Leaders across Europe are waking up to an increasing sense that Trump has hung them out to dry
WASHINGTON DC – For the first time in eight decades, European leaders are beginning a new week fully aware that the United States officially no longer has their backs.
That realisation, first sparked by the publication on Friday of Donald Trump’s dramatic national security strategy, was further underscored by the Kremlin’s reaction to it.
After reviewing the 29-page document, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, gave it Russia’s seal of approval on Sunday, describing it as “largely consistent with our vision”.
The extent to which Trump is ditching the post-Second World War transatlantic alliance is laid out in stark, black-and-white print across a mere two-and-a-half pages of the document, in which it attacks Europe for an “economic decline… eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure”.
In the White House’s telling, the UK and its European neighbours have allowed their national identities to atrophy under the weight of unconstrained immigration, have censored free speech, suppressed opposition parties and lost confidence in their own governing system.
The document ignores the fact that Europe is dominated by democracies that have shared America’s post-war vision of expanding free societies, promoting human rights and taking a stand against dictatorships.
None of that matters to Washington anymore. In fact, the first reference to “democracy” only appears on page 16 of Trump’s strategy, and only three times during the entire document.
Former US president Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city upon a hill” – a beacon of freedom and democracy for other societies to emulate – is being formally eviscerated by Trump.
The document declares: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
Little wonder that Putin is celebrating its release.
Meanwhile, Europe is being told in no uncertain terms that it has no future unless it allows the continent’s more right-wing parties a larger say in government.
The US wants to work with European countries “that want to restore their former greatness”, the national security strategy says, and for that to happen: “Europe must correct its current trajectory… the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”.
It is, in other words, now official US policy that “patriotic” European parties – presumably with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK serving as one prime exemplar – are America’s choice for leading Europe.
Less than three months after Trump waxed lyrical about the Magna Carta during his toast to the King at Windsor Castle – and called the US and UK “two notes in one chord” – his strategy document strikes a deeply dissonant note.
Nato is essentially deemed irrelevant, with Trump arguing that “within a few decades at least” mass immigration will lead “certain Nato members to become majority non-European”.
Trump also warned Europe that he will prevent further Nato expansion, and will, in effect, require the continent’s capitulation to Putin in order to establish “strategic stability with Russia”. Ukraine has been put on notice that “the Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war”.
Asked about the pledge in the document to end “the perception, and preventing the reality, of Nato as a perpetually expanding alliance”, Peskov said it was encouraging.
While the Trump administration’s national security strategy is – in equal measure – unprecedented and horrifying to officials who have viewed the transatlantic alliance as the touchstone for peace and democracy in Europe since 1945, it is also hugely clarifying, which I guess is something.
The document incinerates decades of American diplomacy, along with all talk of “special relationships” between Washington and current governments in Europe, including Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government.
Elon Musk, briefly part of Trump’s inner circle, spent the weekend on social media condemning European governments. He called for the abolition of the European Union, said “the people of Europe should withdraw from the EU to regain their sovereignty” and accused the bloc of “slowly smothering Europe to death”.
Meanwhile, Christopher Landau, Trump’s deputy Secretary of State, said the US “cannot pretend that we are partners while allowing the EU’s unelected and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilisational suicide”.
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No wonder the Kremlin loves the new strategy, and the further divisions it is likely to sow.
No 10 and the Foreign Office must now come to terms with the fact that the party is officially over. The White House is binning any pretence that it seeks partnership and comity with incumbent governments. Rather, it wants to actively lay the groundwork for them to be replaced by “patriotic” opposition parties that Trump believes are uniquely placed to restore European greatness, and also bend the continent to his will.
Leaders across Europe are waking up to an increasing sense that Trump and his Maga movement have hung them out to dry.
