Mujtaba Rahman, of the Eurasia Group risk consultancy, agreed. “The US is now officially committed, alongside Moscow, to interfering in European electoral politics to promote nationalist and anti-EU parties of the far right,” he said.
He said that if the document was US policy, the first election Washington would try to influence would be Hungary’s parliamentary ballot in April next year, in which the nationalist, Moscow-friendly incumbent Viktor Orbán faces a stiff challenge.
Minna Ålander of the Center for European Policy Analysis said the policy document was “actually useful. It codifies in policy, in black and white, what has been evident all year long: Trump and his people are openly hostile to Europe.”
Europe’s leaders “cannot ignore or explain the fact away any more”, Ålander said. “Any hope for things to go back to the old normal looks increasingly ludicrous. Europe needs to finally seize the initiative and stop wasting time trying to manage Trump.”
Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Instituto Affari Internazionale, said Europeans had “lulled themselves into the belief” that Trump was “unpredictable and inconsistent, but ultimately manageable. This is reassuring, but wrong.”
The Trump administration had “a clear and consistent vision for Europe: one that prioritises US-Russia ties and seeks to divide and conquer the continent, with much of the dirty work carried out by nationalist, far-right European forces,” she said.
Those forces “share the nationalist and socially conservative views championed by Maga and are also working to divide Europe and hollow out the European project”, Tocci said, arguing that flattering Trump “will not save the transatlantic relationship”.
Germany’s spy chief, Sinan Selen, said on Monday he “would not draw from such a strategy document the conclusion that we should break with America”, and Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, stressed that Trump remained erratic and the document may not ultimately amount to much.
However, she said, the US clearly wanted to “redefine what Europe means, to Europeans”. The aim was to somehow establish that it is “us who are the aberration, that we have somehow forgotten our true values and heritage, and that European greatness therefore needs to be restored – with the help of ‘patriotic’ parties”, Puglierin said.
She said Europeans needed “to see the relationship much more pragmatically. Realise that endless flattery of Trump, promising to spend 5% of GDP on defence, or offering him breakfast with a king … is just not going to cut it.”
Von Ondarza said appeasement “has not worked on trade, it hasn’t worked on security, and it won’t prevent the US supporting Europe’s far right”. “The bloc needs to articulate a strong strategy of its own.” A summit later this month would be a “decisive test of Europe’s ability to say no” to the US, he said.
