{"id":312885,"date":"2025-12-12T23:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T23:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/312885\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T23:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T23:06:08","slug":"donald-trump-is-pursuing-regime-change-in-europe-jonathan-freedland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/312885\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump is pursuing regime change \u2013 in Europe | Jonathan Freedland"},"content":{"rendered":"

When are we going to get the message? I joked a few months back that, when it comes to Donald Trump, Europe needs to learn from Sex and the City\u2019s Miranda Hobbes and realise that \u201cHe\u2019s just not that into you<\/a>\u201d. After this past week, it\u2019s clear that understates the problem. Trump\u2019s America is not merely indifferent to Europe \u2013 it\u2019s positively hostile to it. That has enormous implications for the continent and for Britain, which too many of our leaders still refuse to face.<\/p>\n

The depth of US hostility was revealed most explicitly in the new US national security strategy<\/a>, or NSS, a 29-page document that serves as a formal statement of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. There is much there to lament, starting with the sceptical quote marks that appear around the sole reference to \u201cclimate change\u201d, but the most striking passages are those that take aim at Europe.<\/p>\n

China and Russia, which you\u2019d think the US would see as genuine strategic threats worthy of serious attention, are addressed flatly and with relative brevity. It\u2019s Europe<\/a> that gets Team Trump\u2019s blood up, against Europe that it unleashes its rhetorical firepower. It warns that economic stagnation, \u201ccensorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates\u201d and above all, migration, raise \u201cthe stark prospect of civilizational erasure\u201d.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need advanced decryption software to work out what that means. The NSS worries that soon some European countries \u201cwill become majority non-European\u201d, which can only be a euphemism for non-white. Any doubt on that score was dispelled by the rambling speech the president delivered in Pennsylvania<\/a> on Tuesday, in which he mused on how the US only takes people \u201cfrom shithole countries\u201d such as Somalia, asking plaintively: \u201cWhy can\u2019t we have some people from Norway, Sweden \u2026 from Denmark?\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps this would not much matter if it merely confirmed that Trump and his circle view Europe through the same culture war lens that they apply to the US, blaming migration, DEI and \u201cwoke\u201d for enfeebling societies that were stronger when they were solidly white and Christian (their understanding of \u201cEuropean\u201d). But this is not merely a Fox News rant. It\u2019s a plan.<\/p>\n

The NSS makes clear that the Trump administration<\/a> will not stand idly by as Europe allows itself to become \u201cunrecognizable in 20 years or less\u201d. It plans to join the fight, backing those far-right, ultranationalist parties it hails for their \u201cresistance\u201d. It says that \u201cthe growing influence of patriotic European parties\u201d is cause for great optimism and the US will do what it can to help Europe \u201ccorrect its current trajectory\u201d. In other words, the US is set on pursuing regime change in Europe and will be throwing its weight behind the likes of Germany\u2019s Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland or AfD, France\u2019s National Rally and, no doubt, Reform UK.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s defenders have sought to argue<\/a> that the administration has no problem with Europe per se; it\u2019s the European Union it can\u2019t stand. A Europe of individual, sovereign nation-states would, they say, find a warm embrace in Trump\u2019s Washington. It just so happens that that\u2019s the precise preference of one Vladimir Putin, who has regarded the weakening or breakup of the EU as a strategic aim for decades. No wonder the Kremlin lavished praise<\/a> on the new US plan, which it was delighted to see aligned with \u201cour vision\u201d.<\/p>\n

Maybe talk of visions is too grand. Perhaps what leads Washington to share Moscow\u2019s low opinion of the EU is not philosophy but something more basic. Note how a chorus of Trump officials chose to restate their anti-EU stance<\/a>, always in the loftiest terms of course, straight after Brussels had slapped the former Trump appointee Elon Musk with a \u20ac120m fine for \u201cdeceptive\u201d practices on his X platform<\/a>. Could it be that what Trump and his acolytes really dislike about the EU is that it\u2019s one of the few forces on the planet that can curb their power? The EU has muscle, and that alone infuriates the likes of Musk and Trump, especially when the common thread running through this second Trump term is the desire to remove or weaken any restraint on his ability to act. Far better a loose grouping of 27 states he can divide and conquer than a mighty bloc working together.<\/p>\n

The motive hardly matters: whether the US regards the EU as an enemy for transactional or ideological reasons, it now sees it as an enemy. That much should have been clear within weeks of Trump returning to the White House, and certainly by February when he gave Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dressing down in the Oval Office. But now that the US government has spelled it out in black and white, it is incontrovertible.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, Europe\u2019s leaders still cannot quite face this painful new truth. The head of Nato, Mark Rutte, ominously announced on Thursday that \u201cRussia has brought war back to Europe<\/a>\u201d and that \u201cWe are Russia\u2019s next target.\u201d He feared that too many don\u2019t feel the urgency of the threat. But he failed to mention that, in this new war, Nato\u2019s most powerful member, the US, has picked a side \u2013 and it is Russia.<\/p>\n

Note how the US is piling the pressure on Ukraine to accept armistice terms congenial to Moscow, instructing Kyiv to withdraw even from those parts of the Donbas region that it still controls<\/a>, with no guarantee that Russian forces would not simply move in and seize the vacated land. Via an interview with Politico<\/a>, Trump told Ukraine it had to \u201cplay ball\u201d since Russia had \u201cthe upper hand\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rutte warns of war, urging Europe to prepare itself, yet he has nothing to say about the one-time ally across the Atlantic now turned foe. On the contrary, only a few months ago the Nato boss was literally calling Trump \u201cdaddy\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Few embody the contradiction more fully than Britain\u2019s own Keir Starmer. He prides himself on his solidarity with Zelenskyy, but remains silent as Trump demonstrates his solidarity with Putin. The prime minister knows that the defence of Ukraine requires combining Europe\u2019s military capabilities, yet last month he allowed the collapse of a plan for the UK to join a major European rearmament effort<\/a>. The UK government had wanted to take part in the \u20ac150bn (\u00a3130bn) scheme, boosting Britain\u2019s defence industry in the process, but balked at the entrance fee.<\/p>\n

This week, Starmer ruled out rejoining the EU customs union<\/a>, explaining that he didn\u2019t want to unravel the trade deal secured earlier this year with the US. It\u2019s the same choice, made over and over again, putting the US relationship ahead of the European one, even as the signals could not be any clearer: this love is unrequited.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s come to something when the sharpest geopolitical voice in Europe belongs to the pope. Leo criticised Trump for \u201ctrying to break apart<\/a>\u201d an Atlantic alliance that remained essential. In the current climate, even naming the problem counts as a radical act. Now it\u2019s time for those leaders who do not speak in the name of God, but for the peoples of Europe, to be as brave.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When are we going to get the message? I joked a few months back that, when it comes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-312885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}