The United States has decided to declare a political and rhetorical war against the European Union. This is the first time a US administration has openly stated that He wants the destruction of the EUAnd it does so from an official document. The National Security Strategy 2025, published last week, is a radical attack on a political project that represents everything Donald Trump detests: surrender of sovereignty, regulation, and the obligatory search for consensus.
Transatlantic misunderstanding has always been present. Historian Timothy Garton Ash recounts in one of his books on transatlantic relations how George W. Bush invited three European thinkers (three Britons, to be more precise) before his first trip to the EU as President of the United States and asked them: "Do we want Europe to move forward?" When the three guests said yes, Bush responded with a smile, pretending to joke. Madeleine Albright's team—Albright being Secretary of State under Bill Clinton and Czech by birth—referred to the entire confusing European institutional framework as "the Euromerder."
Now, however, the US administration is going even further and officially asserting that Europe risks seeing "its civilization wiped out." The EU is a threat because, for Trump, it is much easier to intimidate friends than enemies. The White House's European strategy involves reaching an understanding with Vladimir Putin and strengthening far-right governments throughout the Union. It claims that Washington should "cultivate resistance" within EU member states and that far-right "patriotic parties" represent Europe's hope. We are facing a historic rupture. "A democratic taboo has been broken," declared former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt in the heat of the moment. In contrast, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and former Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, downplayed the EU's outrage by reiterating that the United States remains the EU's "main ally," even though "we don't always agree on various issues."
Europe has a long history of its own divisions. You don't need Donald Trump for that. But Kallas's words remind us, once again, that there is a Europe that feels Putin's breath very closely and the existential need to endure and minimize Trump's humiliations. It is an EU that feels vulnerable and is convinced that Europe alone is not enough. But, on the other hand, it turns a blind eye to the complicity between Washington and Moscow in attacking the Union. A paradox that is becoming untenable.
The credibility of the European Union, even its survival as a supranational political construct, is at stake. Washington's strategy is to destabilize European democracies, intensify efforts to hollow out the EU from within, and simultaneously pressure the EU to open its markets to American goods and services and eliminate restrictions on Silicon Valley tech giants operating within its borders.
For the White House, classic interventionism and digital interference go hand in hand. Trump embraces the Monroe Doctrine to make it clear that the United States will not tolerate any foreign interference in the Americas. Classic Washington's spheres of influence over Latin America are back, while it allows itself to interfere directly in the European democratic system, in a clear alliance between American political and technological power. That's why Secretary of State Marco Rubio considered the €120 million fine imposed by the European Commission on Friday on Elon Musk's social network, for a lack of transparency in advertising and the white-label certification of some accounts, "not just an attack on X, but an attack on all American tech platforms." For his part, Musk called for the dissolution of the European Union in a tweet. These are the same tech giants that exploit internal disloyalty among European partners to evade taxes from Ireland or the Netherlands.
"How much abuse of power are US allies willing to tolerate?" asks the US weekly this week. Foreign Affairs Political scientists Robert E. Kelly and Paul Poast argue that the answer must come from certain European capitals, and it cannot be delayed. If Donald Trump's United States has decided to declare itself an adversary of this Europe, the EU member states are obligated to decide who their main partner is and what their Union truly is. Trump is positioning himself as the catalyst for a disintegrating force pushing from within.
