A wrecking ball’s damage is surely harder to manage if it is swinging from inside the house.
As Europe’s security establishment meets in Germany this weekend, the Munich Security Conference’s organizers have already announced the (creative) destruction of global norms ushered in by US President Donald Trump as a “demolition man” era.
While this has been presented as an opportunity, in truth, it is unclear how constructive the conference will prove. The dust of the previous year’s Munich mauling by senior US officials has not settled, rather become obscured in a wider cloud, as weak foundations cause the pillars of Pax Americana – the peace in the West since World War 2 – to begin to crumble.
This time last year, US Vice President JD Vance’s broadside against Europe’s liberal democracies shocked his audience – assailing what he falsely called their impinging on free speech and backsliding on democracy.
Europe does. It would be tempting to forget the week-long rollercoaster that was Trump’s assault on Danish sovereignty, which forced fellow European NATO members to send troops to Greenland in a show of continental unity. But Europe’s lessons from the flash crisis are two-fold, and may bring comfort at the customarily tedious three-day Munich meeting.
First, Trump often says what feels exciting simply to see how far it will take him, rather than because of a shrewdly detailed policy. Midnight Truth Social posts can mark the peak of months of military planning to snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Or they can dissolve a vast crisis of Trump’s own making, taking NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s off-ramp to switch gears on Greenland from threatened aggression into negotiations. Those talks continue, Vance recently said, but their resonance is partially lost in the white noise of growing US pressure on Iran, and the global fallout from the release of more files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. There is simply too much crazy to catch up on for singular crises to sound out long enough, let alone echo.
The second lesson is that when confronted by allies, Trump seems to dislike being disliked. The Rutte off-ramp was eagerly seized, and the Greenland invasion threat swiftly evaporated. Trump even near-apologized to British troops, after suggesting that NATO forces who fought alongside the US in Afghanistan had done so “a little back, little off the front lines.” Britain lost 457 troops in the conflict. Populists like to remain popular. The “king” likes to have allied courtiers fawning. Europe’s challenge is to change enough, now the old world order is broken, to ensure its own security, but not so irrevocably that it cannot revert to welcome a stabler successor to Trump. One European diplomat described the mood ahead of Munich as: “Careful confidence that we have found our feet, although a sense of dread of the task ahead.”
There are nine months to go until the US mid-term elections potentially hobble the president and fire the starting gun on Vance’s likely bid to succeed Trump. From that point on, a combination of global calm and flattering allies could be helpful to those who seek to follow Trump, in the two years before 2028’s presidential elections. Even though every week of Trump foreign policy can feel like an age, his time in office is limited.
But we are yet to see the wholesale departure of US troops from Europe. Or an end to US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Or a radical alteration of Washington’s nuclear doctrines. Instead, Europe’s larger powers have half-committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, a step which most European officials seem to think was long overdue. The threat from Russia, which can barely dominate its much smaller Ukrainian neighbor, is surely not so great that a wealthy continent of half a billion must rely on the US to come to its defense? What has been the point of decades of greater European integration if those nations seek no autonomy over their own security?
With a souring, unpredictable yet indispensable main ally, Europe’s tactics – month by month – increasingly resemble those of Kyiv. Europe must retain its red lines while avoiding angry outbursts from the US president, hoping to remain out of Trump’s immediate crosshairs, but appearing ever grateful for US support. It is Volodymyr Zelensky’s survival mode, and it provides no room to prosper.
But Europe has, for now, little alternative, and continuing to exist roughly as they are – in this maelstrom where everything seems under threat but little actually gets done – may seem victory enough.
The wider threat of the wrecking ball swings from inside the NATO alliance, and it concerns the erosion of public decency and rise of far-right populism.
The National Rally, Reform UK, and the AfD all pose serious challenges to the stable, centrist leaders of France, the United Kingdom and Germany, respectively.
But the Trump-adjacent European far-right made the limits of its neo-Americanism felt by expressing its disgust during the Greenland debacle. Italy’s rightist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is far from a catalyst for Trump’s wildest tendencies, but instead a moderating whisperer, deployed at moments of EU crisis. The Munich Security Report, published earlier this month, released a slew of polling indicating that Europe’s people do not see a bright future ahead and seek urgent change. But the shackles of Covid-19 debt, the Russian menace, and a world order redefined by the Trump administration will remain the same however far to the right Europe’s G7 economies swing in the coming years. There are limits as to how far Europe can veer to the right.
Europe simply faces a moment where its future is its own to grasp. Try telling a group of the world’s richest, freest democracies the opposite, and the outcry would be deafening. The staid pomp of Munich is a fitting venue to remind European electorates of the value of decency, stability, and of finding a way to be creatively positive in the dust of destruction.
