A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Donald Trump. The European elites did not expect him to make a comeback and, worse still, they have no clue how to counter him.
When I was elected to the European Parliament in 2019, Donald Trump was still the 45th President of the United States, and the Eurocrats fantasized about “strategic autonomy.” In 2020, Joe Biden followed Trump, intoning: “America is back to lead the world again” and all of Brussels rejoiced.
Since then, the EU elites have pursued a policy completely oriented toward and dependent on the policy precepts of US liberals. In trade policy, the EU has severed ties with Russia and China, allowed itself to be drawn into the war in Ukraine, subjugated itself to the climate narrative, subscribed to every US sanction against countries of the Global South, totally surrendered its foreign policy independence and generally renounced everything that could somehow be contrary to the ideas and interests of a woke America.
And now Donald Trump is coming back as #47. He is the very antithesis of woke America. He will end the war in Ukraine, which will humiliate European foreign policy. He has announced that he will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, giving the US a massive cost advantage over European industry, burdened by carbon taxes.
He wants to impose massive import tariffs, forcing Europe’s export industries to invest in the US. Trump has exposed every single European political decision of the last four years as wrong-headed.
And to make matters worse, Trump will make it impossible for the Eurocrats to conceal their failures. The EU’s attempt to censor social networks – above all Elon Musk’s X – through the Digital Services Act will encounter fierce resistance from Washington, as Vice President-elect Vance has already announced.
In this situation, the EU cannot even revert to the old mantra of “strategic autonomy”. Unlike in 2016-20, neither China, India, South Africa, nor Turkey believes anything this EU is saying, not to mention Russia.
Even before 2020, “strategic autonomy” was only a label, never anything of substance: European politicians are too stupid and the EU is too weak to stand up an independent foreign and trade policy. They have always lacked the will to power. The only novelty is that the world will no longer be bluffed.
This situation has led to remarkable changes in the political landscape. The European Union elites in Brussels and Berlin have until now been the most faithful Atlanticists – Politico qualified EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “Europe’s American President” – but now they sound like Gaullists who swear by European autonomy.
Unlike the actual General de Gaulle, to be sure, they have neither ideas nor resources to effect such autonomy. On the other hand, parties that traditionally have been skeptical about America, like Germany’s AfD, have discovered their political proximity to Trump and his MAGA vision, and at the same time have received substantive support in the media from Elon Musk.
During the last several years, the former Blackrock lobbyist and board member Friedrich Merz, foreseeably the next German Chancellor, tirelessly attacked the AfD’s opposition from the right as well as the left-wing opposition of Sarah Wagenknecht, for their presumed skepticism about the transatlantic alliance.
Now it is borne in upon him that these supposed enemies of America sound just like Trump and Vance, while he, Merz, is at odds with the incoming Administration on all relevant issues.
At the level of the EU, Hungary’s Viktor Orban was the whipping boy for all of Biden’s acolytes, who reproached him for his diplomacy with Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Xi. Now Orban has privileged access when Trump moves back into the White House.
Opposite Orban stands the new EU foreign affairs commissioner Kaja Kallas, who got the job only because she is a fanatical Russia hater. The moment a peace agreement is concluded in Ukraine, her standing will zero out, and become a relic of a time that hopefully will soon be put behind us, of no further use in the present.
Those are the turnabouts of political life, except that the Eurocrats did nothing to prepare for them, which exposes them as a pack of amateurs. They are checkmated. They bet everything on a single card, and cannot explain why everything proceeded contrary to their expectations.
But that isn’t simply a problem of communication, but rather one of economics: The Ukraine war was costly, and the Russian sanctions did more damage to the EU and especially Germany than they did to Russia. And to what end? The climate craze has ruined German industry—and to what purpose, now that the US is abandoning it?
This turn energizes the political right, which now feels the wind from America at its back. Until just now, the established German parties were in agreement that there could be no cooperation with the AfD.
They even spoke of a “firewall” against the AfD. Now Elon Musk has taken up the cause of the AfD on X and in the nationally-read newspaper Die Welt. That raises the question of which way the firewall is directed – against Elon and the AfD, or the losers of German politics?
Donald Trump is changing the political landscape globally. The European political elite and its echo chamber in the mainstream media, with all their concepts and capabilities, have no place in this new landscape. For the political right, by contrast, unanticipated opportunities are opening. They only need to be recognized and seized upon.
Trump has made clear that America can’t support world demand indefinitely with its enormous trade deficit. Europe must look to new markets in the Global South. Trump has warned Europe that it can’t cower under America’s defense umbrella while neglecting its own defense.
European patriots must provide for the defense of their countries rather than wasting their resources on counterproductive proxy wars. The time has come for the patriotic right to govern rather than merely complain. There is nothing to lose, but there is a world to win. Patriots of the world, unite!
Maximilian Krah is a member of the European Parliament
The Eurocracy is too deeply embedded to be removed quickly.
The article is a promising start for Dr. Krah and his party to go international. The future of political work lies in reaching out to the world, and Asia Times is an appropriate tool and medium to do so.