The Brutalist: How Europe Can Respond to Trump’s New World Order

Across Europe and within the UK, there’s an understandable revulsion against Donald Trump, which his brutal treatment of Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky at their White House meeting of 28 February has served to accelerate, while his cutting off of military and intelligence aid is already causing deaths across Ukraine.  

Trump is brash; he’s crude; he threatens and bullies; in fact he acts more like a mafia thug than an international statesman or, indeed, the most powerful politician in the world.  But to underestimate the strategic rationale for what he’s doing would be a huge mistake. Neither should we agree with  Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland when he suggests that he is really a poor deal-maker and a weak politician. Trump and his team have a set of clear, strategic goals, which in their brutish style they are seeking to impose on a startled world.

The US nationalist right knows that the triumphalist unilateralism of their post-1989 US neo-conservative predecessors failed. Their Project for the New American Century propagated under President George W Bush by senior leaders such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld sought to export democratic politics but also neoliberal economics by military means, with the aim of making the US the world’s sole super-power.

It faltered as the US found it had bitten off more than it could chew, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, while a clutch of emerging countries, above all China, but reflected more widely in the establishment of the G20, grew in economic strength. The US was forced to adjust to a multi-polar world.

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MAGA World

However, in today’s revised version of neo-conservatism, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement sees new opportunities to make the USA the dominant world power, if not the supreme one. 

The USA’s lead in the IT revolution with the development of global leaders in different aspects of the digital economy – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, PayPal – has given renewed confidence to its capitalist model while an emergent group of ‘new capitalists’ notably Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have the ear of Trump and Vance and are rigorously arguing for an Ayn Rand-style unregulated capitalism. 

These economically libertarian tech bros are at times in contention with the socially conservative MAGA working class base – and their advocates like Steve Bannon – on domestic issues like tariffs and skilled immigration.

However, in terms of world politics, they appear more united. The MAGA movement sees China as its main adversary. It recognises Russia is a serious military and nuclear power but believes, rightly, that it is not an economic rival to the US in the way China is. 

It sees Europe as unable to translate its economic strength into geopolitical muscle and so is vulnerable to a US government willing to deploy ‘hard’ power. Some of the rising G20 powers, it believes, are amenable to transactional trade-offs. The role of the United Nations and its core principles established after the Second World War count for nothing. 

In their world, belief in the values of international law, the acceptance that nation state boundaries cannot be changed by force, and the right to asylum for those fleeing war and persecution are all dead.  

What the first month of the Trump Presidency has shown is that he and his team are trying to impose this MAGA vision by a diplomatic version of shock and awe. In their own backyard, Panama and Greenland are threatened, and if not cowed, then they’ll be coerced. Canada is a bigger fish to fry, but if they want to avoid punitive tariffs, Trump suggests they become the 51^st state. 

On the Middle East, Trump casually – yet repeatedly – proposes to evict over two million Palestinians forcibly from their homes in Gaza and for the US to redevelop the coastal area as a new Mediterranean resort. The policy’s astounding breaches of international law are not even considered worthy of comment by those within the US administration. 

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Russia: A New Yalta 

Some remain reluctant to take Trump’s words at face value. But this denialist camp shrivelled after the joint Trump/Vance monstering of Zelensky in their White House meeting. Following that, even the cautious are obliged to recognise the extent of the US’ policy somersault on Russia and Ukraine.

 The Trump strategy is to end Russia’s pariah status; settle the Ukraine war on Russian terms; offer Putin a seat at the G7 table; end economic sanctions, and sign commercial deals focused on Russia’s natural resources. 

The broad nature of Trump’s offer became apparent in the days following his 90-minute phone call with Putin in mid-February. Within a week, negotiations began between senior US and Russian leaders in Riyadh, with Ukraine and the European Union excluded. In advance, Trump accepted that Ukraine would have to cede land and that the US would provide no long-term guarantees for its territory. The Russian media and commentators could scarcely believe their luck and were even more cock-a-hoop after the White House showdown.

