A few weeks ago, I warned that a second Trump administration could squander the tolerance and goodwill from the world’s great democracies that Washington has long enjoyed. Instead of viewing the United States as a largely positive force in world affairs, these countries may now "have to worry that the United States is actively malevolent". This article was written before Vice President J. D. Vance gave his confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, before President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and before U.S. officials looked set to preemptively offer Russia almost everything it wants before talks on Ukraine even began. The reaction of mainstream European observers was aptly summed up by Gideon Rahman in the Financial Times: "The Trump administration's political ambitions for Europe mean that, at this stage, America is also an adversary".
Is this view correct? Skeptics may recall that there have been serious ruptures in the transatlantic partnership on many previous occasions: over the Suez Canal in 1956, over nuclear strategy and Vietnam in the 1960s, over the issue of missiles in Europe in the 1980s, and during the Kosovo war in 1999. The Iraq war in 2003 was another low point between Washington and much of Europe. The United States has not hesitated to act unilaterally on many occasions, even when its allies' interests were adversely affected, as Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971. or as Joe Biden did when he signed the protectionist Inflation Reduction Act and the United States forced European firms to stop exporting some high-tech products to China. But few Europeans or Canadians believed that the United States was deliberately trying to harm them. They believed that Washington was genuinely committed to their security and understood that its own security and prosperity were linked to theirs. They were right, which made it much easier for the United States to win their support when needed.
For most European leaders - and certainly those who attended the Munich Conference - the situation looks very different today. For the first time since 1949, they have good reason to believe that the president of the United States is not simply indifferent to NATO and dismissive of European leaders, but actively hostile to most European countries. Instead of thinking of the nations of Europe as America’s most important partners, Trump seems to have switched sides and sees President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a better long-term bet. Speculation about Trump’s affinity for Putin has been swirling for years, and those sympathies now seem to be guiding U.S. policy.
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t Trump simply doing what realists like you suggest? Didn’t you say that Ukraine has no plausible path to regaining lost territory and that prolonging the war is simply prolonging suffering to no good purpose? Didn’t you also argue that basing a European security order on an unlimited expansion of NATO is a dangerous pipe dream? Instead of pushing Russia and China closer together, doesn’t it make good strategic sense to drive a wedge between them and create a European order that reduces Moscow’s incentives to cause trouble? Indeed, wouldn’t better relations with Russia make Europe safer in the long run? And if the breakdown of the comfortable transatlantic consensus persuades the nations of Europe to come together and rebuild some real defense capacity, then the United States would no longer have to defend them and could focus more of its efforts on China. In this view, Trump is not an enemy of Europe; he is simply giving some tough love to the complacent continent and following good realist logic.
If only that were true. In fact, Trump, Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other administration officials have moved beyond longstanding arguments about burden-sharing, the need for a more sensible division of responsibilities within the Alliance, or a long-overdue reassessment of how to handle the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia. Their goal is to fundamentally transform relations with longtime U.S. allies, rewrite the global rulebook, and, if possible, reshape Europe along MAGA lines. This agenda is openly hostile to the existing European order.
First, Trump’s repeated threats to impose steep tariffs on close allies, either to force them to make concessions on other issues or simply because they have trade surpluses with the United States, are hardly an act of friendship. Of course, there have been serious trade disputes with American allies in the past, and previous American presidents have acted tough on these issues. But they have not done so on a whim, and they have not used transparently dubious “national security” arguments to justify them. They have also recognized that deliberately inflicting economic harm on one’s allies makes it harder, not easier, for them to contribute to the common defense. Past administrations have also been intent on sticking to the deals they have negotiated, a concept that seems completely alien to Trump.
Second, Trump has not only made it clear that he believes great powers can and should take what they want, but he has made no secret of the fact that he covets some of the possessions of America’s allies. No wonder Trump doesn’t mind if Russia ends up with 20 percent of Ukraine, considering that he wants all of Greenland; could reoccupy the Panama Canal Zone; thinks Canada should give up its independence and become the 51st state of the United States; raves about taking over the Gaza Strip, evicting the population, and then building hotels. Some of these musings may seem completely fantastical, but the worldview they reveal is something no foreign leader can afford to ignore.
