It is time for Europe to wake up to a chilling truth – America has switched sides

The president has this week shown such disregard and contempt for ‘weak’ European allies that it is now beyond doubt what his ambition for the continent really amounts to – a desire to inflict Trumpism upon the wider West, writes Sean O’Grady

What does Donald Trump want from Europeans? It’s a question we didn’t use to have to ask ourselves about American presidents. That was because Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and even George W Bush, whom we used to think a little extreme, were very clear.

They wanted a unified Europe to be a free and strong ally of the United States in Nato, and to stand for “Western values”; to defuse or to win the Cold War, and, in the long term, to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation, albeit while trying to coexist with the Russians.

We did not insult one another, and no US leader ever bothered themselves about who was running London, still less called a mild-mannered mayor “vicious and disgusting”. The very name “Khan” is something that Trump can barely tolerate in his mouth. Imagine, if you possibly can, Ronald Reagan spewing bile about Ken Livingstone back in the day. Try to visualise Jimmy Carter saying that Germany faced “civilisational erasure”, or “Dubya” whingeing about free speech in Sweden.

That world has gone. We need to face up to the full extent of what is happening to us – and what Trump’s America wants and expects in return for even the semblance of military alliance and protection.

Most immediately, Trump wants us to abandon Ukraine and make friends with Vladimir Putin, as if the invasion and the war crimes had never happened – or, as the new US National Security Strategy puts it, “re-establishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia”. We are a continent of “decaying countries” suffering “weak leaders” who “talk too much”. Maybe, but it’s up to us Europeans to vote them in or out. We neither want nor need interference from Washington or Moscow.

‘The collective strength of the European Union is an obvious obstacle to this American power-grab, and so, in a complete reversal of postwar US policy, Trump wants to dismantle it’ (Getty)

He wants us to be more like Trump’s America, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary – Orban being his favourite European. Trump wants us to be more Maga in our attitudes to “DEI”, to immigration, and to “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity”; to restrict migration, renounce climate science, and agree to abide by and adopt American rules and laws. “We want to ensure that US technology and US standards – particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing – drive the world forward.” No wonder they want Brussels neutered.

He would like us, it appears, to legalise incitement to racial and religious hatred in the name of “free speech”. He thinks we should adopt the US first amendment. Maybe we should all have guns, too.

It seems to be of no great interest to Trump what the voters in these little countries want; on the contrary, America will instead support whichever far-right leaders they think will do what Trump wants them to do. This is something the US National Security document describes perfectly explicitly as “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.

If we won’t concede, then we are not worth defending. If we want social media companies to stop spreading race hate and medical disinformation, then we will have to do without American troops and missiles stationed in Europe. We already face tariffs and sanctions if we don’t obey Trump’s wishes; now he is threatening us with Putin.

There is no other way to read it. The collective strength of the European Union is an obvious obstacle to this American power-grab, and so, in a complete reversal of postwar US policy, Trump wants to dismantle it: “We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organisations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.”

We have been warned before. Less than a year ago, the vice-president-elect, JD Vance, came over to the Munich Security Conference – a traditionally cosy get-together for what we used to think of as the “Western allies” – and delivered a blow to the solar plexus of the old order. Slack-jawed, the assembled members of the Western security establishment listened as Vance upended everything that had been done to build solidarity since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941.

Our values are no longer common. Trump’s likely successor stated: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.”

Well, JD, to us it rather feels like it’s our values that are constant, and things in America that have gone awry. So now the threat to the independence of European nations, and the rights of our own peoples, comes also from America, an increasingly hostile state intent on forcing us to adopt Trumpism – with the threat that if we don’t, then they’ll leave us to the mercies of Putin.

We in Europe have been deluding ourselves for too long. The Trump administration has been blunt, and told us that the past is bunk: “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

America is no longer an ally. America has switched sides. She’s gone. America will not look after us. It won’t help Ukraine, and it could turn its back on anyone. We still imagine that Trump would actually go to war with Russia to save Estonia. It’s absurd. When the president comes over for his banquet at Windsor Castle, or a big parade down the Champs-Elysees, and when the warm words echo around the ancient masonry and the medieval tapestries, we Europeans like to think we are part of something shared.

We fancy that Trump, of Scots and Bavarian heritage, might deep down be amenable, reasonable, and not as bad as folk make out. But then he goes back to Washington and concocts something as vile and treacherous as his National “Security Strategy”, belittles our multicultural societies, and orders us to let American companies break our laws, or else.

In fact, Trump’s values are closer to those of Putin, Xi and the House of Saud than to those of the progressive liberal democracies of Europe. We in Europe are mostly not his natural allies – so why defend us? His Maga movement is being infiltrated by “groypers”, people who think Hitler was “cool” and are as antisemitic as they are proudly Islamophobic. Well, no thank you to that.

America, of its own volition, is rapidly becoming a strategic challenge to Europe, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise. We have to wake up. What does Trump have to do to make us realise things have changed?