Europe must "de-risk" the American threat

Trump’s infatuation with Putin is part of a bigger story. For Europeans the US is as much a threat as an ally

When China hawks in Washington demanded that European governments follow the US example and “decouple” their economies from China, officials in Brussels came up with a subtler approach. Europe would “de-risk” the relationship. It would acknowledge the facts of geoeconomics embedded in existing ties and continue to seek global collaboration where it worked, but deny Beijing sensitive technologies and access to critical infrastructure and reduce Europe’s economic dependency.

When the same diplomats now speak of de-risking they are as likely to be referring to the transatlantic relationship as to China. And when conversation turns to the “twin threats” facing the continent, the immediate gaze turns towards Moscow and Washington rather than towards Beijing.

The policymakers are not alone. In Berlin, Paris and London, the same sentiment is fast becoming part of the general public discourse. Donald Trump has never been popular among Europeans. Yet few imagined that just weeks into his second term a majority would rank him only a sliver behind Vladimir Putin as a danger to the continent.

Even allowing for Trump’s provocative bombast, the speed of transformation in America’s standing among its European allies has been breathtaking. A poll this month from YouGov - taken less than two months into his second term - indicated that a full 78 per cent of Brits now rate the US president a “very big or fairly big threat” to European peace and security. This from a nation that has long nurtured a special relationship with its American cousins.

The figure for Spain was 75 per cent, for Germany 74 per cent and France 69 per cent. Italians were the most sanguine about the new regime in the White House, but even then 58 per cent voiced the same concern. The poll put the US president just a notch behind his pal in Moscow in Europe’s calculation of threats. Three years after his unprovoked war on Ukraine, Putin is identified as a serious danger by 89 per cent of Brits, 87 per cent in Spain and 80 per cent in France.

This is not a revolt of wishy-washy European “liberals” against bellicose Trumpian conservatism. Putting aside the smaller European parties that sit on the nativist far right - avowed friends of Putin as well as Trump - the reaction had been broadly based across the political spectrum. Thus some of the harshest criticism of the US administration has been heard from Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s staunchly Atlanticist Christian Democrats and the new chancellor-in-waiting.

With an eye on domestic voters, right-leaning parties across the continent have thrown their support firmly behind Volodymyr Zelenskyy in response to Trump’s attempts to force Ukraine’s capitulation. Inger Støjberg, the leader of the far-from-progressive Denmark Democrats, called Trump’s treatment of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office: “Shocking and grotesque.”

In Britain, Conservative politicians who only yesterday lauded Trump now accuse him of appeasing a totalitarian dictator seeking to crush Ukrainian democracy. Boris Johnson, a longstanding cheerleader, has gone into hiding. The US president, the well-known conservative historian (Lord) Andrew Roberts told the House of Lords the other day, had put himself on the wrong side of the vital frontier between “civilisation and barbarism’.

It is not just Ukraine. Nor simply a matter of the vulgar braggadocio that saw vice president J D Vance hurl insults at his hosts while heaping praise on Neo-Nazis and Islamophobes during his first visit to Europe. These things matters - sales of Tesla cars, now widely called “Swasticars”, have all but collapsed in European markets in the wake of a Nazi salute from the company’s boss and Trump confidant Elon Musk. But Europeans are beginning to understand - many would say belatedly - that the America they sometimes disagreed with but essentially trusted has gone.

Trump’s attempt to humiliate Zelenskyy, his fawning over Putin, the capricious tariff war being waged against allies, the clumsy attempts at blackmail to prevent proper European regulation of US tech companies, the territorial claims on Greenland and Canada, the withdrawal from the global climate change agreement and the scrapping of America’s oversea aid budget all tell the same story.

Washington has abandoned all pretence of global leadership and its past commitment to international rules. It will grab what Trump thinks it can get in a world dominated by power blocs. Beijing is now a firmer ally of the multilateralism. Never mind, this is an approach destined over time to weaken the US - an invitation to China to grab the western Pacific, to Putin to string along a president without any grasp of strategy, and to old friends to strike deals among themselves.

We are where we are. And Europe - the region most heavily invested in the old multilateral order - is more at risk than most. Its dependency on the US - economically and militarily - far outstrips that on China. Decoupling is not an option for a continent that relies on the US for more than half its military equipment. The “sovereign autonomy” sought by France’s Emmanuel Macron is the work of a generation and more.

But de-risk it must. There is nowhere else to go. The signs are that the politicians have begun to understand this. Merz has blown-up the debt brake that stood in the way of serious German re-armament. The EU is developing its own financial and industrial instruments to lay the foundations for European-wide defence. Post Brexit Britain is rediscovering the centuries of history that should have taught it that European and British security are indivisible.

There are still some who hope for the best. Trump will not be there forever. The US will relearn the advantages of alliances. We should hope this is so. But America’s direction of travel has been set. Beyond the present no-man’s land of geopolitical upheaval lies a new landscape that one way of anther will demand that a Europe that wants to hold on to what it has must be able of looking after itself. Trump has put up the signposts.