The real question, however, is how they failed to see this coming. The uncritical acceptance of Trump by Europe’s populist Right reveals a poor understanding of US foreign policy, and a near-total absence of geopolitical vision. Regardless of who sits in the White House, the logic behind America’s foreign policy remains the same: advancing US economic and geopolitical interests at the expense of everyone else.

Since the early Nineties, every single American president has ended up bombing some faraway country, despite all of them — including George W. Bush! — campaigning against foreign entanglements. Trump 2.0 is merely the latest, and most brazen, iteration of this pattern. Having vowed to “stop all wars” as recently as in his inauguration speech, he has since pursued the most aggressive and militarist foreign policy since Bush Jr., culminating in the attack on Iran — something none of his predecessors had dared to do, despite four decades of Israeli pressure to that end, precisely because they understood the catastrophic consequences. For Europe’s self-described patriots, America’s addiction to military intervention — much of it, over the past quarter century, on or near Europe’s doorstep — should have prompted some caution. That would have been far safer than automatically aligning with “America First” or taking Trump’s promise of peace at face value.

This imperial logic applies to its allies just as much as to its adversaries. Since the Second World War, Washington has consistently treated Europe as a key extension of its global empire, a region to be controlled politically, economically and militarily, and kept firmly aligned with US interests. Nato has been central to this project. As summarised by its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, its function was that of “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. In other words, the original purpose of the Alliance was not to defend Europe, but to prevent the emergence of an autonomous bloc, ensure its strategic subordination to the United States and foreclose rapprochement with Russia.

Earlier European sovereigntists understood this. Charles de Gaulle deeply resented what he saw as American domination of Western Europe under the guise of the Atlantic alliance, arguing that it reduced European nations to the status of protectorates rather than genuine sovereign states. In 1966 he acted on this conviction, withdrawing France from Nato’s military structure and expelling US forces from French soil.

In the six decades since, US policy towards Europe has remained essentially unchanged. In the Eighties, when European nations, led by France and West Germany, sought to pursue a détente with the Soviet Union, Washington pushed back, insisting that European security policy be subordinated to American Cold War strategy. And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US made clear that that European security would remain anchored to American leadership through Nato.

Far from providing security to the continent, the Alliance’s eastward expansion was a key factor in triggering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the US then exploited not only to “bleed” Russia — but also to drive a wedge between Europe and Russia, and force the EU to decouple from Russian gas and turn to American gas instead, both of which were longstanding US strategic imperatives. This was made possible by a European political class in submission to the transatlantic dogma. Just look at their silence in the face of the Nord Stream bombing, an act of sabotage carried out with at least US foreknowledge, if not direct US involvement.

European populists have long attributed this subservience to ideology — an unholy alliance between liberal-globalists on both sides of the Atlantic. But Trump himself explodes this thesis. Despite being as ideologically remote from Europe’s liberal-transatlanticist class as it is possible to imagine, he has extracted from them essentially the same compliance: on trade, defense, Nato spending and even Greenland. The master-servant relationship, it turns out, has nothing to do with ideology; it is structural. One might expect this from a “globalist” political establishment quite clearly beholden to foreign and vested interests. Yet the same transatlantic streak seems to run through virtually all European Right-populist parties, which means the continent’s sovereigntists are either comfortable with Europe’s subordination to Washington or genuinely blind to its structural nature, believing that Trump would somehow be different.

In fact, things have only got worse. Since returning to the White House, Trump has launched an aggressive trade war against Europe, threatened to annex part of its territory, weaponized the continent’s dependence on American gas to extract political concessions and demanded Europeans spend hundreds of billions on US weapons. Europe’s globalist establishment has dutifully complied with all of it. But Europe’s sovereigntist parties have not put up much of a fight either. Whatever the short-term political calculations, the optics of self-described European patriots saying little while their transatlantic ally economically waterboards the continent are not good.

The war on Iran may prove to be the turning point. Europe is already feeling the economic ripples: oil and gas prices have surged dramatically, heaping further hardship on households and businesses already battered by the switch from Russian to American energy. Indeed, according to the EU Commission President, the war has already cost European taxpayers an additional €3 billion in fossil fuels imports. A prolonged conflict — or even a stabilization of prices at current levels — would be economically devastating for the continent. And if Europe loses access to Qatari LNG, its dependence on American gas will become absolute.

