In 2025: What was the West? What was Europe?

Having read the Trumpworld blueprint for the world – the National Security Strategy – and taken in the outrage from across Europe, we should now just take a breather. Nothing has changed in the transatlantic relationship, beyond some nostalgic view of the post-1989 domestic bliss having now turned outrightly violent. Europe is recoiling at the viciousness of a dominant, narcissist partner we always knew was an abuser. That says a lot about European denial.

Trump is vulgar; he is abrasive. But is he also the first U.S. president to state bluntly what we have always known. That Washington will rule through might, and that Europe must obediently accept what its master says.

Has this subservience not been true for the last 30 years? Europe complied with American demands in the bombing of Yugoslavia; in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq; in the War on Terror and the creation of the surveillance industry and facilitating rendition flights to Gitmo; in refusing to buy Russian gas; in pursuing critiques of Chinese human rights abuses as a thin pretext for trade (have we even considered what Europe has done through arms trading and its role in the genocide of Gazans before criticising China?)… Europe fooled itself, by remaining subservient to a White House that has always sought to prevent the strategic independence of growing European industrial capacity, ostensibly powered by cheap Russian gas.

Now that the hawkish pursuit of war has resulted in new debt and higher gas prices for Europe, the EU must contend with the decline of electoral trust in its mainstream parties, and the decline of its own competitiveness. Now Europe is being gaslighted by Trump for regulating ferocious American capitalism and tech-lords, and for its multiculturalism and humanity. Now it is being threatened by Trump that the U.S. will “correct” its ways by hook or by crook… and Europe? It does nothing: it takes the U.S. tariffs without retaliation, gets told by Trump to hit China with tariffs, cooperates with America’s client-state Israel when it carries out its genocide, calls for massive spending diversions towards rearmament, fuelled both by bold rhetoric from NATO about the Kremlin’s incessant efforts at taunting Europe through interference, cyber-warfare and border incursions.

All in all, it seems the real war is against Europe. With the United States and Russia now enjoying a tag-team bout against the EU.

When Europe does not fight back, it cements its status as a subordinate, and it accepts its fate as such. Trump, the White House, the United States, will never see Europe as an equal. Only as a compliant dependent. With dependency, no respect can be expected from “daddy”.

The United States not only inflicts high tariffs on EU products, to which the European Commission does not retaliate, but demands that Europe fight Chinese exports by combating mercantilist overcapacity, technological theft, cyber espionage, and other economic practices that effectively undermine American technological and manufacturing interests.

The United States then wants Europe to abandon its focus on regulatory legislation that reins in American capitalism and controls on the techno-feudal command of digital overlords like Elon Musk. A few weeks ago, the EC announced it was enforcing the Digital Services Act’s provisions on deceptive practices and transparency to fine X.com fined €120 million for deliberately deceiving users into thinking people who have paid for a blue checkmark have had their identity “verified” – US Vice President JD Vance retaliated, saying the EU was trying to suppress free speech; Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the fine was “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments”; then X owner Elon Musk declared that “the EU should be abolished” and blocked the EU Commission’s ad account on X; to which, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev replied: “Exactly”.

In no uncertain terms, the U.S. promotes a clear far-right agenda, pitching ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracies onto Europe as being the victim of a self-inflicted racial war. It claims Europe’s decline is own down to “civilizational erasure” migration policies that hollow out white, European birthrates or loss of national identities. These are falsities that promote allegations that the EU undermines political liberty and sovereignty through censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.

The Trump administration says it will support “allies” that can restore “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” and “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history”. When the White House says it will oppose “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe” it is referring to the European Commission and its campaign on rule of law conditional funding against strongmen leaders and the far-right (Hungary and other Visegrad right-wing pow-wows which the document says it will support through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges); and to intervene by actively supporting parties that “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory”, in which case this refers to far-right, anti-immigration parties like Reform (UK), Rassemblment (France), and AfD (Germany), all parties that are poised to make major government gains in the next elections – not least by the effort of the managerial and inept political class that took hold of England, Germany and France in the last decade.

A longer unpublished draft of the document was circulated prior to the official, public strategy: according to Defense One, it listed Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary as countries that the US should “work more with … with the goal of pulling them away” from the European Union (the White House denied the existence of any such draft).

