Trump has decisive views on Europe – and we cannot afford to ignore them

Compare and contrast these words from two American presidents.

- Kim Darroch

"Our alliance is the foundation of global security. Our trade and our commerce is the engine of our global economy. Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet. When Europe and America lead with our hopes instead of our fears, we do things that no other nations can do, no other nations will do."

"Europe is not doing a good job in many ways... I know the smart [leaders in Europe]. I know the stupid ones... They talk too much and they're not producing... And if it keeps going the way it's going... many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer... Most European nations, they're decaying... I think they're weak."

The first is Barack Obama, speaking in Berlin on 19 June 2013. The second includes excerpts from a Donald Trump interview with Dasha Burns of Politico on 8 December 2025. Quite a contrast, is it not?

And the new American national security strategy - published on 4 December, welcomed in Moscow and the prompt for the Politico interview - throws fuel on the fire, asserting that Europe's "economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure".

So what is going on?

Trump has been criticising Europe for "ripping off America" all the way back to letters he wrote to US newspapers in the 1980s. And he has intensified his attacks since launching his political career.

In his 2016 election campaign, he called Nato a scam through which Europeans got America to pay for their defence while spending their budgets on social policies. In 2017, he reportedly presented Angela Merkel with an invoice for more than $300bn for decades of US military spending on the defence of Germany (the White House denied the story). In 2018, he told CBS the EU was "a foe" because "in a trade sense they've really taken advantage of us". And in 2020, he told Ursula von der Leyen at Davos that Nato was dead and the US would leave.