It often appears that President Trump has no European policy. The reality is that he does, and Europe should be worried.

A superficial look at the first 10 months of the Trump administration’s Europe policy highlights the recurrent themes of burden sharing within NATO, the US trade deficit, and the president’s desire to end the war in Ukraine—and, hopefully, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize as a result. While often haphazardly translated into policy and sometimes in tension with each other, none of these goals is a shocking departure from Republican foreign policy orthodoxy.

The challenge that Europeans are facing in dealing with Washington, however, runs far deeper than just a chaotic pursuit of such goals. The mercurial, thin-skinned, or business-like nature of the president is not the central problem, either. If anything, way too much attention is paid to the administration’s supposedly “transactional” nature and the possibility of taming it through business deals or red-carpet treatment, such as the state visit extended by the United Kingdom earlier this fall. Everyone knows that for reasons only tangentially related to policy, Trump likes Finland’s Alex Stubb. At times, he seems to get along with France’s Emmanuel Macron and less so with Germany’s Friedrich Merz—or with the European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen.

The new Kremlinology surrounding the study of Trump’s mood and policy swings is a distraction from a much darker set of conclusions about the administration’s view of Europe. Specifically, while many in the MAGA movement pay lip service to Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage and its past achievements, they profoundly dislike Europe as it currently exists. They perceive it as irretrievably broken thanks to its lax immigration policies, complacent reliance on America’s security umbrella, and wrongheaded progressive schemes from green energy to the European project itself. The EU, after all, “was set up to take advantage of the United States,” according to Trump himself.

If, furthermore, Trump and his followers see Europe as effete and weak—a view now validated by the EU’s and the UK’s folding in face of tariff threats—it is perfectly conceivable that the administration is tempted to reduce Europe from an ally and at least a nominally co-equal partner to the position of a client or tributary, whose domestic politics can be tweaked by Washington at will.

Consider the shifts in US policy on Ukraine. Despite its timidity and sluggishness, the Biden administration recognized that US and European interests were broadly compatible: a Russian victory in Ukraine would not only constitute an existential threat to countries on NATO’s Eastern flank but also be disastrous for the transatlantic alliance and the United States.

Trump, in contrast, seems interested just in ending the war in whatever way possible. “Let both claim Victory,” he posted on his social media platform, and “let History decide!” Accordingly, the burden of providing financial and military assistance to Ukraine has been placed entirely on the shoulders of European allies. There has been little pressure on Russia itself, with the exception of the recent sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, which nonetheless lack the bite of comprehensive secondary sanctions. 

The open-ended sanctions exemption casually granted to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which has made zero effort to decouple from Russian energy, won’t apply to the whole of Europe. Yet, this move signals that despite years of pleading from multiple US administrations to reduce Russian energy imports, the new US sanctions are a charade meant to appease GOP hawks rather than a serious effort to suffocate Putin’s war machine.

The fact that diplomatic outreach to Moscow, most recently in the form of an aborted summit in Hungary, has been met with Moscow’s mockery and usual bad-faith tactics has not brought Trump and Europeans closer together. If anything, the seeming intractability of the problem will likely prompt him just to move on, regardless of consequences for Ukraine itself and European allies.

Just for showing up in Washington, Viktor Orbán was given the shutdown of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty’s Hungarian service, one of the few remaining outposts of independent journalism in an increasingly authoritarian country. The move, empowering one of the most destructive actors in the EU, speaks volumes about this administration’s true plans for the continent.

Another case in point: the deepening ties between Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the administration. Endorsed by Elon Musk and welcomed to Capitol Hill recently by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), the AfD is enjoying an unheard-of level of access in Washington. The party’s co-leader, Beatrix von Storch, held meetings at the White House. Its legislators, Jan Wenzel Schmidt and Markus Frohnmaier, were received at a high level at the State Department—despite the fact that Frohnmaier is widely understood to be a Russian operative whose former parliamentary assistant coordinated fire bombings in Ukraine, meant to discredit the Ukrainian government.

The outreach to the far right in another key member country of the EU, France, may be going more slowly—in part because the likes of Steve Bannon are seen as too extreme by the current leadership of the National Rally. (Seriously!) Yet, Trump himself felt no inhibition in coming to the defense of the French nationalists’ former leader, Marine Le Pen, a convicted fraudster, by calling her trial “a witch hunt” and dismissing her crimes as a “bookkeeping error.

Europeans would commit a fatal error by mistaking the administration’s internal dysfunction and infighting—over military force posture around the world, diplomacy with Russia, or trade—as evidence of open-mindedness and good faith. The complex nature of the US government and discord in the US coalition might prevent Trump and his acolytes from fully realizing their plans for Europe, but that does not mean that there are no such plans.

For many years—predating Trump, in fact—a large contingent of self-styled US conservatives have harbored a profound dislike of the EU and wanted to see it go the way of the former Soviet Union. An overlapping group sympathizes with those in Europe who seek to make their countries “culturally coherent” by imposing tighter immigration rules and deportations. And yet another faction would like to see Europe pay, in some way, for its decades of free-riding and complacency.

It does not take much effort to see that three add to a highly toxic mix, which nonetheless aligns with the administration’s behavior. The fact that these considerations are also a stark departure from the traditional, bipartisan understanding of US interests in Europe should not be read as a consolation but as a reminder of just how far the United States has shifted away from the long-standing understanding of its own role in the world. And the sooner Europeans come to grips with this version of America, rather than its naively idealized, more benign version, the better for everyone involved.