US President Donald Trump meets Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Finnish President Alexander Stubb at the White House in August. Photo / Tom Brenner, The Washington Post
A new United States national security strategy berating Europe has triggered a wave of acrimony across the Atlantic, enraging and dismaying European officials who say the document has turned the Trump Administration’s vitriol against European democracies into formal policy.
In an interview with Politico, conducted on Tuesday and published yesterday, United States President Donald Trump said Europe was “decaying” and “weak” on immigration and Ukraine.
“Most European nations, they’re decaying,” Trump said. On Europe’s leaders he said there were “some real stupid ones”.
It capped a rocky week for transatlantic relations now at their lowest point since Trump returned to the White House in January.
Trump’s push to halt the war in Ukraine on terms favourable to Russia and the European Union’s announcement late last week of a roughly US$140 million fine against X for violating the bloc’s digital rules, have fuelled the fire.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, is calling for the EU to be abolished, and Trump supporters are railing against the 27-nation bloc.
European officials describe the regulations as a matter of sovereignty and say they are trying to stop abuses by behemoth American technology companies.
Tensions erupted after the US strategy painted the EU as a bigger threat than Russia or China and said Europe risks “civilisational erasure” because of immigrants and progressive social policies.
The document lays bare the depth of the rift in the 80-year-old Western alliance, European officials and analysts say and serves as proof that European nations should strive for greater military independence.
In one snarky retort, Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski, wrote that gun deaths are “an interesting metric of erasure”, noting there were nearly seven times as many per year in the US as in the EU.
Other commentators have directed their ire at American food products banned in Europe because of chemical additives.
From the start of Trump’s term, the President’s inner circle has bashed Europe.
Vice-President JD Vance delivered the first broadside in February in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he accused European governments of censoring political opponents, especially the far right, by restricting hate speech, and he alleged that they had created “horrors” by accepting too many immigrants. There have also been disputes over tariffs and regulation.
“Now it’s clear, Vance’s speech in Munich and the many tweets of President Trump have become official doctrine of the United States, and we must act accordingly,” European Council President Antonio Costa said at an event in Paris on Tuesday.
Costa urged Europe to understand that “post-World War II alliances have changed” and to get ready to “protect ourselves not only against our adversaries, but also against the allies who challenge us”.
Efforts by European leaders to cajole Trump - reaching a deal on tariffs, agreeing to increase military spending, and taking over military and financial support of Ukraine - appear to have done little to change the views within his Administration.
The security document put it in writing.
“There is a growing recognition that their strategy did not work,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute for International Affairs and a former EU foreign policy adviser.
“It’s becoming clearer that, obviously, it’s expressed by the Trump Administration, but there seems to be a bigger Maga sort of worldview in which Europe is identified as Public Enemy No. 1.”
Tocci said the US strategy describes the continent as “the only world region apparently in which democracy is under threat”; echoes the “great replacement” theory - a baseless claim that white populations are deliberately being replaced by non-white immigrants; and “buys into a narrative” on Russia, which has blamed Europeans for its war in Ukraine.
“The whole thing is completely, I mean, off the bender,” she said.
The US strategy’s embrace of European nationalist parties, and its promise of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, also drew pushback.
“What we cannot accept is this threat of interference in Europe’s political life,” Costa said in some of the most forceful comments from the bloc’s top echelons.
Former EU commissioner Thierry Breton shared the sentiments, saying that the “very shocking” document puts it “in black and white” that the White House sees European institutions “as an enemy” it wants to “destabilise”.
Breton said the Administration seems to want a “Europe that will be much more fragmented and so, evidently, weakened”.
Some European politicians and commentators spent last weekend responding to tirades from Musk and US officials in a war of subtweets on X.
A member of the European Parliament from Germany said the continent did not want “a tech bro oligarchy”. Another, from France, posted that “Europe is not a colony of the US”.
On the other side of the spat, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, fresh off a visit to Nato headquarters, complained about European nations pursuing “all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security.”
Landau mentioned “economic suicide/climate fanaticism” and “disdain for national sovereignty”. In subsequent posts, however, Landau described the “charming” Christmas market in central Brussels and shared a photo of Belgian fries.
The US strategy published late last week - a mission statement that every administration publishes - accused the EU of seeking to “undermine political liberty and sovereignty”, lamenting “censorship of free speech” and “loss of national identities” in Europe.
Unlike the strategy of Trump’s first term, it did not focus on geopolitical challenges from Russia and China. Instead, it cited a need to “re-establish strategic stability” with Russia and cast the US as a potential moderator between Moscow and Europe, rather than as the largest and leading member of the Nato alliance, which views Russia as a pernicious threat.
The security strategy also derided “unrealistic expectations” of European leaders backing Ukraine against Russia’s invasion and accused their “unstable minority governments” of “subversion of democratic processes”, without backing up the claim.
The stark language laid out a vision of Europe that contradicts many views on the continent.
An annual survey by Korber-Stiftung, a German nonprofit, found that 59% of Germans believe they can freely express their opinions but only about 35% believe this is also true for Americans.
This is certainly not the first transatlantic rift.
During George W. Bush’s administration, there was a bitter split over the US invasion of Iraq, and Trump’s first term was also divisive.
But polling this year suggests growing alienation, with more and more Europeans viewing ties with America negatively or even as adversarial.
On Ukraine, recent polls also suggest that public support for Europe’s backing of Kyiv remains solid in countries such as Germany, Britain, and France despite growing weariness amid economic difficulties and political pressure from the hard-left and hard-right.
European leaders have pledged to boost ailing economies, cut red tape and embark on a defence build-up, although they may be sluggish and divided in following through. But many Europeans blasted the US complaints as absurd.
The Trump team has made no secret of its disdain. Trump once said the EU - a project long backed by the US and designed to promote free trade and prevent military conflict on the continent - was formed to “screw” the US. Top Trump advisers called Europeans “pathetic” and “freeloading” in a leaked chat.
One irony is that even before the xenophobic lectures from Washington, many European governments had begun turning away from open-door immigration policies as embattled centrists seek to answer challenges from nationalist parties.
But not everyone was displeased by the US vision for Europe.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, Eurosceptic party classified by German authorities as extremist, cheered the security strategy as “a foreign policy reality check for Europe, and especially for Germany”.
Hungary’s Kremlin-friendly Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, praised Musk “for holding the line” against what he called an “attack on X” from the “Brusselian overlords” at the EU executive branch.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine on X an “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments”, while Musk shared a slew of posts against the EU, which he said “should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries”.
Replying to Musk, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev posted: “Exactly”.
As Europeans fumed, Moscow welcomed aspects of the new US strategy. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Russia hopes it “will have a sobering effect on the European war party”.
Jurgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesman of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said Trump’s strategy echoes “right radical parties in Europe” with a pro-Kremlin line “or sometimes it sounds like Putin talking about Europe”.
Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni - a conservative ally of Trump and Musk in politics and ideology - said in a TV interview that “when you outsource security to someone else, you have to know there’s a price to pay”.
Some, however, criticised EU and national leaders for not hitting back harder.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s former top diplomat, yesterday called the US strategy “a declaration of political war” and said Trump seems to want a subordinate “white Europe divided into nations”.
Borrell called on European leaders to “stop pretending that Trump is not our adversary, hiding behind a fearful and complacent silence, and instead assert the EU’s sovereignty”.
- Beatriz Ríos, Stefano Pitrelli, Kate Brady, Natalia Abbakumova, Mary Ilyushina and Karla Adam contributed to this report.
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