That alone would be alarming if it were simply an unintended consequence of war. What if rising energy prices were, however, factored in from the outset? As the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and Europe’s principal energy supplier, the United States stands to gain substantially from the price surge. This raises the possible scenario: if the proxy war in Ukraine was designed to decouple Europe from Russian gas, the Iran war may be aimed at decoupling it from Mediterranean resources altogether. As noted earlier, US imperial strategy spans decades and administrations, and the ideological color of the president is largely irrelevant to its execution.

Nor does this account for the war’s other potential consequences: mass refugee flows towards Europe, as previous US Middle Eastern wars have generated, and growing pressure on European governments to become more directly involved militarily. Europe now faces two devastating wars on its doorsteps — one to the east, stoked by Washington, and one to the south, actively waged by it. The first pushed Europe into economic and geopolitical vassalage, but the second may be the shock that finally breaks it, plunging it into economic and social collapse.

In light of all this, it’s little wonder that rifts are starting to emerge between MAGA and the European populist camp, and most visibly in Germany, the country most economically affected by these wars.

The AfD is probably the party that has received the most explicit US backing, including Elon Musk’s notorious declaration that “only the AfD can save Germany”. But the Trump administration’s increasingly reckless and aggressive foreign policy is now causing serious strains within the party.

The AfD has always been broadly split into two camps. One — stronger in western Germany, associated with party leader Alice Weidel and foreign policy spokesman Markus Frohnmaier — is pro-MAGA, transatlantic, pro-Israel and neoliberally oriented. The other — dominant in the east, represented by party co-chairman Tino Chrupalla and Thuringian leader Björn Höcke — is more openly nationalist and Eurocentric, more sympathetic to Moscow, hostile to US interventionism, and critical of Germany’s unconditional support for Israel.

Höcke has been characteristically blunt. In 2022, he stated: “It was and is US strategy, as a foreign power on our continent, to drive wedges between peoples and nations that could actually work very well together.” He argues that Germany must cease to be a “vassal state” of the United States, and that Washington, as a non-European power, “should withdraw from Europe”, since “the natural partner for our way of working and living would be Russia”.

When Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, the divide became impossible to paper over. Chrupalla wrote on X: “A fuse has been set on the powder keg of the Middle East.” More recently he said: “Donald Trump started as a president of peace. In the end, Donald Trump will end as a president of war.” Meanwhile, within the other wing, Frohnmaier declared that Israel had “every right” to ensure that “its existence is not threatened”.

More from this author

How the Ukraine war ends

By Thomas Fazi

The party leadership has tried to manage these tensions, largely aligning with Trump on most issues. But the outbreak of the war in Iran has caused these pressures to bubble to the fore. In a notable break with other European Right-populist parties, most of which either endorsed or stayed silent about the US-Israeli strikes, the AfD issued an official statement, claiming that “the renewed destabilization of the Middle East is not in the German interest and must be brought to an end”. It is a modest step, but a telling one. And as the war grinds on and its costs for Germany mount, the Eurocentric wing of the party is likely to grow stronger.

Similar fault lines will inevitably open in other Right-populist parties across the continent and beyond — and indeed they already are. A vivid example comes from the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform has found itself tied in knots over the Iran war. Within the space of days, Farage criticized Starmer for not backing the US operation more forcefully, while simultaneously attacking the rising fuel prices that the same war has caused. Meanwhile, Reform’s own ranks were split: deputy leader Richard Tice called for full UK support for the US offensive, while the party’s new Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick, who recently defected from the Conservatives, told the BBC: “If you’re asking me the question, do I think that it is in the interests of the British people… for us to be deploying British airmen in bombing raids over Iran right now, when our allies have not asked us to do that, then, no, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Labour wasted no time pointing out these contradictions, accusing Reform of “saying they would bomb Iran” one week and “backtracking as petrol prices rise” the next. It illustrates the impossible position in which Trump’s war has placed his European populist allies: they cannot support it without owning its economic consequences, and they cannot oppose it without betraying their transatlantic loyalties. But more crucially, it points to the total lack of geopolitical vision among most Right-populist parties.

