This new world disorder is a threat to European security

Henry Kissinger once remarked how “it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but it can be fatal to be its friend”.

- MARK ALMOND

Richard Nixon’s foreign policy guru was admitting that the Pentagon could dish out enormous damage to any state that wasn’t a nuclear superpower and which challenged Washington, but weaker states who leveraged their defence on the back of American power could find themselves fatally exposed if, or when, the White House left them in the lurch.

The ignominious collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 haunted Kissinger. Friday night’s Oval Office “great television” row between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is a generational wake-up call to the West, in particular, as well as a signal to a world of potential predators that America’s primary concerns don’t have its allies’ interests at heart.

European policy elites are shell-shocked by the Oval Office row. EU leaders have long assumed their countries’ wealth would buy Brussels influence in the world without getting down and dirty in power politics. Donald Trump’s second term has shattered those illusions within six weeks.