Alyssa Slotkin

We need as many friends as we can have.

And alienating our friends is actually bad for our national security.

There's another side of the Trump foreign policy that has actually been quite effective.

And actually, if you speak to some of the peoples in the room, they said that, yes, it's true, Europe has not been paying its way.

And we should say that that's something that the United States has put pressure on since Obama, but it has never really delivered a change.

until this sort of very aggressive policy do you think that there is something to that that you needed a sort of trump level event in order to get that out of europe well look i wish it wasn't done in the way it was done but i used to come here as a pentagon official and a cia officer come to munich and say please do more please invest more in your own defense the russians aren't just a threat to us they're a threat to you they're your neighbors

And we got the like, well, it's nice to see you, very diplomatic.

And unfortunately, the lesson that's been taught is if you club your allies over the head, they will eventually give you something more.

I don't want that to be the lesson, but I have to admit that's what's happened.

I mean, Putin has helped too, but I think that's not the way we want to proceed.

We want people to pay their way.

And a place that potentially the Trump administration does need help from the Europeans is on this question of China, potentially a collective approach.

There have been some high-level meetings on critical raw materials that have been underway at the moment.

Do you see a sort of scope for cooperation with the Europeans on the question of China?

Do you think there's more sort of space that they could occupy sort of together with the United States?

I think there's a ton of room for cooperation with the Europeans vis-a-vis China, but we have to have our house in order in the United States on what we want out of China.

And as someone who's from a car manufacturing state, every day I'm confused, right?

We have more tariffs right now on Canada than we do on China.

One day we're all about Buy America, the next day Donald Trump's talking about letting in Chinese electric vehicles into the United States.

So we got to get our house in order, and I understand why Europeans would be hedging