Following Washington’s recent attempt to effectively redraw the map of Europe, the continent’s leaders are saying the quiet part out loud to US President Donald Trump.
Despite its proclaimed focus on domestic affairs, Mr Trump’s “America First” administration has a lot to say about Europe’s future, prompting many to ask why it is so deeply enmeshed in the continent’s politics.
Its overreach in the first weeks of this year has even spurred the nationalist right – which should be both an ally of, and nurtured by, Mr Trump – to push back. From the Sweden Democrats to Germany’s AfD to Britain’s Nigel Farage, the US President has been under fire from his ideological allies on this side of the Atlantic.
Is this a rupture, and is it the state of things to come? I’d put it differently. It shows the limits to Mr Trump’s efforts to get other countries to align with his song sheet.
America has as much to lose from roughhousing the establishment cohort of European leaders as it has to gain from the rise of outsiders who seek to break the system from the same end of the political spectrum. But in terms of raw politics, Mr Trump became impossible to defend even among Europe’s disruptors, when he pushed to acquire Greenland from Denmark and then derided more than a decade of European frontline troop deployments to Afghanistan under the Nato flag.
Mr Farage remarked that Mr Trump was wrong on the troop issue. “We stayed by America for the whole 20 years, we proportionately spent the same money as America, we lost the same number of lives as America, pro-rata, and the same applies to Denmark and other countries too, so it is not quite fair,” he said.
AfD leader Alice Weidel was equally blunt over Greenland. “Donald Trump has violated a fundamental campaign promise – namely, not to interfere in other countries,” she declared.
Jordan Bardella, the French nationalist, was triggered by the US President’s threat of tariffs on Europe. He backed the so-called European bazooka response of retaliatory trade measures against the US. He also called for the scrapping of the EU’s trade deal with Washington for good measure.
It is almost a year since US Vice President JD Vance set out the Trump manifesto on Europe. By diagnosing a dying civilisation, trapped in its own cycle of ethnic, cultural and economic decline, the White House offered a route map for the rise to power of all the aforementioned movements and more.
There are several mentions of Europe in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document released last month. The most pertinent is the first: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilisational self-confidence and western identity.”
That is an agenda-setting declaration. But it must now be placed alongside the stirring of resistance from the centrist and mainstream leaders who run Europe.
Until recently, despite the clash of perspectives, the White House would have taken satisfaction from the rolodex of leaders who jockeyed to take on the role of “Trump whisperer”.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have been the most able to defray the hard edges of the American President’s impulses. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer held two phone calls with Mr Trump in one week, with one not going so well and another securing a rare Truth Social backdown from the US President, praising the fighting spirit of the UK troops in Afghanistan and beyond.
Meanwhile Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, the epitome of a centrist European politician, has commonly been seen as the defuser-in-chief – even though his references to Mr Trump as “Daddy” were toe-curling. There has also been a hardcore Trump-friendly fringe to hold the line among the Europeans, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico being prime examples.
Interestingly, aspirational nationalist insurgents from the fringes of the big European countries have had a tricker job staying onside with the Trump agenda, without appearing to collude with a US President prone to rubbishing Europe as a global pygmy.
In fostering the ideal of American separatism, Mr Trump has created brands such as “Maga” (which, in the continent, would translate to “Mega” – or Make Europe Great Again) and taglines for a new type of politics. But to be taken seriously in Europe, the Americans need either a pliable set of established powerbrokers willing to fall in line or an ideological group of outliers to push their agenda.
Alienation on both sides of the European coin is poor politics, even if there will continue to be common themes where both sides come together.
The changing footprint of American power and sway in Europe is one thing. The outright diminishing of US influence could yet be the accidental outcome of how America interacts with its nominally allied partners.