The overwhelming sense across Europe – among politicians, institutions and commentators but also most notably amongst the general public – is that the United States has gone rogue

The envisaged rapprochement with Russia is not just military. The US sees investment opportunities in exploiting Russia’s extensive natural resources, as Secretary of State Rubio made clear when speaking of “incredible opportunities” at the Riyadh meeting. 

The Trump team’s vision is a new Yalta, a superpower deal over the heads of Ukraine and Europe, detaching Russia from its alliance with China, while ensuring that the European Union is a shadow power, weakened by internal nationalist rivalries with the global hegemons able to play divide and rule at Europe’s expense. 

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Humiliating Ukraine and Europe

The second leg of the strategy is designed both to show how smaller states have to ‘bend the knee’ to the US superpower and undermine Europe as a global player. The Trump team see resolving the Ukraine war on Russia’s terms as a key way to achieve both objectives.

Hence, the deliberate exclusion of both Ukraine and the EU from the February negotiations in Saudi Arabia; the abuse of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky with Trump claiming even before the row at the White House that Zelensky is responsible for the war and acts as ‘a dictator’; while Trump’s proposed  deal on Ukraine’s rare minerals was described by the Telegraph’s world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard as “iron-fist coercion by a neo-imperial power against a weaker nation.”  

“The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” Evans-Pritchard points out. The deal is not just for minerals but for ports, infrastructure, oil and gas: the terms are more punitive than those imposed on Germany after both world wars. 

As a New York Times op-ed piece put it, it was as if Roosevelt had insisted that Churchill do a peace deal with Hitler on any terms with no security guarantees and hand over to the US rights to half of Britain’s coal.

The treatment of Europe has been no less contemptuous. Thus, at the annual  Munich Security conference, instead of discussing Ukraine and the security situation, Vice President Vance, the protégé of top tech bro Peter Thiel and Trump’s ideological hit-man,  launched a polemic against Europe and how it was supposedly assailing democratic values by regulating the internet and imposing limits on hate speech.  This merited more concern than the violation of Ukraine’s internationally agreed borders by hundreds of thousands of Russian troops since 2022, a topic on which Vance was silent. 

To add insult to injury, Vance didn’t meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the conference but went off instead to meet Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right AfD. Following Elon Musk conducting an hour-long interview with Weidel, this showed the willingness of the MAGA leadership to intervene directly in European elections and openly woo one of the most extreme nationalist parties within Europe. 

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How Should Europe Respond? 

The rapprochement with Putin and the disdain for both Ukraine and Europe have left Europe’s political and military leadership stunned, even if these policies had been widely trailed by Trump supporters over the previous twelve months. They leave Europe and its citizens with a political choice that is both simple and stark.  The disparate nations of Europe can either work together as a unified force or else remain separate, notionally ‘sovereign’- to use the favourite word of Brexiteers and other nationalists- but in reality completely subordinate to the global hegemons on their Eastern and Western flanks. After Ukraine, whither the Baltic states and Greenland?  

1. End Denialism

So what is to be done?  Does Europe want to be a player on the global chess board or a row of pawns to be picked off and pushed around? The French political leadership – in the Gaullist tradition – have been clearest in asserting the case for Europe to stand on its own two feet. President Macron has spoken of the need for Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ throughout his Presidency.  But the Atlanticist political leaderships in Italy, Poland, Germany and, above all Britain have been hesitant up till now. 

The Trump team’s determination to break with the post-war Atlanticist settlement is a huge shock. They need to adjust swiftly to the new reality. There is no ‘bridge’ that can be rebuilt. 

Both individual European leaders and EU institutions are recognising the new reality. The Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a long-time Eurosceptic social democrat with an aggressive anti-immigration policy, is shifting her ground and recognising the need for European solidarity and collective action. (Le Monde, 28 February 2025) Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed exemptions for defence expenditure from EU monetary rules.  

Friedrich Merz has responded the quickest – and sharpest. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting said when interviewed on election night. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump’s statements last week, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” Merz even went as far as to liken the Trump administration’s recent tactics to those of Russia. 

