A Euro-Right Case Vs Trump's Greenland Antics
And: Fate, The Danube, And The Mississippi; Comic Decadence On The Potomac
I did a piece for The Free Press about the threat to the ascendant European Right from Trump’s Greenland blustering. I agree that it’s in the interest of the US to own Greenland, but not in the way Trump is going about it. My angle, though, is different from most critics’. I point out that the nationalist-sovereigntist Right is rising in France, Poland, Germany, and Britain, which benefits the US directly, and indirectly by making it more likely that key European nations will be governed by parties that actually believe in defending the West from mass migration and Islamism. But:
Voting trends in most of Europe favor the nationalist right. That should make Trump happy. It aligns with the principle laid out in his National Security Strategy late last year, which framed strong European sovereignty as necessary to defend the West. And yet now, in his MAGA-lomaniacal determination to impose his will on the world, Trump may tear apart that civilizational unity. How will any self-respecting European conservative fail to stand up to the bullying from the White House?
Of course, it would be nice if the European leaders cared half as much about guarding the borders of their own countries as they do about defending the borders of Greenland from the Sultan of MAGA. But it’s not difficult to understand their reaction to the Greenland gambit. There are a number of conservative Europeans who generally support Trump, but who are now being forced to reconsider their position—because they are patriots.
Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s right-wing RN, denounced Trump’s moves on Greenland as “a direct challenge to the sovereignty of a European country.” More recently, he criticized Trump’s new Greenland tariffs as “commercial blackmail.” Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, one of Trump’s closest European allies, characterized the tariffs as “a mistake.”
With his bellicose posturing on Greenland, Trump is putting his natural political allies in Europe in the position of losing ground with voters, or having to take strong anti-American stances to maintain their popularity. A wiser and more patient approach would be to play the long game, and count on changing European populist politics to deliver Greenland to American ownership through diplomatic means. But that’s not how Trump rolls.
I make a point that I personally didn’t really grasp until I moved to Europe:
Living here over the past few years, I’ve learned things that Americans who have never lived abroad simply can’t understand. It is impossible to overstate the influence the United States has beyond its borders.
And not only in Hungary. From 2021 through 2023, I traveled throughout the former communist countries of Europe to promote my book, Live Not by Lies, an account of how liberalism has morphed into a mild form of progressive totalitarianism. At almost every event, there would inevitably be a question from the audience by someone with white hair. In an apologetic tone, they would ask some version of this question: “We used to look to America for hope, but now we are afraid of you—what happened?”
What these questioners meant is that they had been freed from one hard tyranny—the Soviet Union—but now found themselves subject, in a softer way, to one coming from the United States. It generally played out culturally. One Slovak Catholic told me that U.S.-funded NGOs were at war with anything in his country that violated American (and Western European) ideas of progress. For example, in 2023, then-USAID chief Samantha Power made a well-publicized visit to Budapest, where she announced a $20 million donation for “pro-democracy” NGOs. Conservative Hungarians took this as an attempt to undermine a democratically elected government in a NATO ally.
Two years later, when the newly elected Donald Trump unleashed DOGE on USAID, we all discovered that this was more or less correct—Washington did, in fact, use USAID and the NGO-cracy to impose its will on smaller countries, frequently by promoting progressive causes such as “climate equity” and LGBTQ rights. This is partly why the nationalist governments of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are unlikely to say much against Trump’s Greenland harangues. They aren’t going to risk their relationship with a friendly administration over an icy, faraway island. (Though what ordinary Hungarians—or Slovaks, Czechs, and other European peoples—think about Trump’s Greenland ploy might be a different matter.)
I look forward to polls of European voters, to take their temperature. Hard for me to see how you win people over to your side in the long term by humiliating them, and reminding them of their own weakness. I’m not talking about Greenland per se — European publics will never favor that, whatever their governments say or do — but about electing governments aligned broadly with the stated US long-term strategic goal of consolidating and defending the West.
Here in Hungary, there’s an election coming up in the spring, and it’s going to be close. On the one hand, Orban’s closeness with Trump should be a big bonus for him, given that Hungary no longer has a hostile administration to deal with, and indeed has an ally in resisting Brussels’ bullying. On the other hand, if I were the opposition leader Peter Magyar, I would go all in on “European patriotism” — this, even though it’s clear that should he win, he will turn Hungary into a vassal of Brussels’s managerial liberals. Bottom line: I want Orban to win re-election, just as I want the RN, the AfD, Reform UK, and a right-wing coalition to win in Poland. I fear this Trump thing puts all that in danger. I hope I’m wrong. We will see.
Read the whole thing. And for a similar take, read Mary Harrington today, who writes that Trump, with the Greenland gambit, “has royally screwed the European Right.” More:
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.
Last point — this from today’s WSJ:
Only 16% of Europeans view the U.S. as an ally that shares the same values, down from 21% in 2024, according to a recent survey conducted in November by the European Council on Foreign Relations, an international think tank.
The decline in the U.K., long the closest U.S. ally in Europe, was stark: down to 25%, from 37% a year earlier.
Europeans also have their pride and don’t like to see their countries being pushed around, said Jérémie Gallon, a French foreign-affairs expert and head of Europe for trade-and-policy consulting firm McLarty Associates.
“People are starting to feel that the sense of humiliation, and vassalization, is at a point that is unacceptable,” he said.
It is all so unnecessary. Of course the US-European relationship needed to be recalibrated. Of course J.D. Vance’s Munich speech was an occasion of brutal truth-telling. But I’m telling you, the US is going to miss Europe when it’s gone, more than the “screw the Euroweenies” people on the American Right understand.
The only way European civilization is saved is by changing demographics and the recovery of Christianity. Politics has a key role to play in that. Trump is making it much harder on the politicians in Europe who stand a chance at reversing its steep decline. That is all.
