Unnerved by Trump, European diplomats seek reassurance from Democrats

PHILADELPHIA — Federica Mogherini, an Italian diplomat who serves as the European Union's top foreign policy official, spends most of her time shuttling among Whitehall, the Quai d'Orsay and other elegant bastions of Europe's foreign policy establishment.

But this week, she was in Philadelphia, soldiering through the heat, the traffic and the peculiar rituals of an American political convention. She was one of an unusually large contingent of European officials who came here to watch Hillary Clinton claim the Democratic nomination for president.

There was an undercurrent of quiet desperation in these visitors. They worried that Donald Trump could be elected president and follow through on his threats to end U.S. support for NATO, seek closer ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and rewrite trade deals. Many were craving reassurance that Clinton's campaign was on track.

"Of course we are worried, especially those people from NATO countries," said Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to Washington. "The Americans are the ones who elect their president, but the whole alliance is watching this. We have a lot of skin in the game."

Like many envoys, Wittig spent a day with the Republicans in Cleveland and a day in Philadelphia. He was studiously diplomatic about Trump — calling him a "newcomer and an outsider" — but he said Europeans would be comfortable with Clinton because she was a known quantity.

"She has a record of holding up the alliance," Wittig said. "She has been one of the architects of the pivot to Asia, but the more enlightened among us know that this is not a rebuttal of Europe."

With the Clinton campaign's top officials closeted with the candidate or other Democratic leaders this week, it deputized its outside foreign-policy advisers to meet with Europeans. They delivered some variation of the message that, as one adviser, R. Nicholas Burns, put it, "The Trump phenomenon is real, but Hillary Clinton is going to win the election."

Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, spent Thursday in a round of meetings with officials and journalists.

"I never thought my role would be to reassure Europeans," she said.

['I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard,' Trump says of Democratic convention]

Like many foreign policy experts, Smith expected the 2016 election to pit Clinton against a more traditional Republican — one who might have accused her of being too soft on Russia, for example.

Instead, she is facing a candidate who declared this week that Putin was "a better leader" than President Barack Obama and that he hoped Russia's intelligence services had successfully hacked Clinton's computer and would release her emails.

Even before those statements, Trump's political rise alarmed foreign leaders. Obama said in May that his counterparts at summit meetings were "rattled" by Trump's candidacy. During his speech Wednesday, in one of his few ad-libs, Obama exclaimed, "I have to say this. People outside of the United States do not understand what's going on in this election. They really don't."

Those low-grade concerns spiked last week after Trump questioned whether the United States would come to the defense of the Baltic States if they were attacked, an obligation under the NATO treaty.

"The East Europeans believe they are living on a razor's edge," Burns said. "They are really worried about Trump."

Madeleine K. Albright, a secretary of state in the Clinton administration who is advising Clinton, recently returned from a trip to Britain. She told a friend that she was stunned to discover that people wanted to talk more about Trump than about the British vote to leave the European Union.

On Tuesday, addressing the convention, Albright said Trump had "done damage just by running for president" and that he had weakened America's standing "by threatening to walk away from our friends and allies." On the other hand, she said, Clinton recognized the role of America in Europe on a 1996 visit to Prague, Albright's birthplace, where she gave the first lady a tour.

Lest anyone forget Clinton's commitment to NATO, the Clinton campaign scattered the convention with reminders. Among the speakers on the final night was Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan and is now retired. Clinton's running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, spoke of his elder son, Nat, a Marine, who had just deployed to Europe "to protect and defend the very NATO allies that Donald Trump now says he would abandon."

These messages were soothing, if not especially surprising, to the foreign visitors who know Clinton well. They were more interested in signs that her campaign was steady as she headed into the general election. Wittig said many of his European colleagues believed that the race was either too close to call or that Trump held a slight lead.

Burns, a former ambassador to NATO, said Europeans needed to adjust to the idea that Americans are questioning their engagement in the world. Isolationist sentiment, he said, was growing on the right and left. But Clinton symbolizes a traditional commitment to national defense — political ground usually claimed by Republican candidates.

For Mogherini, electing Clinton was a matter of self-interest on both sides.

"I don't think the U.S. could afford giving up its engagement with the rest of the world, and in particular its friendship and natural partnership with Europe," she said. "That would go against U.S. interests."

"Here in Philadelphia," she added, "I've seen a genuine willingness to stay engaged."