The US National Security Strategy paints a picture of the sort of nation the Trump administration wants to see in Europe: culturally cohesive, militarily strong, with low levels of crime and immigration – and “majority European,” meaning white. If that country can get rich by making a product the rest of the world wants to buy, all the better.
What would such a country look like? Denmark might be a start. It has some of Europe’s toughest immigration laws and one of its lowest crime rates. Conscription is mandatory, and it is overwhelmingly white. It even makes the drugs that keep Americans thin. If its welfare state is too cushy, or its climate policies too green – well, nobody’s perfect.
But instead of holding Demark up as a country worth working with, President Donald Trump spent the first month of the year antagonizing it with his threats to seize Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Although Trump eventually backed down, his gambit alarmed Europe’s mainstream and has even led some nationalist leaders – once proud of their ties to Trump – to distance themselves from him.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally and the protégé of Marine Le Pen, accused Trump of “coercion” and slammed his “imperial ambitions.” Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) who just weeks ago had hailed the National Security Strategy as the dawn of a “conservative renaissance,” said Trump had “violated a fundamental campaign promise – not to interfere in other countries.”
Trump’s aggressive push to annex Greenland was a blunder, analysts told CNN, which could thwart his administration’s hope to build a “civilizational” alliance of hard-right European parties. In threatening the national sovereignty of a European country, they added, the president has undermined the sort of nationalism his administration wants to cultivate among “patriotic” European allies.
“Greenland was a major miscalculation,” said Ivan Krastev, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Although Trump can easily find support in Europe with an anti-immigration, anti-woke, anti-green agenda, Krastev said the president unwittingly crossed a line by threatening national sovereignty.
“Trump is always called a nationalist, but he’s a nationalist who does not understand nationalism – particularly the nationalism of others,” Krastev told CNN, describing Trump as a nationalist “without history.”
“When it comes to land, his view is that of the real estate guy. He believes that he’s in the business of gentrifying the world,” he said.
By contrast, the principles of land and borders are almost “sacred” for European nationalists, who have visceral memories of what happens when borders are redrawn by force. “European nationalism is very, very sensitive about territorial integrity, because this was very much what shattered Europe before,” Krastev added. “This is why, for them, what Trump was doing is indefensible.”
While the would-be leaders of France and Germany issued sharp rebukes to Trump, the opposition in central and eastern Europe was more muted. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and Trump’s loudest cheerleader in Europe, dodged a question about Greenland, saying it is an “in-house issue,” while Poland’s nationalist President Karol Nawrocki merely said the dispute should be resolved “in a diplomatic way.”
For Orbán especially, Trump’s antics could create a problem. More than any other European leader, Orbán has made a career out of bristling against the EU, despite not seeking to leave it. For years, Orbán has railed against what he depicts as an overbearing, even imperial power, which he says corrodes the national sovereignty of its members.
Similar criticisms could be levelled against Trump, according to Dimitar Bechev, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe.
“If you’ve been campaigning on issues of sovereignty, and reclaiming control from Brussels, then you cannot be seen as fighting on behalf of a hegemon,” Bechev told CNN. European nationalists must be “careful” in their response to Trump’s recent antics, he said: “You don’t want to disown Trump, but on the other hand you don’t want to appear as if you’re Trump’s proxy.”
An ‘illiberal internationale’?
Although Trump used his speech at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last week to claw back his threats to take Greenland from Denmark by force, the president managed to rankle his European allies once more by baselessly claiming that NATO troops “stayed a little back” from the front lines when fighting in support of the US in Afghanistan.
Italy’s hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, praised last year by Trump as “beautiful and powerful,” said his comment was “unacceptable.” “Friendship requires respect,” Meloni said this week in a terse statement.
Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist Reform UK party who has previously campaigned for Trump in the US, felt the need to distance himself from the president, calling his comments “wrong” and describing his threats against Greenland as a “very hostile act.”
Liberal European leaders gave more full-throated criticism. Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever said Trump’s repeated threats and insults were an affront to Europe’s self-respect. “Being a happy vassal is one thing; being a miserable slave is something else,” he said at Davos. “If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity. That’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy – it’s your dignity.”
Krastev said Trump had underestimated the extent to which nationalism is based on pride. “If you are not going and appealing to the pride and dignity of these nations, these parties have no choice (but to oppose you),” he said.
Jeremy Shapiro, a research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said the Trump administration’s hope to cultivate “like-minded” allies in Europe could already be backfiring. The Greenland debacle “is the latest in a succession of ways in which Trump is stepping on his own feet,” Shapiro told CNN.
A major poll released this month by the ECFR showed that Trump has squandered some of the influence in Europe that he had when he took office. Only 16% of EU citizens now consider the US as an ally, while 20% see it as a rival or an enemy.
Trump’s antics will not stop certain populist parties from piggybacking on his influence and working with MAGA on a “transactional” basis, Shapiro said. Orbán, for instance, has lent heavily on Trump’s support ahead of Hungary’s election in April, in which he will face his first credible challenger in years.
But Trump has undoubtedly “lost some influence” among the nationalist parties his administration is trying to court, he said. “They are increasingly wary of him. And I think what it means in the long term is that we’re not going to see some sort of ‘illiberal internationale’ with Trump at its head.”