He was especially critical of Elon Musk for endorsing the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the German election. “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America,” Merz said during a televised debate on Sunday night. “Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk — that is a unique event. The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic, drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow. We are under such massive pressure from two sides that my absolute priority now really is to create unity in Europe.” 

Just ten days later, Merz had turned his words into actions. With a truly historic deal between the chancellor-in-waiting and his likely coalition partners, the Social Democrats, he shattered the country’s ‘debt-brake’ and allowed for potentially unlimited borrowing for defence spending and created a €500bn 10-year fund to drive infrastructure investments.

The UK government has remained reluctant to acknowledge the choice it faces.  It’s not a question of being rude to the US President, but there are clear limits to what can be achieved by obsequious fawning. The facts are that Trump has moved the goalposts and that the UK government has to play on a new pitch. But the direction of travel for the non-populist European politicians is clear: they need to create an independent, resilient Europe, and with Merz so strongly climbing aboard alongside Macron in a renewed Franco-German motor, the momentum is there. 

The national populists, notably Viktor Orban, will try to frustrate them. Welcoming the Trump rapprochement on Hungarian state radio on 14 February, Orban contemptuously declared, “The days of the EU are numbered. The future won’t be written in Europe.”

But Meloni, Le Pen, Farage and their ilk face a profound dilemma. Trump, Musk and Vance aren’t vote-winners among Europeans. The interventions of the latter two in the German election did not boost the AfD vote. Their politics still remain a minority taste among Europeans, even national populist ones. 

Recent Reform recruit Tim Montgomerie had sharp words for Trump’s Ukraine policy on GB News: “It’s clear he has chosen to ally himself with the blood-stained tyrant in the Kremlin rather than the invaded people of Ukraine. Trump’s dishonest attacks on Ukraine and Zelensky in recent days could have been written for him by Putin”.

Statements like this by highlight the difficulty European national populists will have in endorsing the MAGA capitulation.

2. Combine Defence Efforts

Thus, the potential for Europe to respond collectively is real. What remains very uncertain is how and whether they’ll develop the capacity to achieve it. In the military and defence arena, the immediate focus has been on bolstering the military expenditure of individual European states. But the first priority should not be an arbitrary % GDP figure, as demanded by Trump. Rather, Europe should take a series of practical steps that consolidate its common capacity.

Firstly, it should look to make its current military and defence investments more effective. Does it make sense for there to be twelve separate types of European tanks?  Common procurement and interoperable equipment would facilitate what are currently twenty-seven separate armies and begin the process whereby they can work as a unified force. The key question is whether significant steps can begin to get the separate military forces working together.

Secondly, as von der Leyen has suggested, the EU should drop its current restrictive Maastricht Stability and Growth Pact financial rules so as to permit each country to increase its military investments. The special EU Council meeting of 6 March agreed to this and is looking to consider the creation of common European bonds for defence procurement and investment, just as the EU did with its Green Deal. The EU should use the fact that it has a common European currency to enable the kind of large-scale investments that Europe needs.

Thirdly, make a collective offer for a European contingent of land, air and naval forces under a combined command to protect Ukrainian territory in the event of a settlement. Here, the joint Macron/Starmer initiatives illustrate the potential for common European action. The detailed outcomes remain uncertain, but they certainly indicate a readiness to translate worthy words into meaningful actions.

3. Economic Renewal

More broadly, a more resilient Europe needs to be a more dynamic one, as the 2024 Draghi Report amply demonstrated. It laid out how Europe can become more innovative and achieve more sustainable economic growth. But its proposals require more public as well as private investment, the utilisation of more common EU borrowing and the completion of the much delayed banking and capital markets union. 

The Trump-induced crisis has given renewed impetus to this agenda, and crucially, the new German government is indicating that this should not be just confined to military expenditure. Pursuing a Keynesian investment strategy rather than the continuation of restrictive, austerity economics and accelerating, rather than retreating from, the moves to a low carbon economy are vital steps if European citizens are to see an end to two decades of minimal economic growth and wage stagnation. And these are crucial steps to reduce the appeal of the populist right among those on low incomes and in precarious jobs.