What is Europe’s response? It doubles down on the far-right agenda…

Keir Starmer calls on the Council of Europe (which includes the whole of the EU member states) to curb joint human rights laws in the European Convention for Human Rights so that member states can take tougher action to protect their borders; joined by Italy of course, various EU states want to change the interpretation of the ECHR that prevents the deportation of asylum seekers, by diluting the threat of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’.

Here, even the ‘left’ foolishly hopes they will convince mistrustful voters they are better than the far-right at doing their dirty business!

On Ukraine, the White House is equally sanguine and perhaps less wrong about the fact that European officials “hold unrealistic expectations for the Ukraine war”. At the very least, no European leader will commit their forces to fight the Russian invasion, but they are OK in funding a long war of attrition that ramps up rearmament strategies as America pulls away from the Eurasian sphere to focus more on its backyard (now dubbed the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe doctrine).

The political crisis inside the EU can be illustrated by the divisions inside the European Council on the EC and EP hawks tub-thumping for cash for Ukraine’s defence (now forced by Trump to pony up); and the missed opportunities to correct mistakes of the past and employ continued diplomacy with Russia. Going into 2026, EU taxpayers will pay €3 billion per year in borrowing costs to raise €90 billion in common debt to finance Ukraine’s defence against Russia. Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia are not part of this solution, forced only because Belgium (with support from Italy and Malta) feared retaliation from Russia if it allowed the use of the €200 billion in frozen Russian assets, most of which are held in the Brussels-based financial depository Euroclear. Russia has already started legal action.

The tragedy of the Ukraine war lies in the way Europe, buoyed in the early days of the conflict by Ukraine’s sustained resistance against Russia, pursued this war of attrition (without committing its own forces of course) instead of asserting itself as a geopolitical actor seeking peace – both in Ukraine and in Gaza.

The moral absolutism that defines the bold statements of so many EU leaders, NATO, Ursula von der Leyen, Kaya Kallas and even Roberta Metsola on the subject of European defence are all well and good. But without the diplomatic pursuit of peace, Europe’s back is to the wall if it is forced to accept the bitter, realistic price of ending the war now: illegitimate Russian gains in the Donbass. Is endless war the better option? How serious is Europe about ending war when only Ukraine is doing the fighting? Is perpetual escalation Europe’s only answer not to allow itself to be outmanoeuvred by the overt American intervention?

Europe has forgotten how to act in its own interest, because strategic autonomy means nothing when American pressure leads to European leaders defaulting to compliance.

(Malta, a price-taker in international relations, seems to have learnt early on that the Trump administration’s taste for retribution requires kid-gloves and unctuous praise, even a Nobel peace prize… As one of the least enthusiastic of the European member states on prospecting for a military economy against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Malta is keeping its head below the parapet. That is how Malta now values morality in international relations.)

For decades the West manifested itself through promises of democracy and international law, values presented as universal. But Gaza is the major turning point of our lives 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: international law is only applied selectively by the West, and European governments refused to mount a humanitarian intervention to stop mass civilian deaths. Led by Germany as well as the UK amongst others, they have provided diplomatic cover for Israel, despite knowing the scale of the destruction.

This two-year silence has made clear that the European Union does not defend the principles it claims to uphold. How can European leaders speak of democracy when the West has supported the collective punishment of an occupied population? How can governments claim to stand for human dignity, but allow clear violations of international law?

By standing aside, Europe has told the rest of the world that Western commitments to law and rights are conditional… so much for its own conditionality mechanisms on rule of law and EU funds.

For centuries, European colonisation has meant enforced trade regimes and ruinous resource extraction to power a climate crisis that is the product of capitalism. Will Europe keep defending a neoliberal order that many outside the continent see as unjust, or will it truly support human rights, with those values being applied in Gaza with the same urgency as for Ukraine?

The EU had the chance to prove it stood for humanitarian principles. Instead, most governments tacitly supported Israeli military operations eve as aid deliveries were blocked, and calls for a ceasefire were delayed or watered down; nobody bar a few EU states had the guts to call out the genocide; and when ordinary people protested in European capitals, they were brutally beaten by the German Polizei; the British, true to their original idea to create the illegal Israeli occupation in the 1930s, imprisoned them.

European governments again chose alignment with Tel Aviv’s daddy in Washington over an independent moral stand: this is the crisis of democracy and human rights that is the height of the European hubris heralding the death of the West. It is the loss of trust in a system that preaches values while betraying them in practice.

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