There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.
What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.
So, too, Trump wants to disrupt a social order that regards him and his worldview with contempt. The US president and his officials get respect from dictators and kings (although perhaps not from the ones whose respect they most want – Putin and Xi Jinping), but they know that the leaders of many other democratic countries look down their noses at them.
Now it is America that wants to act as spoiler, smashing the existing hierarchy of respect to replace it with a world where Trump will get unqualified obeisance. Europe, with its emphasis on the rule of law and multilateralism, is the strongest remaining example of an entire system of prestige and values that the Trump administration wants to destroy.
The irony is it was the US that built the world Trump is setting out to demolish. After the second world war, Washington developed a new global ambition. Republicans and Democrats shared a faith that a world built on American values would be better for America. It proclaimed that democracy and the rule of law were the ideals by which countries should be evaluated.
Despite the obvious hypocrisy (the US itself regularly acted in illiberal, undemocratic ways and preferred to judge than to be judged), this was the cornerstone of American “soft power”; its ability to influence the world indirectly through culture and values. Other countries looked up to the US as a model to be emulated.
Modern Europe was the greatest creation of the old order. After the second world war, the US helped rebuild the economies of western Europe, fostering the success of liberal parties and often quietly undermining those it thought too far to the left or right.
The European Union has historical roots in an arrangement created to coordinate US aid disbursed through the Marshall plan. As it grew, it built a new regime for Europe, based around cooperation between nations, the importance of law and liberal democracy. After Soviet domination of eastern Europe collapsed, the EU expanded to bring in countries to its south and east, on the condition that they internalised democratic principles. In many ways, the EU embodied the values of the US-created liberal order more than America itself.
Now the Trump administration wants to break up the old order, replacing it with one founded on power and national self-interest. Its new national security strategy proclaims it wants to “maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’”, but that the path to doing it is through recognising “America’s inherent greatness and decency”. Trump boasts in his foreword to the strategy that, at last, ‘America is strong and respected again”.
The problem is that this obviously isn’t true. Countries that still hold to liberal values absolutely do not respect Trump’s US. They treat it like an angry, incoherent drunk with a bazooka. You say whatever you hope might calm them down, but you certainly don’t respect them. American soft power and indirect influence over other democracies is shrivelling away.
That explains why Trump’s national security strategy spends so much energy and venom denouncing Europe. Even while the US ostentatiously renounces the ambition to change the world, it says it wants to intervene in Europe and transform it.
Maga America wants to help European parties that it favours – but this time they are on the far right. Instead of promoting European cooperation, as the US did after the second world war, the Trump administration now hopes to turn discontent in the newer EU member states into a wedge against the liberal democratic values of the EU, turning Europe into a collection of sovereign nations, all strongly nationalist and culturally “white”.
In this world, Europe would no longer be a barrier to Maga ideology. The challenge the Trump administration faces is that it simply does not have the capacity or global ambition to bring this transformation about.
Like Russia, the administration wants respect, but it doesn’t have the power to do much more than act as a spoiler. It wants to shape Europe more at the same time as it wants to engage with Europe less, retreating from its role as guarantor of Nato.
The Trump strategy denounces the “massive military, diplomatic, intelligence and foreign aid complex” that has underpinned US global ambitions, and is doing everything it can to hollow it out. But without that complex, it isn’t going to be capable of reshaping Europe in its image.
For sure, the Trump administration can use scattershot interventions to punish the European Union, while trying to help far-right parties to power. It is already denying visas to people who have acted as factcheckers and social-media moderators, whom it accuses of censoring rightwing views, and threatening the EU for its temerity in regulating services such as X. But as the example of Brazil – where efforts to punish officials and help Jair Bolsonaro have badly backfired – shows, that is as likely to hurt its ideological allies as to help them.
The Trump administration wants the benefits of respect and global soft power, which is why it is going after Europe. But it also wants to retrench, cutting down its global capacities and remaking the US into a regional power like Russia which invests its strengths in bullying the countries in its neighbourhood. It can’t have both.