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America First leaves Europe last Populists should dump DC

They need to look forward (Photo by ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)

They need to look forward (Photo by ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)


November 9, 2024   4 mins

“False and dangerous.” “Deeply concerning.” “A neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath.” Many of Europe’s leaders may have been regretting their previous criticisms of Donald Trump. From Donald Tusk to David Lammy, the bloc’s liberals rushed to offer their stiff congratulations to the newly anointed President-elect. Meanwhile, the leaders of Italy and Hungary raced to kiss the ring of America’s godfather of populism.

Yet if there is one thing that unites Trump sycophants and sceptics in Europe, it’s the desire to boost European defence spending and security cooperation. In a nervy display of Franco-German solidarity, the leaders of France and Germany announced that they would work to build “a more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this context”, with an emphasis on enhancing European defence. In Britain, there have been calls for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to draw closer to Europe on security, deepening a Brexit betrayal initiated by Boris Johnson.

For liberals, strengthening the EU and Nato will insure against Trump either withdrawing from the defence alignment — whose European members he views as parasitical free-riders — or giving up on the Ukraine war effort. For populists, greater defence spending is an act of fealty, symbolising their devotion to Trump’s new world order.

Either way, Europeans would be mistaken to respond to Trump 2.0 by doubling down either on the transatlantic alliance or European integration. What Trump’s victory shows is that the globalist strategy of pursuing transnational integration against the wishes of voters has failed. With his America First agenda, the President-elect has now bet twice on America’s voters over its globalist elites — and won both times. In light of this, Europe’s leaders would commit a grave error in choosing Nato over their own people.

There was once a time when European economic and security integration may have had a strategic rationale: in the post-Cold War unipolar world, globalisation was underpinned by American hegemony and economic strength. Back then, American globalism provided the cover for European integration, allowing Europe’s elites to detach themselves from their voters. Workers were promised all the glories of globalisation in return for retreating from politics into lives of cosy consumption. This process opened up the void between citizens and political elites that has bedevilled European states ever since.

That world is now long gone. The high-tide of economic globalisation has receded, and political globalism is ebbing with it. Today, China is the industrial workshop of the world, and America is no longer its hegemon. This means that further European or transatlantic integration through Nato has become a losing strategy. Rather than uniting against Trump or sucking up to him, Europe should seek to replicate his domestic political model. As Trump did in the US, European nations should build electoral coalitions for national renewal, and use this as a basis to forge new international relationships in place of the old transnational ones.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid further European integration, whether it’s via the EU or Nato, but several stand out. First, Trump’s foreign policy focus will be on China and the Asia-Pacific more than Europe, which will increasingly take second place in Washington’s political calculations. No amount of Trump-whispering from Giorgia Meloni or Viktor Orbán will change that. Second, a push to further European integration in response to US strategic retreat from Europe will not strengthen the Continent. Quite the opposite: it will bolster the transnational structures that weaken the nations of Europe. The EU functions by leaching power from the nation-state without suborning it to any greater political authority. With no institutional core, the EU functions as a political pinball machine, ricocheting responsibility from one supranational agency to another, from one country to another.

“There are plenty of reasons to avoid further European integration”

This structure admittedly worked for a time, but only with the US hovering in the background. Throughout the era of unipolar globalisation, Washington was ready to come to the aid of European states when necessary: America offered leadership during European military campaigns against Yugoslavia in the Nineties and Libya in 2010, for instance, and oversaw the European financial crisis in the 2010s through the International Monetary Fund. Today, with Trump looking east, America will be less willing to lend a hand.

Nor will strengthening Nato be of much use in Trump World, as this will ​​only reinforce Europe’s geopolitical divide — from which the US ultimately profits. Just consider the war in Ukraine. As long as the EU and Russia are at odds, the EU will remain dependent on importing more expensive US liquid natural gas, which will act as a drag on European industry and growth. Meanwhile, Russia will remain focused on supplying energy markets outside of Europe, relying ever more heavily on Chinese imports to supply its industrial equipment. That is a world that favours Chinese and American firms over European ones.

If Trump’s foreign policy follows the direction of his first administration, then we can expect a renewed focus on building a more transactional international order. Bilateral bargaining and regional orders are more likely than starry-eyed globalist compacts. To bargain effectively in such a world, European nations must develop a clear sense of their own national interests. And identifying those national interests means looking inward, not outward. This means turning away from the faded promises of globalism.

