Originally published in Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Donald Trump has always presented himself as a master builder, a successful real estate developer who erected office buildings and resorts and curated golf courses all around the world. In reality, Trump was never a good businessman, declaring bankruptcy six times over his career and producing a string of failed enterprises from Trump Airlines to Trump University.
It turns out that Trump’s singular talent is not construction, but destruction. Now in his second term as U.S. president and no longer constrained by the team of “adults” he answered to in 2017, Trump is taking a sledgehammer to everything in sight. He has put into practice the slogan of Silicon Valley, eagerly embraced by his close friend Elon Musk: “move fast and break things”. Yet this is not the “creative destruction” of an evolving capitalism. More often than not, Trump engages in uncreative destruction, breaking things and leaving them broken, as he is currently doing with the U.S. government.
Now, he is threatening to do the same to the rules-based international order, beginning with the transatlantic alliance with Europe the United States has maintained for over 75 years. If Trump gets his way, NATO will lie in ruins, Ukraine and a number of former Soviet states will be once again satellites of Moscow, and the European Union will have come apart at the seams, thanks to Trump’s encouragement of far-right allies like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, and the National Rally in France. The geopolitical gloves are off.
Trump’s vision
Trump’s efforts in this direction during his first term were constrained by a group of traditional Cold War conservatives who staffed the State Department and the Pentagon. Today, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists who are equally eager to break things. The Trump team has not only begun to reverse the U.S.-led effort to isolate Russia after its illegal seizure of Ukrainian territory—it has challenged all U.S. alliances based on liberal principles and adherence to core precepts of international law.
Consider the speech that Vice President J.D. Vance delivered at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Here, he declared: “the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.”
Of course, what Vance really meant was the values shared with the Trump administration. He singled out for criticism Romania’s cancellation of a presidential election because of blatant interference by Russia, the European political mainstream for refusing to partner with far-right parties, European courts for criminalizing hate speech, and European governments for upholding a woman’s right to choose.
Vance barely mentioned Ukraine at a conference focused on the war there, and yet the war was very much the backdrop to his remarks. Vance’s speech took place midway through the launch of Trump’s new Russia policy. Donald Trump talked directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin on 12 February. They agreed to high-level discussions between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which took place in Saudi Arabia on 18 February. In between, on 14 February, Vance delivered his poisonous valentine to Europe.
The conversations between Moscow and Washington have taken place without the participation of Ukrainian representatives and over the head of European governments. So, it fell to Vance to explain to the Europeans at Munich why they were not included: because Europe no longer inhabits the same moral universe as the U.S.
By referring EU commissioners as “commissars” in his speech, Vance effectively labelled the European Union “far-left”—despite the fact that its leadership is in fact quite center-right. The Trump administration sees in the European Union many of the things it despises most: “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI), protecting the civil rights of women and the LGBT community, and a federal authority that implements policies according to democratic consensus. Trump, meanwhile, stands for the “sovereignty” of local governments, corporations, religious institutions, and racist and sexist groups.
Not surprisingly, these are the values the administration shares with the Putin regime in Russia. The Russian government has attacked the civil rights of various groups, imposed “pro-family” and anti-LGBT policies on society, promoted hate speech and genocidal language (vis-à-vis Ukraine), partnered with far-right parties in Europe, and promoted the “sovereignty” of all pro-Russian statelets in Georgia, Moldova, and eastern Ukraine.
What the war is really about
The war in Ukraine is not merely a conflict over territory. Certainly, Russia has long coveted Crimea, and Putin’s concept of a “Russian world” includes areas in the “near abroad” such as eastern Ukraine where large numbers of Russian speakers live. Ukraine, of course, seeks to restore its borders of as they existed prior to the Russian incursions of 2014.
But the underlying conflict is geopolitical. The origin of the conflict with Russia in 2013–4 was Ukraine’s desire to move closer to Europe, both economically and politically. The EU represents everything that Putin detests: a politically liberal and culturally progressive space that serves as a magnet for all post-Soviet countries. Like the French revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that challenged established imperial powers, European values of democracy and inclusion—however imperfectly implemented by the EU—have spread deep into the post-Soviet space as a direct contrast to Russia’s imperialist ideology. When there were widespread demonstrations in Russia, before Putin effectively outlawed protest, European ideas also served as an inspiration for Russian activists, which directly challenged Putin’s rule.
