Well, We Know How They Feel About Trump

Donald Trump has nations a bit on edge, even America's friends.

Take the Swedes for example. Sweden is a country with Cold War memories. During those dark years when the Soviet Union vied with the United States, Sweden constructed 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters. That's a lot.

Today, of course, the Soviet Union is gone. So too is the United States, at least in the sense that we once knew it. Today it's Putingrad and Trumpville. And that's got the Swedes on edge all over again. They're taking this pretty seriously, even to the point of planning to expand that already extensive network of nuclear fallout shelters.

Swedish authorities figure the existing 65,000 shelters will suffice for a population of seven million only, today, that still leaves three million with not much better than "duck and cover." Officials are now looking to construct new shelters to protect the overage. Swedish shelters are intended to provide protection against the gamut of WMDs - nuclear, biological and chemical.

If you find the Swedes extreme, the Swiss are way ahead of their Scandinavian counterparts. The Swiss have an abundance of shelters, more than enough to house their entire population.

Whereas confidence among Europeans that President Barack Obama would “do the right thing regarding world affairs” ranged between 70 and 90 percent in a number of surveyed nations during his term, those numbers plummeted after Trump’s inauguration and have only gone down since. Only 7 percent in Spain and 11 percent in Germany now say they have confidence in Trump. Top officials in Germany have also directly contradictedTrump’s North Korea policies, and have voiced concerns that the White House may overreact to nuclear provocations and escalate the war rhetoric being exchanged with North Korea.

Europeans are similarly worried that decades-long nonproliferation efforts could be dismantled virtually overnight, leading to a new arms race. In 2009, the Obama administration negotiated a treaty with Russia in which both countries agreed to cap the number of deployed warheads. Trump reportedly called the agreement a bad deal in his first phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year, although administration officials have since backtracked.

Sweden’s new shelter locations indicate that at least some of the concerns are connected to Russia. One of the regions where most new shelters are expected to be constructed in the coming years is the island of Gotland, where military defenses were recently expanded with the declared aim of stopping a possible Russian invasion.