European leaders’ invitation to their December summit was an exercise in diplomatic understatement. European Council President Antonio Costa set the scene with a year-end warning that “rules-based economic relations and traditional partnerships can no longer be taken for granted.” Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran the blunter headline “Trump Declares War on Europe.”
The publication days earlier by the US president of his new National Security Strategy (NSS) rationalised and gave formal expression to the reality that we are now in a qualitatively new age. In year one of Donald Trump’s second presidency long-standing US commitments to democracy, global relationships and realignments are being reshaped, and economics and politics turned on their head. The stability of the Cold War years is now a distant dream.
Goodbye to multilateralism and the UN, WTO, and cooperation on climate change. Hello to a return to great power rivalry and the doctrine that might is right, nowhere more epitomised than in Trump’s repeated insistence that Ukraine is to blame for the Russian invasion and his dismissiveness and downright rudeness to president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Trump has long seen Russian president Vladimir Putin as a strong leader whose efforts to bully Ukraine into making territorial concessions were nothing short of “genius.” In Trump’s eyes, Putin is worthy of admiration and respect like fellow autocrats such as Turkey’s Tayip Recep Erdogan, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu - unlike the leaders of traditional US allies Germany, Canada or France, for whom he exhibits scorn.
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Optimists suggested during the 2024 election campaign that Trump’s bark was worse than his bite. They argued that an ageing president would, in his second term, be gentler, less abrasive and less revolutionary. On the contrary, an embittered Trump captured and subdued all resistance in the Republican Party, and also in Congress, surrounded himself with willing sycophants and began a purge of the state administration in an apparently successful attempt to remove all constraints to presidential action. And to do what he promised during his campaign.
On the international stage we saw the immediate expression of Trump Mark 2. He promised to pull the US back from international military engagement and spoke of annexing Greenland, a threat repeated this week. He would bomb Iran and shoot up Venezuelan ships, he sent troops in to US cities, and fancifully claimed to have resolved eight wars for which he would be awarded an equally ridiculous peace prize from FIFA.
In Gaza, where the October ceasefire was greeted by Trump as one of his main achievements, the death toll continues to rise. Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu, like that with Putin, blew hot and cold, but in the end he has stood by the Israeli prime minister. The path to phase two of the peace deal remains precarious.
He spent the first period of his second term chastising countries previously seen by the US as allies, not only leaving them out of the emerging Ukraine talks but threatening and then invoking tariffs against them, demanding they increase their military spending and asserting claims over some of their territory. For some, grovelling diplomacy was seen as the answer.
The NSS strategy depicts Europe as facing “civilizational erasure” at the hands of immigrants and its leaders. It says the US will cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s leaders, and asserts that many of their governments “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, posted on social media that the NSS “places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe.” While deploring and forswearing interference in elections elsewhere, the document promises to back Europe’s “patriots”, the populist hard-right parties whose “growing influence … gives cause for great optimism.” It insists that attempts to resist such parties are themselves anti-democratic. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the paper asserts ominously.
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Europe alone, not Russia, nor China, is now seen as the only ideological enemies of the US. In the rest of the NSS document -dealing with other areas - US interests are defined as merely economic.
Trump has made 2025 his own, reshaping not only the US, but the global order, undoing a vital post-War consensus based on democratic values, multilateralism and the rule of law. It is never easy to distinguish what is important coming out of the White House and what is just “noise”, but Trump’s actions are far-reaching,
The challenge to Europe, Ireland, and the west from its key ally’s turn is monumental, even existential - US power and influence remain, and will remain, indispensable, not least in Gaza and Ukraine. This is the central, critical political and diplomatic challenge which Europe now faces.