The prospect of European integration threatens Putin far more than NATO, which serves after all as a useful bogeyman to scare Russian citizens. This is why the Russian president has worked so assiduously to support Eurosceptic voices and exploit divisions in the EU through ideological bedfellows like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. Now, finally, Putin has an American partner who can serve as the other side of the pincer movement against the EU, and Ukraine as well.
Trump the negotiator
During his first term, Trump was so eager to negotiate an American exit from Afghanistan that he signed off on a flawed agreement with the Taliban that laid the groundwork for the collapse of the government in Kabul and the headlong retreat of U.S. forces.
So far, Trump seems to be following the same game plan. First, he has tried to extract as much mineral wealth from Ukraine as possible, a diktat that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy initially refused to sign. In his eagerness to “end” the war in Ukraine, Trump accepted Putin’s version of history, according to which “Ukraine started the war,” and declared Zelenskyy a “dictator.”
In his meeting with Lavrov, Rubio committed the U.S. to discussing economic cooperation with Russia. This comes at a time when Trump has been threatening tariffs against allies such as Canada and the EU. Economically, the policies of the U.S. and Russia are now converging. Russia’s economy is based on fossil fuels, focused on military production, and highly centralized in the hands of oligarchs—all attributes that Trump admires and hopes to reproduce at home. Moreover, Russia treats Ukraine as a colonial subject, which is how Trump would like the U.S. to treat Panama (over the canal), Greenland (to extract its natural resources), and even Canada (absorbed as a fifty-first state).
In a certain sense, Russia is the embodiment of “move fast and break things”, an anarchic force that can be deployed against Ukraine and Europe just as Trump has unleashed Musk upon the US government. Trump does not believe in harmonizing up—a process embraced at least in theory by the EU—but in racing to the bottom. There, at the bottom, lies the rubble to which Trump has turned every “public thing”—every res publica, every republican order.
What Europe should do
Europe has a choice. It can wait out Trump (again) and expect that U.S. foreign policy will swing back to some form of liberal internationalism after the 2028 elections. But there is no guarantee that US foreign policy will return to status quo ante in 2028. Liberal internationalism has suffered a number of blows to its reputation, in the U.S. and abroad, some of which may prove fatal. Even if Democrats win in 2028, it will be much more difficult in a radically polarized political environment to build public support for robust participation in the UN and associated institutions, the rebuilding of USAID, economic cooperation with allies, or international climate justice policies.
Indeed, US politics will face a crisis point in 2028 when the worst-case scenario will be the abrogation of democracy (if Trump suspends the Constitution and/or declares martial law) and the best-case scenario will be an election won by the opposition that Trump then declares illegitimate, precipitating a civil war.
Europe cannot afford to continue being the victim of a bullying United States. Sure, Emmanuel Macron can try to play good cop with Trump, but behind the scenes, Europe should opt for Plan B. It should ramp up its own independent military capacity and no longer assume that the United States will honour Article 5 of the NATO Charter. It should treat the U.S. as a powerful but unprincipled hegemon, a country with whom only a la carte transactional deals can be made.
Yet Europe also cannot afford to retreat into a retaliatory nationalism of its own. It must amplify its anti-fascist credentials. It should assume global leadership in the struggle against climate change, and it should learn the lesson of what happens when neoliberalism dominates the economic sphere and the ever-greater polarization of wealth encourages the rise of the far right.
As Trumpism steers the U.S. in a xenophobic, illiberal direction, Europe must cut its losses and work to prevent even more of the Trumpist virus from spreading throughout the continent. The U.S. opposition to Trumpism will try to win the mid-terms in 2026 and the next presidential election in 2028—without triggering a civil war. But please, Europe, do not provide any legitimacy to the Trump administration by treating it as anything but a rogue state.
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