Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office. The group chat shows their shared animus against “European freeloading.” Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
Trump officials have demanded more European military spending and questioned the continent’s values. Leaked messages show the depth of the rift.
Trump administration officials haven’t kept their disdain for Europe quiet. But the contempt seems to be even louder behind closed doors.
Europeans reacted with a mix of exasperation and anger to the publication of parts of a discussion between top-ranking Trump administration officials, carried out on the messaging app Signal. The discussion, about a planned strike on Yemen, was replete with comments that painted Europeans as geopolitical parasites, and was revealed Monday in The Atlantic, whose editor was inadvertently included in the conversation.
“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again,” wrote Vice-President JD Vance, asserting that the strikes would benefit Europe far more than the United States.
“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later replied. “It’s PATHETIC.”
The exchange seemed to show real feelings and judgments – that the Europeans are mooching and that any US military action, no matter how clearly in American interests as well, should be somehow paid for by other beneficiaries.
A member of the chat identified as “SM,” and believed to be Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Donald Trump, suggested that both Egypt and “Europe” should compensate the United States for the operation. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM wrote.
There was no official request from European Union officials that the United States carry out the strike in Yemen – they were simply informed, said a European diplomat and a European official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic conversations. There have also been no conversations with high-level policymakers about remuneration, according to the diplomat.
The apparent disregard by administration officials of security protocols by having a discussion that included operational details on a consumer chat app, even an encrypted one, prompted concern that Russia and China could be listening in.
“Putin is now unemployed: No point in spying anymore,” Nathalie Loiseau, a member of European Parliament, wrote on the social platform X, saying the leaks now came from the Americans themselves. “No point in crushing Ukraine anymore, Trump will take care of it.”
The commentary in the exchange is the latest blow to one of the world’s most storied alliances, which took generations to build and strengthen but which the Trump administration has managed to weaken in mere weeks.
“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top EU official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”
The European Union is, in many ways, the antithesis of the principles that Trump and his colleagues are championing. The bloc is built around an embrace of international trade based on rules. It has been at the forefront of climate-related regulation and social media user protections.
Europe has been on alert ever since Vance delivered a speech at a security conference in Munich last month that questioned European values and its democracy and shocked European leaders. He followed that up by warning that Europe was at risk of “civilisational suicide”.
If the relationship between the United States and Europe were merely transactional, it would be relatively easy for Europeans to just spend more on the military and give Trump some sort of victory, said François Heisbourg, a French analyst and former defence official.
But in Vance’s speech attacking European democracy in Munich, let alone in the newly public exchange, the distaste for Europe is about more than transactions.
“Vance was quite clear: We don’t share the same values,” Heisbourg said.
He and others, such as Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the US depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts”.
China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Bab el Mandeb Strait and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Tocci noted.
For months, Washington has been sending barbed statements and actions Europe’s way.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, even as European leaders warn that they will defend territorial integrity. Usha Vance, JD Vance’s wife, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, are visiting the island this week, uninvited, its Government says, and to an agitated response.
Trump has also repeatedly warned that Europe must pay much more for its own defence, threatening not to come to the aid of nations that do not pay up sufficiently, and has pivoted sharply away from Ukraine. He has simultaneously rolled out plans to slap hefty tariffs on Europe and argued that the EU was created to “screw” America.
Christel Schaldemose, a Danish politician who is a centre-left member of the European Parliament, said the way the US has been talking about the EU in general lately is “not helping”.
“Could we start talking to each other as allies and not enemies?” she said.
Even as European leaders try to maintain the friendship, they are racing to try to bolster their defence expenditures, cognisant that it would be nearly impossible to replace US military capabilities overnight.
They are meeting Thursday in Paris to discuss Ukraine, and Nato foreign ministers meet early next month to discuss progress.
They are also scrambling to strike a trade deal with the United States, with the EU trade commissioner headed to Washington on Tuesday to talk with his US counterparts.
But with America’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Europe, the Continent’s officials are contemplating a future where the prized relationship stretching across the Atlantic, a foundation upon which decades of relative peace and prosperity have been built, might never be the same.
“The international order is undergoing changes of a magnitude not seen since 1945,” Kaja Kallas, the top EU diplomat, said last week, echoing a line from the bloc’s defence preparedness plan, which is meant to help Europe to become more militarily independent.
Splintering from the United States is an expensive prospect. The EU has already unveiled an initiative that could be worth €800 billion (about $1.5 trillion) to help European nations achieve desired military spending levels.
Still, the group chat leak underscores why a divorce may be necessary: the United States is not the reliable ally it once was, either rhetorically or practically.
It is highly unusual and possibly illegal for sensitive military plans to be discussed on a messaging app, rather than by a more secure means of communication.
That disregard for normal security procedures will “cause allies to be very reluctant to share analysis and intelligence,” said Ben Hodges, former commander of US forces in Europe. Barring major change, people “will assume America can’t be trusted”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jeanna Smialek and Steven Erlanger
Photographs by: Doug Mills
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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