The section on Europe in the Trump administration’s new national security strategy, entitled “Promoting European Greatness,” reads like a manifesto from the continent’s far-right parties.
Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognisable” because of mass immigration, the Trump administration says. Its elites are censoring free speech and oppressing the political opposition. In an interview yesterday, President Trump said that Europe was weak and that its nations were “decaying.”
The security strategy — a summary of the U.S. president’s foreign policy priorities — argues that the U.S. should “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” by supporting “patriotic” parties that fight immigration.
The document caused no shortage of outrage in Europe. The United States is interfering in the continent’s internal affairs, many mainstream politicians said, violating the very sovereignty it professes to support.
But Europe’s far-right parties — the ones ostensibly being supported — have been notably quiet. Few have spoken out publicly in support of the document so far.
There’s one thing these parties have learned from Trump’s second term: It’s not always easy to square “America First” with “Germany First,” or “France First.”
‘A bad thing for Europeans’
When Trump was first elected in 2016, champagne corks popped in far-right parties’ headquarters across Europe. His victory was taken as proof that their time had come.
But nearly a decade on, the reality of his agenda has been more complicated.
In May, shortly after Trump announced tariffs on many countries, the European Council on Foreign Relations asked Europeans, including far-right voters, whether Trump’s election was a good or bad thing for their countries.
In Germany, only 20 percent of voters who support the far-right AfD said Trump was good for their country; 47 percent said he was bad. In France, among voters of the National Rally, the split was 18 to 43 percent. British voters who support Reform U.K. were more balanced: Thirty percent said he was good and 31 percent said he was bad.
Mark Leonard, the director of the E.C.F.R., told me Trump’s aggressive and chaotic tariff policies were deeply unpopular in Europe, not least among the working-class voters that the far-right parties were courting. Trump’s brand now carries serious risks.
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, has called Trump’s tariff policies “extremely bad” and said Germany was “disproportionally affected” by them.
Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s protégé and the president of the National Rally, has been even more forceful. He accused the U.S. of “economic warfare.” Trump, he said earlier this year, “is a good thing for Americans, but a bad thing for Europeans.”
Zero-sum competition
“America First” presents a conundrum for Europe’s far-right parties. As Leonard put it: “They’re not about America first, they’re about Germany first, about France first, about Britain first. There’s an inherent tension.”
These parties largely align with Trump ideologically — that part is easy. But agreeing on immigration policies and being anti-woke can go only so far, Leonard said. It cannot make up for a very real divergence on core national interests such as trade and national security.
There is a limit to alliances among nationalist parties, when part of that nationalism involves seeing the world as a zero-sum competition.
That wasn’t such a problem when far-right parties could jointly cast themselves as anti-establishment. But now that they’re aligned with the leader of the most powerful country in the world, whose decisions are affecting their countries, they’re being called on to explain what they think about his policies, Leonard said. And that isn’t always straightforward.
Which raises an intriguing question: If the parties claiming the mantle of “my country first” gained power, would they actually stand up to Donald Trump?
There have been some flickers of this: In France, Bardella called on Europe to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs. When the E.U. instead cut a deal with Trump, Weidel lamented Brussels’ unwillingness to stand up to him. “The tariff ‘deal’ on American terms is a damning indictment of the E.U.,” she said.
Seen from one angle, this was the leader of a far-right party complaining about the European Union — standard fare. Seen from another, it’s perhaps a glimpse at a future in which Trump’s supposed allies in Europe could actually make implementing his agenda harder.
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