Europe’s great pretence is finally collapsing. For eleven months, Trump 47 has treated the transatlantic alliance not as a pillar of shared security but as a burden he’d happily discard. To him, Europe is a weak, confused bloc—part effete, part nationalist, wholly unimpressive—compared with the “masculine” authoritarianism he admires in Russia and Hungary. European leaders, desperate to keep NATO intact, have debased themselves in response: flattering, courting, and pleading with a president who openly questions the value of their survival.
The new U.S. National Security Strategy should erase any illusion about Washington’s reliability. America now flirts openly with Putin, forming the strangest tag-team in modern geopolitics, leaving a politically timid Europe exposed. Yet Europe’s response is more supplication: promises of defence spending without strategy, hoping Trump can be charmed into restraint. Hope is not a plan.
But the deeper question is whether the “craziness of Trump” outlives the man. With the Republican Party reshaped by MAGA and Democrats struggling to defend the older liberal order, America’s political centre may be irretrievably gone. Random tariffs, casual violence abroad, and warm ties with autocrats are now features, not bugs, of U.S. policy.
If Trump 47 is a symbol of American exhaustion—a nation willingly shedding the system it built—then Europe, Taiwan, and ultimately America itself should fear what comes next.
Dr. John Bruni is the Founder and CEO of SAGE International (SAGE). SAGE is South Australia’s only privately operated, online, NFP geopolitical think tank and consultancy.
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