Third and most important, Trump, Elon Musk, Vance, and the rest of the MAGA crew are openly supporting illiberal forces in Europe. In effect, they are trying to impose broad-based regime change across Europe, albeit without the use of military force. The signs are unmistakable: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a welcome guest at Mar-a-Lago. Vance met with Alice Weidel, co-chair of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, while in Munich, but not with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and his statement that the main challenge facing Europe is the “threat from within” was an undisguised attack on the continent’s political order. (It was more than ironic that Vance would criticize Europeans for anti-democratic behavior, given his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election or condemn the January 6 rioters. Not to be outdone, Musk has been spewing his own false and hateful accusations at various European leaders, defending far-right criminals like Tommy Robinson and interviewing Weidel and expressing his own support for her party.
Despite some differences on certain issues, the MAGA movement and most far-right parties in Europe generally oppose almost all forms of immigration; they are skeptical, even hostile, to the European Union; they see elites, the media, and higher education as the enemy; they want to reimpose traditional religious values and gender norms; they believe that citizenship should be defined by shared ethnicity or ancestry, not shared civic values or birthplace. Like their fascist predecessors, they are comfortable and skillfully using the norms and institutions of democracy to undermine democratic governance and strengthen executive power. Does this sound familiar?
The assessment that the United States is now an adversary of Europe is therefore only partly correct, since Trump and his minions support European far-right nationalist movements that share their basic worldview. They are hostile to the vision of Europe as a model of democratic governance, social welfare, openness, the rule of law, political, social and religious tolerance, and transnational cooperation. One could even say that they would like America and Europe to have similar values; the problem is that the values they have in mind are incompatible with true democracy.
Trump and his co. believe that treating Europe as an enemy risks little because they believe that Europe is a declining region and incapable of acting with one voice. Undermining efforts to strengthen European unity by supporting the far right also makes it easier for Washington to play the "divide and rule" game. On the other hand, overt bullying of other countries tends to foster national unity and a greater willingness to resist (as we are now seeing in Canada), and the chaos that Trump and Musk have unleashed in the United States itself may make Europeans wary of trying similar experiments at home.
It is also worth recalling that the initial push for European economic integration occurred in the 1950s, when European leaders believed that the United States would withdraw its forces from the continent in the not-too-distant future and return responsibility for European security back to these countries. Thus, the integration of key industries such as coal and steel was a first step toward building sufficient economic and political unity to allow these countries to confront the Soviet Union without direct U.S. assistance. The United States ultimately decided to keep its forces on the continent, and the European Economic Community (and later the EU) took on more overt economic and political goals, but early history reminds us that the prospect of having to go it alone was once a powerful driving force behind greater European cooperation.
Finally, if America is now an adversary, European leaders should stop asking what they need to do to keep Uncle Sam happy and start asking what they need to do to protect themselves. If I were them, I would start by inviting more trade delegations from China and start developing alternatives to the SWIFT system for international financial payments. European universities should increase their efforts at collaborative research with Chinese institutions, a step that will become even more attractive if Trump and Musk continue to damage academia and institutions in the United States; to end Europe's dependence on American weapons by rebuilding Europe's own defense industrial base; to send EU Foreign Affairs High Representative Kaia Kallas to the next BRICS summit and to consider applying for membership. And so on.
Since all of these steps would be costly for Europe and damaging for the United States, I do not want to see any of them happen. But Europe may have little choice. Although I have long believed that the transatlantic relationship has passed its peak and that a new division of responsibilities is needed, the goal should have been to maintain a high level of transatlantic friendship, rather than to foster open hostility. If Trump's diplomatic revolution turns 450 million Europeans from some of America's most loyal allies into bitter and resentful adversaries who increasingly seek ways to hinder the United States, Americans will have only themselves to blame, or rather the current president.
Authored by Stephen Walt, a journalist at the American magazine Foreign Policy, and Rene Belfer, a professor of international relations at Harvard University