For the Maga movement, its fears about Europe have been confirmed. In the hours after the US and Israel launched missile strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, posted on X that she would convene a special “security college” on Monday. Beyond the jokes about Europeans not working on weekends, this established an axiom within Maga: that the continent is fundamentally an unserious actor on the world stage.
The war has only sped up the deterioration of the transatlantic relationship. The mixed response from European capitals has caused genuine anger in Washington – well beyond the usual suspects. Senator Lindsey Graham posted that “everyone in Europe is rightly impassioned about Russia invading Ukraine. But when it comes to the long-suffering people of Iran, Europe has been pathetic.” Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, said: “Just a reminder, our good buddies the British refused to allow the US military to operate out of any of their bases.” The Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared that the “special relationship is dead”. In response to Defence Secretary John Healey’s equivocal comments on Sunday morning, Maga senator Mike Lee said that America’s “membership in Nato is not sustainable”.
The Maga movement thinks that its supposedly closest allies have not shown up in a moment of crisis, but this is confirmation of what many Americans already sensed for a long time. There are several reasons for why the relationship has broken down.
The first is Ukraine. Many in the Trump administration do not think that what they see as an intra-Slavic conflict on the European fringe impacts their national interests. The Europeans’ commitment to repelling the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a sideshow for them. When Trump forced the Europeans – through Nato – to buy American military hardware for Ukraine this became a division with a large price tag.
The second is that the US has shown Europe little respect. I don’t think those in Washington really understood the anger in European capitals after Trump said at the start of February that Nato troops stayed back from the front line in Afghanistan. Ditto Trump’s designs on Greenland.
The third reason is a disagreement over the validity of international law. The EU has long thought that its ability to regulate its huge market – and therefore dictate the behaviour of companies who want to operate in Europe – gives it power on the world stage. It is an institution built on international law, something Trump treats with disdain. His administration sees international law as irrelevant and illusory at best, and an affront to US sovereignty at worst. This disagreement seems to be what led the UK to block the US from using its bases initially, degrading one of the key purposes of the so-called special relationship – namely, military cooperation. Starmer probably thought that there was no legal basis for the war and did not want to be liable for abetting it. On Sunday night (1 March), he said US forces could now use British bases for defensive bombing, but he was careful to say this was legally justified by collective self-defence. The Maga movement resents what they see as an obsession with a shibboleth of globalism.
None of this is to say that all Europeans agree. The Polish boasted that they were informed of the attack beforehand. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has suggested that the era when Europe could stay wedded to international law has passed. In a speech on Sunday, he said that international law has been ineffective against the Iranian regime. But for the Americans to launch an offensive in the Middle East with such little regard for the Europeans has turned a diplomatic crack into a fissure. Sitting comfortably under the US security umbrella is increasingly an unwise option for many European leaders. The war in Iran is making these divides more stark. Two political classes are waking up to the fact that each has a world-view irreconcilable to the other.
[Further reading: Donald Trump: Neoconservative warmonger]
