On day three of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos last year, I sped down from the press centre to the main hall for US president Donald Trump’s virtual address to the event (they were in different locations).
The purpose? I wanted to gauge, first hand, the reaction of Europe’s elite to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.
Would they sit in stony silence as he thrashed the European Union? Would they reproach him for his climate denying?
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Neither as it happens. They cheered, clapped, divvied up friendly questions and begged him to attend the event in person the following year.
It resembled a medieval court, with Trump cast as king and Europe reduced to grovelling courtier. This bootlicking exercise set the tone for 2025.
Perhaps the most egregious example was Nato secretary general Mark Rutte’s almost unwatchable “daddy” performance.
As Trump compared Israel and Iran to “two kids in a schoolyard” who “fight like hell”, Rutte interjected, laughing: “And then daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get them to stop.”
UK prime minister Keir Starmer is perhaps the most toadish of them all, offering Trump almost complete obedience, something that is apparently derided behind closed doors in the White House.
In July Starmer played the role of guest in his own country (unprecedented for a British leader) when summoned to a meeting with the US president at Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.
[ Keir Starmer’s ‘see no evil’ Donald Trump strategy risks making him weakerOpens in new window ]
The English language abounds with words to describe Europe’s Trump policy. Fawning, sycophantic, obsequious. One commentator called it “strategic self-emasculation”.
Nobody disputes there’s a realpolitik element to dealing with Trump. Washington has Europe over a barrel on Ukraine. If the US cancels its intelligence sharing or weapons supply to Kyiv, the country could fall, leaving a belligerent Russia on the EU’s border.
But has Europe’s policy of self-emasculation actually delivered anything other than withering disdain from Trump himself?
Washington’s recently published national security strategy would suggest not.
The 33-page document expends more ink excoriating the EU than the country’s traditional foes, Russia and China, and openly advocates intervening in European politics to support anti-EU, anti-migrant parties. Russia has welcomed the document, saying it was “largely consistent” with Moscow’s vision. The comfy Cold War consensus doesn’t apply any more.
Europe is playing out the script Trump has written for it: dithering, enfeebled, a pushover. It’s humiliating to be a European watching this.
Ireland’s own sycophantic response to Trump resulted in MMA-fighter turned alt-right influencer Conor McGregor being invited to the White House on St Patrick’s Day last year, a role normally afforded the Taoiseach.
One month after Fifa boss Gianni Infantino added to the Trump adulation cake by inventing a Fifa peace prize and awarding it to the US president, Trump invaded and captured the leader of a foreign country.
He now has his sights on Greenland, something that Denmark warns would effectively end the Nato alliance.
Nato doesn’t have a provision in its charter for dealing with Nato-on-Nato attacks.
Trump is breaking the 80-year-old transatlantic alliance and it is naive to think Washington’s antagonism toward Europe will disappear with Trump’s departure.
The hunker-down-and-wait-Trump-out approach being adopted by European leaders is an act of denial and a refusal to accept reality.
It suggests that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again, which is by no means certain. Trump’s views on Europe are widely shared across his Maga base.
A more proactive approach would be to see Trump as a difficult but necessary pill for Europe to swallow.
Economically, the bloc’s single market is an unfinished product which has been left behind by the US and China.
Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on Europe’s competitiveness problem is surprisingly direct on what needs to be done. To catch up, he says the EU needs to invest €800 billion annually in critical industries – everything from AI to energy and EVs – while lowering regulatory barriers for innovative firms, which typically have to go to the US to scale up.
The former European Central Bank president says this investment could be partly funded by the common issuance of debt, something that has been on the EU’s to-do list for over a decade.
Similarly, Trump has exploded the notion that Europe can simply rely on the US to underwrite its security.
Germany more than any other member state embodies the bloc’s predicament. It outsourced its security requirements to the US, its exports to China and its energy security to Russia and is now spending about €1 trillion on defence and infrastructure to ween itself off these reliances.
As former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson said in an interview with the Spectator magazine this week, European leaders need to use “hard power and hard cash” or face becoming irrelevant.
The EU’s dithering over €210 billion of frozen Russian assets at a time when Moscow is engaged in an actual and hybrid war against the Continent is pathetic.
Europe needs to toughen up and stop curtsying to an increasingly erratic US president.