4. Developing a Constructive Relationship with China

A growing European economy will also want and need to strengthen its economic relations with the huge Chinese market. A more self-reliant Europe needs to avoid getting sucked into a confrontation with China in the way that the Trumpists and their acolytes such as Liz Truss and Iain Duncan Smith desire. 

The Chinese government does not want to promote trade wars and introduce tariffs; nor does it deny the reality of climate change. It has not attempted to intervene in European politics in the consistent way that Russia has been doing for two decades and which the Trumpists are following. Hence, there is considerable scope for Europe to find ways to work with China for mutual benefit. 

And there is the potential to do so, especially in the transition to a low-carbon economy, that could illuminate the benefits of international cooperation and show the short-sightedness of the MAGA, beggar-my-neighbour approach.

5. Whither the UK?

The UK has little option other than to be part of this shift. The geographical, economic and military realities that link us irretrievably to the European continent have been starkly revealed in this crisis. The subservient alternative is to hang onto the coattails of a Trump-led United States that is indifferent to Europe’s fate. 

The Starmer government’s actions in working with Macron and other European partners to develop joint European responses for Ukraine indicate its grasp of these new realities. Yet their rhetoric clings to the myths of the ‘special relationship.’ This specious game-playing cannot last: who will be the first senior Labour politician to follow Merz and break the Atlanticist, special relationship taboo? .

Momentous geo-political shifts inevitably bring other changes in their wake. Two are already clear. Firstly, the era of the post-Cold War peace dividend is over. Defence spending seems certain to rise. Yet, after fourteen years of Conservative austerity, a social democratic government confronts the dismal legacy of a ‘broken Britain’, failing infrastructure and creaking public services. 

A cavalier cut to international aid will only get it so far. The need to challenge neo-liberal orthodoxies and find new tax resources from the ever-expanding wealth inequalities in the country will become ever more apparent. Changed circumstances force changed tax policies and wealth taxes are the low-hanging fruit.

Secondly, the political silence over Brexit cannot continue. It will be impossible for the UK government to sustain its prominent role in convening a joint European response to the Ukraine crisis and maintain its obdurate attitude to other European issues.

 This is the moment for a serious reset. An obvious first step would be to respond to the EU’s proposed youth mobility scheme whereby 18-30 year olds could live, work and study for up to four years in each other’s countries. This would show a UK willingness to open up to cultural and economic exchanges with our near neighbours while those coming to the UK to work on a time-limited basis would not need to bring in dependants, unlike many who’ve been recruited since Brexit from across the globe to fill vacancies in the health, social care and hospitality sectors. 

I’ve written elsewhere on the dismal failure of Brexit. It’s noteworthy how both the Conservative Party and the Brexit press have fallen silent on its supposed merits over the last few years. Without any public campaigning, the electorate has drawn its own conclusions, with 55% now thinking it was wrong to leave as against 30% who believe it was the correct decision. 

The world has moved on since 2016. The tumultuous upheavals over Ukraine confirm that the UK’s crucial strategic relationship is with Europe. Defence can’t be hived off from the wider European picture. Common procurement and interoperability of equipment mean participating in the Single Market. They are all of a piece. Progressives both within and outside Labour should bite the bullet and state clearly that in these changed times, the UK needs the closest possible relationship with Europe and its Single Market. 

At the start of the first Trump Presidency, Europe huffed and puffed but ultimately behaved as if this was just a minor blip in US-European relations.  Eight years on, the age of inertia is over. The overwhelming sense across Europe – among politicians, institutions and commentators but also most notably amongst the general public – is that the United States has gone rogue, that its current leadership prefers autocrats to democrats and that now Europe has to look after itself if it wants to defend its values and beliefs.

The pace of change in less than a month of Trump’s rapprochement with Putin has been seismic. Whether European leaders can sustain their momentum and shed decades of subservience remains uncertain, but for the moment, most of them appear determined to try.

Jon Bloomfield, together with David Edgar, is the author of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right