They better get their act together fast. Any national-populist party that wants to seriously challenge the European liberal-globalist status quo — and wishes to retain credibility with its voters — can’t limit itself to anti-immigration, anti-“woke” and anti-establishment domestic politics. It needs to articulate a coherent foreign-policy framework in line with Europe’s core economic and geopolitical interests. As de Gaulle understood 60 years ago, this necessarily means breaking with Washington and its forever wars.

Denmark, Trump said derisively, has no claim to Greenland except that “a boat landed there 300 years ago”. To mounting horror from America’s erstwhile Nato allies, and many among America’s own elected representatives, the US President has declared his intention to “take” this Arctic island, long considered a Danish territory, citing “national security” concerns.

After the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif wrote: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” The post caused uproar for its callous response to shocking violence. But “vibes, papers, essays” has since become a meme: it captures a reality that, in parts of the world still clinging to the comparatively peaceful and affluent End-of-History order, remains under-appreciated. Namely: that seismic change happens in the real, material world, not the world of debates and ideas. And when change occurs, there is sometimes no solution that doesn’t involve force of some kind, and accordingly also winners and losers.

This is the context in which we might look at the Greenland crisis, and ask ourselves: what did we think multipolarity meant? Vibes, papers, essays? The clock has been ticking, for some time now, on the “rules-based international order”. But for all that a transition from this order to some form of “multipolarity” has been much discussed, this has tended to assume tensions between “the West” — understood as a single bloc stretching from Eastern Europe to California, plus some outposts — on one hand, and Russia and/or China on the other. A few fringe theorists on the European Right have long regarded America as an enemy; but in general, the transatlantic alliance has never been in doubt. Until now. And this development poses an especially acute challenge for Europe’s populist Right, where Trump has long been viewed as an ally, inspiration, and example of where (some hope) European politics might one day be induced to go.

This view was reinforced by JD Vance’s Munich dressing-down of European leaders last year, for censorship and mass migration, and repeated in the State Department’s Substack call for “civilizational allies in Europe”. The sentiment was further bolstered by lines in the State Department’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS), on “preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational (sic) self-confidence and Western identity”. Not least, this document noted the American optimism inspired by “patriotic parties” within Europe — which, the NSS asserted, should be encouraged as a means of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.

More from this author

Starmer can’t win his war on Musk

By Mary Harrington

But far from cultivating such resistance, Trump has instead turned on Denmark, whose soldiers were fighting and dying alongside Americans in Afghanistan just a few years ago. He’s threatened punitive tariffs, at an escalating rate, against Nato members, including the UK, until Europe accedes to his demand for a “deal” on Greenland.

Previous conflicts between the Trump administration and the EU, for example on jurisdiction of social media, could be spun as being in the interests of the European Right. Not this time. This is old-fashioned imperial business: a demand for control of territory America perceives as in its sphere of influence. The postwar convention of national borders as fixed and sacrosanct is officially dead.

What, indeed, did any of us think multipolarity meant? Vibes, papers, essays? Trump’s actions have united Europeans in anger, perhaps permanently shattered what was left of trust in the Nato alliance, and tipped an ice-cold bucket of realpolitik over the head of a European political elite. And, far from lending support to “patriotic parties” orthogonal to the current EU regime, he has royally screwed the European Right.

However paradoxical the notion of a nationalist Internationale, many had pinned their political hopes on Trump fostering just such a coalition — a hope fanned by the NSS. Instead, Trump has tainted by association every European populist group that has ever given his regime so much as the time of day.

The fractiousness and inertia of the existing EU panjandrums can never be overstated, so even as great a provocation as Greenland may still prompt no serious repercussions. But to the extent the crisis galvanizes European resolve to consolidate as a geopolitical bloc, Trump’s actions have sharply increased the likelihood that this will not happen under some hypothetical rising populist coalition, but under the existing technocratic one, complete with the climate, censorship and mass-immigration shibboleths Trump’s own NSS so decries.

This coalition will now assert, with some justice, that no European in their right mind should trust any political body aligned with Trump, and by extension America, when this body’s interests are so plainly not those of Europe. You might as well appoint Putinists to run your country. We have already seen a worked example of this kind of political backswing in Canada, where Trump’s threats of annexation prompted so fierce a retaliatory groundswell of anti-American fury that an election previously polling strongly for the Right-wing change candidate went instead to the technocratic anti-Trump continuity guy, Mark Carney. Farage, Le Pen, and the AfD would all be in for a dose of blowback, and the outraged responses from RN’s Jordan Bardella and AfD’s Alice Weidel are perhaps calculated to head the worst of this off.

