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What is the endgame of Donald Trump’s foreign policy? That question has not been asked enough since US vice-president JD Vance’s shocker of a speech in Munich.
It is clear that Trump and his cronies want to bury the rules-based international order and restore the great power competition that preceded it. They seem to prefer a world divided into spheres of influence under a handful of large states run by strongmen.
But even if (indeed especially if) that is their goal, why would they want to push Europe into a Russian sphere of influence? For this is the obvious consequence of withdrawing US protection or of helping Europe’s Maga equivalents to power. An abandoned Europe would also see less reason to rally behind an aggressive American approach to China. If Trump’s view of the world is redolent of how mobsters might divide up a city into gangland territories, how does it make sense to vacate the most lucrative and powerful territory there is outside of your home turf?
Bullies often project, so take what they say about others as an indicator of what they think about themselves. That has long been true for Trump, and goes for Vance’s speech as well. His most shocking line — “the threat that I worry the most about” is not Russia or China but “the threat from within” Europe — is best read as identifying the strongest adversary not of Europe, but of the Trump regime’s goals.
Russia and China, after all, may be geopolitical powers the US needs to come to an understanding with. But they pose no challenge, let alone an alternative model, to the Maga world Trump and Vance are busy building, especially inside the US itself. In contrast, the EU and Europe more broadly, if it can stay united, has the ability to put up resistance that matters to Maga America and its Big Tech oligarchy.
It’s admittedly no match for the US militarily, nor even capable of securing its own defence without American help — yet. But even this is changing, as Elisabeth Braw recently pointed out with regard to the north European Joint Expeditionary Force’s relative self-sufficiency in the Baltic Sea. Trump may find that taking responsibility for its own security makes Europe less rather than more pliable.
Commercially, the EU is already a power to be reckoned with. It’s an enormous market for Trump’s tech bro executives. When the EU chooses to (it often does not), it can act autonomously around the world, pursue its interests vigorously and, in particular, regulate its home market as it sees fit. That matters for the tech industry more than most.
Europeans reacted most viscerally to Vance’s boosterism for the far right, but his namechecking of Elon Musk should give them as much pause. Does America’s new leadership fight EU regulation in order to pave the far right’s path to power, or does it root for the far right in order to promote governments willing to give Big Tech free rein? Like chickens and eggs, it’s not a terribly useful question: both matter. But do not minimise the push to defang Europe’s regulatory sovereignty for the benefit of US tech. It is the most consistent talking point among Trump’s henchmen.
Why does Europe matter so much to them? Partly, of course, because it’s easier to make money if you can sell the same extractive services to European consumers as you have already inflicted on American ones. Politically, because it replicates the enormously powerful tools to influence voters that Trump’s camp has built in the US.
But it is also because the European insistence that tech developments must be done in ways that respect consumers and citizens encourages the development of alternatives. America’s Big Tech often decries European regulation with the argument that the EU’s heavy-handed rules kill innovation in Europe. But if that were true, what would they have to complain about? The lack of innovation in Europe would reduce competition against them.
If, contrary to what they say, Europe’s tech regulations are necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for alternative products and technologies to emerge, Big Tech’s visceral opposition makes more sense. It is a sign that Europe is on the right track. It should plough on rather than be deflected.
The EU and its member states should, in a perverse sense, be flattered. The insults and belittling aside, they have been designated the most serious adversary of Trump’s Maga world, one that must be defanged first. Europe should embrace the paradox that Trump and his cronies hold the EU in greater esteem than Europeans themselves, and prove itself a worthy adversary.
martin.sandbu@ft.com
