Donald Trump's recent gains in some polls in the Middle West and Florida may prove to be a transient phenomenon if the Republican nominee's pro-Russian, anti-NATO stance is hammered home to the regions' large communities of Eastern and Northern European heritage.
The ethnic vote in several battleground states could be decisive in a close election. Nearly 10% of the populations of Wisconsin and Michigan is Polish American. In Pennsylvania the share exceeds 7%; together with the sizeable Ukrainian and Lithuanian American communities it approaches 9%. Polish, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian Americans combined comprise 5% of Ohio's population. Battleground state Florida is nearly 3% Polish American. Finnish Americans are numerous there and in Michigan and Wisconsin.
How much do these figures matter? Scholars have long debated the salience of ethnic ties in voters' preferences. Variables of age, gender, education, income, and generational and psychological distance from the homeland all play a role. As in many other ways, however, this year's presidential campaign is different. One of the two major candidates is propounding views that pose an existential threat to the ancestral homes of millions of Americans.
Trump openly admires Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "strong leader," comparing him favorably to President Obama. Trump avoids condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including its annexation of Crimea. At the Republican convention in Cleveland his operatives forced a change in the party platform, stripping out a call for "providing lethal defensive weapons" to Ukraine and replacing it with softer language calling for "appropriate assistance." Trump has pooh-poohed the U.S. intelligence community consensus that Russia hacked into the emails of the Democratic National Committee.
One of the many reasons that Trump refuses to make public his income tax returns may be that they would reveal extensive business interests in Russia. He has surrounded himself with pro-Moscow advisors, some of whom have their own intimate professional and personal ties to Russia. A few days ago in an interview with Russia's propagandistic network RT he blasted the American media for being "unbelievably dishonest."
Meanwhile, the object of Trump's admiration, Vladimir Putin, has utilized his invasions of Georgia and Ukraine as a threat to NATO members on Russia's western borders - especially Poland and the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- and to militarily non-aligned NATO partner countries Finland and Sweden.
Unsubtle tactics include a dramatic increase in Russian military probing along the borders of the Baltic countries. NATO fighter aircraft have scrambled hundreds of times to intercept Russian bombers and fighters over northern Europe. Last year Russia carried out a massive snap military maneuver of more than 80,000 troops, tanks, and aircraft. Russian military jets with their transponders turned off have buzzed commercial aircraft in flight near Copenhagen and have shot flares at Swedish Air Force planes. Russia has made submarine incursions into Swedish and Finnish waters and even simulated an attack on the Danish island of Bornholm.
These provocations, along with extremely bellicose Kremlin verbal threats prompted NATO at its July summit in Warsaw to order the deployment of four rotating battalion-sized units to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, including American forces. At the Warsaw summit officials from Sweden and Finland were included for the first time in discussions of alliance policy toward Russia.
What is Trump's view of NATO? In a March 2016 meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post Trump said that U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years. "We certainly can't afford to do this anymore," Trump said, adding later, "NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money."
In a Bloomberg interview Trump declared "I think NATO may be obsolete. ... NATO was set up a long time ago, many, many years ago. Things are different now."
To be sure burden sharing has been a persistent theme in NATO deliberations, but Trump's purely transactional approach to the alliance neglects solemn U.S. commitments and direct benefits to the United States, and understates European members' contributions to the organization.
Support for NATO has been a bipartisan cause in Congress since the organization's founding in 1949. After the Cold War, Republicans were in the lead in advocating NATO enlargement as shown by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's inclusion of it in his 1994 "Contract with America." In 1998 in the Senate's 80-19 vote for admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO both parties split 4 to 1 in favor, but Republican support was more solid; several Democrats came around only after strenuous lobbying by Joe Biden, who was the bill's floor manager.
That was then; this is now. In July, Gingrich cynically dismissed NATO member Estonia as being in the "suburbs of St. Petersburg" -- a metaphor for the GOP's abandonment of principle at the altar of Trump. Meanwhile Trump continues his adulation of Putin. All this has led the Latvian journalist Dainis Ivans to fear a "Putin-RibbenTRUMP Pact."
Hillary Clinton, a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been a consistent and outspoken supporter of NATO and of U.S. solidarity with its allies. She has no illusions about Putin's threat to Eastern and Northern Europe countries, whose leaders privately are in despair over Trump's pro-Russian statements.
Many leaders of ethnic communities in the U.S. share these apprehensions, but the Central and East European Coalition, which represents more than 20 million Americans, wants to preserve its non-endorsement policy. Recently, however, it issued a policy paper welcoming the Obama administration's plans to increase funding for the region and to preposition military equipment in Eastern Europe, and calling for establishing permanent NATO bases in the alliance's eastern member states to counter potential Russian aggression.
In the next eight weeks the Clinton campaign would do well to target ethnic voters in battleground states, emphasizing the fundamental threat to the countries of their ancestors that a Trump presidency would constitute.
Michael Haltzel, former foreign policy advisor to Vice President (then-Senator) Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.