‘Stop sucking up to Trump’: US threat to meddle in Europe is fuelling pressure for a collective push-back | World news

A.A new nine-country poll last week found that almost half of EU citizens see Donald Trump as an enemy of Europe. The survey conducted for the French discussion platform Le Grand Continent revealed that Trumpism is seen as a “hostile force” across Europe.

The new US foreign policy doctrine released by the White House on Friday will have increased these participants’ worst fears. The 30-page National Security Strategy hit Europe like a bomb. And citizens may have confronted their political leaders to understand what Trump’s worldview might mean for Europeans.

The strategy outlines a radical departure from the ethos that undergirds the Atlantic alliance, the doctrine that has linked the United States to Europe since World War II. The US now frames the EU, the continent’s core political community, as a legitimate target for ideological warfare.

Its most surprising axis is the threat to directly intervene in the “development of resistance” in Europe and to restore the supposedly lost national sovereignty of the EU’s embattled nations.

This is not just the usual threats to withdraw troops or for Europe to spend more money on its own defence. This suggests that the Trump administration wants to help “patriotic” far-right parties come to power while legitimizing racist conspiracy theories. He makes the extraordinary claim that Europe risks “civilization erasure” if “non-European” immigration is allowed to continue.

This strategy means that Europe must now view the United States as a “willing enemy,” according to Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, an expert on far-right extremism. Writing in the Guardian, Mudde said: “Perhaps now that it has been published in an official document, European leaders will finally realize that ‘the father’ is serious… The current US government believes that its national security is best ensured by the destruction of liberal democracy in Europe.”

Trump doubled down on Tuesday, using an interview with Politico to once again expose “decaying” European countries and their “politically correct” leaders whose immigration policies are “destroying” their countries. He particularly complained about Paris and London: the problem, he thought, was that French and British capitals were becoming less white or, as the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont wrote, “not racist enough”.

Compelling results

The US military and political alliance with Europe is clearly in crisis.

In an opinion piece published Monday, Georg Riekeles and Varg Folkman predicted that as Washington retreats militarily, it will increasingly use other coercive tools to reshape Europe in the political direction the United States wants. And not just on trade: As Mudde points out, this could mean that the United States is demanding that the far right’s freedom of expression be protected.

One of the biggest questions to ask, according to Paul Taylor of the European Policy Center, is why Russia is so openly embraced but not mentioned as a threat. Is there a longer game that involves luring in Vladimir Putin to isolate China? Are influential US interests looking for attractive business deals? In both cases, the document was warmly welcomed by the Kremlin.

But the reaction of European governments was muted (at least in public). Leaders have deferred to Trump for months, desperate to keep him preoccupied with the defense of Ukraine and avoiding any peace plan that wouldn’t harm their security (or provoke another trade war), and appear incapable of talking. Germany’s Friedrich Merz went further and said he underlined the need for a more independent European security policy.

The White House’s efforts to force Ukraine into a bad “peace” deal may be entering another treacherous phase. But Washington’s priority is not a European security architecture that will protect Ukraine from future Russian invasion – the strategy has been made clear. This is the desire to “quickly cease hostilities” and “reestablish strategic stability with Russia.”

Those words (combined with the accusation that Europe is not interested in making peace with Putin) must have been the elephant in the room as Merz, Starmer and Emmanuel Macron embraced close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday.

In an interview the next day, Trump threatened to leave Ukraine unattended if Zelenskyy did not “play ball” in the talks. Europe has been kept away from directly participating in US-led talks, but it has helped Ukraine side with a dangerous Trump-Putin divide. But Kiev is now running out of money, so Europe urgently needs to find billions to keep Ukraine in the war, either using frozen Russian assets or through joint borrowing.

Meanwhile, Zelenskyy, desperate to prevent a trans-Atlantic rift, said he might hold an election in response to Trump’s accusations that he was using the war to cling to power.

How should Europe react?

This last doctrine could form the basis of US international policy for the remaining years of Trump’s term and for much longer if he is succeeded by vice president J.D. Vance.

As many analysts have told Jon Henley, European democracies urgently need to develop a counterplan to both save Ukraine and future-proof their liberal democracies from Maga-inspired interventions. I just hope Trump embraces driving a wedge The conflict between Europe’s leading far-right parties is a risky strategy. As Timothy Garton Ash implores the continent’s leaders in this column: “How much more clarity do you need?”

Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian Institute of International Relations, believes that Europe has the means to stand on its own to defend Ukraine, even in the short term. “If we get over our learned helplessness and stop fawning over Trump, Europe can prevent Kiev’s capitulation. It will be difficult, but we can do it.”

It might even be possible that Eurocentrist leaders would be in good standing with anxious voters if word gets out that they are now opposing Trump. Le Grand Continent’s survey also showed that 51% of Europeans believed they, too, were in Moscow’s crosshairs, even before Putin’s chilling announcement last week that they were “ready for war with Europe.”

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