outlets are trying to undermine her through fake news articles, especially as Ms. Merkel is seen as Europe’s most solid bulwark against Russia and for maintaining sanctions on Moscow over its annexation of Crimea and support for Ukrainian separatists.

German officials say they are not pressing for a Merkel visit to Washington any time soon because they are so unsure of what the outcome might be.

“If people came with an anxiety level of 9, now they’re at 7,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown professor who was a Europe director in President Obama’s National Security Council. “Everyone recognizes that this is a work in progress, and that there’s a tug of war going on among the key players and no one knows who is going to win.”

Trump officials had to come to Munich, but they were restricted in what they could say because there have been few serious policy reviews so far, Mr. Kupchan said. “We’re witnessing public diplomacy in the service of sorting out internal debates, when normally you have the reverse.”

Thomas Matussek, a former German ambassador to Britain and the United Nations, said that “people will be reassured to some degree, because they want to be,” he said. He contrasted the president and his adviser: “Trump’s not an ideologue, like Bannon, but pretty pragmatic and innovative, subject to discussion.”

That, too, is the view of Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, a London-based research institution. “Trump does not come in with a fixed foreign-policy agenda on many issues, so there is contested space and room for influence and maneuver,” he said, pointing to early “flip-flops” on Israel and NATO. “Trump’s fixated on certain things, like trade and jobs and America’s place in the world, but there seems to be room for influence.”

Artis Pabriks, a former Latvian foreign and defense minister and now a member of the European Parliament, said that he trusted Mr. Mattis and Mr. McCain. Mr. Pabriks applauded the recent introduction of American and other NATO troops into the three Baltic countries and Poland, a policy that he said he expected Mr. Trump to continue.

“But the Cold War was won not just by weapons but by propaganda and soft power,” Mr. Pabriks said. “And on German television, Trump is a joke for everybody. We’re concerned also about American prestige.”

Follow Steven Erlanger on Twitter @StevenErlanger.

Alison Smale contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Worried Europe Leaves a Security Conference Still Unclear on Trump’s Plans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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