For this reason, renewed calls for transnational integration — whether of the European or Atlantic variety — miss the mark. The alarmed response of European liberals to Trump’s victory reveals a fear not only of Trump, but of their own voters. The reason they fear Trump is because they know that he has something they lack: national democratic legitimacy, built on the wishes of the marginalised and the politically excluded. Europe’s liberal elite feel trapped between a mercurial Trump and their own left-behind “deplorables”.

By contrast, Europe’s populists have embraced Trump as the leader of their global movement. Yet this is also ill-advised. Rather than turning to Washington for leadership, populist leaders would be better off learning from the Trump playbook: appealing to their fellow citizens rather than parading around with Nato banners or jockeying for international position. This is the paradox of Trump World: the only way to build a new era of international cooperation is to start from within, through a project of national renewal.


Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of eight books, as well as a co-author of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (2023). He is one of the hosts of the Bungacast podcast.

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UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Each nation, peaceably and diligently doing what is best for its citizens is exactly what Trump, and most Americans, want.

Steve Gwynne
Steve Gwynne
1 month ago

“This is the paradox of Trump World: the only way to build a new era of international cooperation is to start from within, through a project of national renewal.”

This is exactly what Boris Johnson failed to do following Brexit with a sharp inward focus on cultivating an inclusive post-EU national identity. The metaphor being, harbouring the good ship Britannia in order to refit and carry out repairs before embarking on a global mission to mediate multipolar blocism. Or something like that.

Anyway, I very much align with what Philip has to say. We need to re-establish the Westphalian system of sustainable, resilient and sufficient nation states to the extent that this can be achieved within the context of technological innovation, growing resource scarcity and international trade.

The reason being that at a species level, transnational blocism is too antagonistic with elites more able to put their own interests first whereas the Westphalian system engenders more scope for national resilience within a field of inter-national relationships that bind the human global system in more flexible nonlinear ways.

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
1 month ago

Good piece. Events, not least elections, might force EU Member States to start listening to voices from within. In our case, hate crime legislation is designed to silence any debate that would force the elite to listen to voices from within but we are an island off a (non-EU) island off the coast of Europe so we don’t matter.

Nancy Kmaxim
Nancy Kmaxim
1 month ago

The unfortunate reality of the viewpoint of this article is that the author accepts the narrative that President Trump was elected by “the marginalized”. He was elected by the economic powerhouse of the United States, and invites those who aspire to economic and social prosperity to join in. Partnership requires mutual “skin in the game”, and steadfast commitment to the welfare of citizens.

blue 0
blue 0
29 days ago

History illustrates that ignoring the consent of the governed will not end well.

Will D. Mann
Will D. Mann
29 days ago

With the USA on one side and China and it’s client states on the other, each exerting a gravitational pull through economic and military power, Europe can either form a third block of its own or each individual country will be picked off by the major powers

Andrew F
Andrew F
29 days ago

There are glaring contradictions in this article.
In what sense is Hungary or Italy (so called populists) parading under NATO banners?
Clearly frontier countries like Baltic States, Poland and Finland have different views regarding Russia and benefits of NATO than appeasers of Russia like Germany and France.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
28 days ago

The parts about EU integration here are just wrong.
” it will bolster the transnational structures that weaken the nations of Europe. The EU functions by leaching power from the nation-state without suborning it to any greater political authority.”
This is just bare-faced BS. First, if you imagine an alternate universe without the EU, where Europe today consisted of 25+ currencies, a labyrinth of borders, both physical and regulatory, and almost certainly higher intra-European geopolitical tensions (remember the wars of the 19th and early 20th century? That. Those fault lines didn’t go away by themselves). How could the average European possibly be richer or safer in that scenario?
The EU is still significantly less of a single market than either China or the US. The lack of power consolidation is a weakness not a strength, in the context of a world where Europeans have to compete. Not everyone can skate by being Switzerland.
Second, the European Parliament and Council of Ministers does exist, so both directly and indirectly, the EU is subject to ‘greater political authority’. The argument here seems to be that a polity has to be a ‘nation-state’ to be legitimate, but ‘nation-state’ is a woolly and not historically fixed concept. France now might be a ‘nation-state’, but medieval France, which it’s Breton’s, Occitanians, Basques and other ethnic and linguistic minorities wasn’t. Same with Germany. Same with Britain. There’s no inherent reason why, in 100 years, Europe can’t be a ‘nation-state’ – Europeans have enough in common to forge a common political identity.
And as inefficient you might argue EU institutions are, having all EU members trying to cooperate without them, and replicating many times over EU bureaucracy at a national level, would be almost certainly worse.

Michael Layman
Michael Layman
27 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Except it may not include Ukraine.