German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full of youngsters that Donald Trump has been “humiliated” by his war in Iran – and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems around which Germany had planned its defence strategy for the coming decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez observes a strict neutrality on Iran, declaring his country’s bases out of bounds – and Trump urges Spain be kicked out of Nato. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his country’s navy in a war on which he wasn’t consulted – and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the bedrock of American military and economic security.

But, strangely, it does.

Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of decades’ standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen to suck the vitality out of Europe’s historic nations in order to build up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.

There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that they played a huge part in saving Western civilisation during the Cold War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU (which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold War had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, Nato’s victory was a real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.

The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025: protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and electoral corruption. Vance’s........

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