Carney has since, somewhat pointedly, deepened Canada’s ties with China — perhaps prudent, from a balancing perspective, but surely less than desirable from a US one — and, indeed, from the vantage-point of the nationalist Internationale. In this chaotic context, progressive Europe is already calling loudly for “sovereignty”, even if this has to date comprised more vibes, papers, and essays than concrete material action. What about the European Right, though: will it, too, turn more explicitly and decisively against America?

This tendency has long lurked on Europe’s Right-wing fringes. Most obviously, it’s a theme among Russia-aligned “Eurasian” thinkers such as Alexander Dugin, for whom the America-led “West” is every bit as much the bogeyman as it is for Third Worldist supporters of “decolonisation” such as Najma Sharif. But even beyond Putin’s immediate ambit, French anti-migration theorists such as Guillaume Faye and, notably, the controversial polemicist Renaud Camus also view America not as Europe’s prospective savior but, respectively, either irrelevant or even, in Camus’ case, as a principal source of European woes. For Camus, America represents both an ideological wellspring and principal actor in the spread of “davocracy”: a homogenizing, post-national global order he views as virulently destructive of distinctive peoples and cultures worldwide, including in Europe.

To my knowledge, Camus has not indicated whether he welcomes the end of that stabilizing and neutralizing power, nor whether he would celebrate the decoupling of Europe from America. But it’s plausible that a growing proportion of European Right-wingers may move in that direction — not least because American promises of “civilizational” assistance evidently take second place behind more old-fashioned realist ones, consistent with the post-liberal, multipolar new order.

Was it ever possible to imagine an America-led “civilizational” influence that was not, in practice, “davocracy”? We are in the process of finding out: the venerable globalist shindig is running at the moment, and Trump is attending, reportedly to “punch allies in the head”. The Danes are staying away. What comes next is anybody’s guess. But contra those dreaming of a based transatlantic “civilizational” coalition, however well intentioned and sincere, what Greenland has brought ferociously home is the primacy over such ideals of two hoary realist preoccupations: geography and hard power. Geography makes Greenland of strategic interest to America. Multipolarity sharpens the perceived exigency. Hard power guarantees that no one and nothing can prevent an America, especially not one that has discarded its erstwhile “internationalist” scruples, from rolling up and taking it.

Short of severe and perhaps self-destructive escalatory measures such as evicting US military bases, dumping Treasury bonds, or imposing self-harming retaliatory tariffs on the USA, it’s hard to see what the EU can do about it. States that have relied on the US security umbrella for decades have, as a result, comparatively little hard power of their own, and certainly nothing that could stand up against the USA — even if Europe cared enough about Greenland to try. Thus, as Thucydides famously put it, in his History of the Peloponnesian War: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Suggested Reading

Why Trump will get Greenland

By Wolfgang Munchau

But power-plays of this kind have second-order effects. And I wonder if the longer-term ripple effects of an American transition from the soft de facto imperialism of the “rules-based international order” to a harder, more coercive sort really will, as some in the online peanut gallery seem to imagine, actually Make America Great Again.

Let us say, for example, that the cost of acquiring Greenland by force turns out to be the entire accumulated stock of faith that there exists something called “the West”. Under these circumstances, there will be little future appetite for any kind of “coalition of the willing” led by America — or, perhaps, for its cultural output or even moral blandishments.

Perhaps it will be Trump’s harsh treatment of America’s European satrapies, long stupefied by peace and comfort, that finally shatters what remains of a desire among Europe’s elites to cling to the postwar American “rules-based” imperium. If so, it may ironically be the man who sought to Make America Great Again that ends up handing Third Worldists such as Najma Sharif their long-sought prize, namely the end of the America-led cultural and political order we generally call “the West”.

Should that happen, America will have definitively shrunk from monopole to one of several bloc leaders, from arbiter of global norms to playing realist games of geography and hard power. If so, we can expect those factions within the European Right who flew too close to the Trump to retire, badly singed, perhaps for some time. And yet a Europe obliged to embrace realism abroad would surely, eventually, be obliged to abandon its dreams of progressive internationalism. After that, who knows? For better or worse, perhaps those Right-wing “Eurasians” would get their prize as well: the “decolonization” of Europe.