Stephen M. Walt (a Harvard University international relations professor and a prominent member of the so-called realist school of international relations) argues, in his recent piece for Foreign Policy, that the United States of America is now “Europe’s enemy” – or at least the enemy of today’s Europe and its values. Journalist Gideon Rachman (writing for Financial Times) has described it in lighter terms, by saying that “The Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary”.

Walt acknowledges that realists like himself have been arguing that (even from an American perspective) prolonging the war in Ukraine made no sense, and that NATO expansion was a dangerous path which actually pushed Moscow and Beijing closer together. Thus it would make sense for Washington to “drive a wedge” between these two Eurasian powers and, at the same time, in his words, “fashion a European order that reduces Moscow’s incentives to cause trouble.”

The political scientist however argues that the current US presidency has already gone way beyond transatlantic “disputes about burden-sharing” (within NATO) and that the aim of Trump’s administration is actually to “fundamentally transform relations with long-standing U.S. allies, rewrite the global rulebook, and, if possible, remake Europe along MAGA lines.”

To make this point, Walt mentions the blunt way Trump is weaponizing tariff threats (even against close allies) “either to coerce concessions on other issues or solely because they are running trade surpluses” and the way the concept of sticking to deals negotiated seems “utterly alien” to the new US President. Walt gives other examples: Trump has been openly talking about occupying and conquering territory, which signals something, even if one deems his attacks on Greenland, Palestina, the Panama canal and Canada as just “fanciful”.

Moreover, in Walt’s view, “Elon Musk, Vance, and the rest of the MAGA team” seem to be “trying to impose a far-reaching regime change throughout Europe, albeit without using military force.” Treating today’s Europe as an “enemy” in fact “risks little” for Trump’s team, because “they believe Europe is a declining region.”

Based on these points, Stephen Walt reasons: “if America is now an adversary, Europe’s leaders should stop asking themselves what they need to do to keep Uncle Sam happy and start asking what they must do to protect themselves. If I were them, I’d start by inviting more trade delegations from China and start developing alternatives to the SWIFT system… European universities should increase collaborative research efforts with Chinese institutions… End Europe’s dependence on U.S. weapons by rebuilding Europe’s own defense industrial base… Consider applying for [BRICS] membership.” However, writing from an American perspective, he adds that these steps would be “costly” to Europe and also “harmful” for the US and he adds: “I don’t want to see any of them actually happen. But Europe may be given little choice.”

Agreeing with Walt’s premises, some analysts of a more naive “anti-imperialist” persuasion are claiming the US is now a force for multipolarity and no longer part of the West, geopolitically speaking. One could say even serious moderate experts such as Walt are coming up with quite peremptory assessments. There really seems to be some overreacting going on to the point that it is potentially tainting otherwise good political analyses. Trump has indeed issued no less than 70 Executive Orders (in his first month), and this confuses political adversaries, allies, and analysts alike.

I would dare to argue however that Trump’s actions so far have not been so unexpected – they do mark a relative turn but the impression they make is largely due to a matter of pace and style rather than content. I’ve commented before on the colonial nature of the transatlantic partnership and on how it involved a veiled enmity – it is just all in the open, now. One might recall that it was Joe Biden who started a subsidy war (by means of the Inflation Reduction Act) against Europe.

At the time, France’s Macron said the matter was so serious it could “fragment the West”. In addition, as I wrote before, by November 2023,  James Stavridis, former NATO’s Supreme Commander, was already calling for a “land for peace conclusion to combat” in Ukraine. If this seems like Trumpism before Trump, then we need to rethink the very idea of “Trumpism”.

Simply put, the US has long been overburdened and it must pragmatically acknowledge the fact that other great powers exist – not to mention the reality of the Chinese superpower. This involves some degree of “retreating” (and this is what has been going on even under Democratic administrations with the withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) Be it as it may, Washington in all likelihood will still try to maintain its hegemony even if in a more “poled” world.

It is not a matter of either “multipolarity” or “unipolarity” but rather a nuanced continuum. Moreover, Trump is avoiding to signal weakness, even while retreating from a number of theaters, by playing “tough”, and this is key to making sense of his way of leading the American withdrawal from Eastern Europe, while planning to pivot to the Pacific and to the American continent as part of a complementary neo-Monroeist approach.

What some have been calling a “Reverse Kissinger Strategy” or an attempt to “court” Russia so as to drive it away from China (an exaggerated description as it is) is not really some wild novelty. As I argued elsewhere, the American foreign policy frequently reminds one of the swing of a pendulum. It often oscillates between the notion of “countering” either Moscow or Beijing – sometimes attempting to pursue both trends at the same time, as we have seen clearly enough with Joe Biden’s dangerous “dual containment” approach.

The pendulum might be swinging once again now. It does not mean that such a turn is irreversible or that Trump will obstinately stick to it no matter what. As for Europe, there could be an opportunity to finally pursue its strategic autonomy. Even while pursuing the goal of diversifying energy sources in the long run, Europe could pragmatically resume its energy relations with Russia – this certainly would benefit all parties.

However, this would require some degree of rapprochement, and fixing something is usually harder than breaking it. The maidanization of Europe might in fact have gone a bit too far already. It is not Trump and J.D. Vance who are “fascistizing” Europe, as Walt argues: In fact, Europe itself made the (anti-Russia) far-right mainstream with the Meloni-Von der Leyen alliance.

This includes the normalization of Fascist Roman salutes (the same way neo-nazism in Ukraine has been whitewashed since 2014) -and all that took place way before Trump and Vance. Those are problems for Europe to deal with, independently of what Trump or Vance do or say.

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