The White House is aggressively seeking to weaken and dominate the United States’ traditional allies. European leaders must learn to fight back.
S
ir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on television for an end-of-year Q&A with the German public.
But diplomatic improvisation alone cannot fully answer Donald Trump’s structural threat to European security. The US president and his emissaries are trying to bully Mr Zelenskyy into an unjust peace deal that suits American and Russian interests. In response, the summit helped ramp up support for the use of up to £100bn in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. European counter-proposals for a ceasefire will need to be given the kind of financial backing that provides Mr Zelenskyy with leverage at a critical moment.
More broadly, though, an ominous lead-up to Christmas has underlined the limits to firefighting and turning the other cheek to Maga provocations. The extraordinary national security strategy paper published last week by the White House did European leaders a service in this regard. Brimming with contempt for liberal democratic values, it confirmed the Trump administration’s desire to minimise security guarantees in place since the second world war, while simultaneously pressuring the EU into betraying the principles on which it was founded. This was a “for the record” version of the US vice-president JD Vance’s mocking Munich speech last February. Passages predicting the “civilisational erasure” of Europe through migration and EU integration could have been written in the Kremlin, which duly noted an overlap in worldviews. Ditto the hostile calls to cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s supposed trajectory, and support for “patriotic” nationalist parties. For good measure, Mr Trump echoed “great replacement” conspiracy theory tropes this week in an interview that rammed home the same talking points in less coherent form.
