Claims that Europeans were not expecting global assertiveness from a second Trump administration are not supported by the facts.

A litany of pre-election 2024 cautions and complaints were articulated in Brussels then relayed by its obedient media. The European Union (EU) attempted to sabotage an interview – expected to draw a record audience – between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the former’s X platform, then withdrew its position by throwing the architect of the bloc’s Digital Services Act, Thierry Breton, under the bus.

For reasons that you’ll also locate in mental asylums, the Labour Party assisted MPs (“logistics”) to campaign for Kamala Harris - on United States soil. British conservatives were no better: given the choice, they said, much better for the black woman to be in the White House.

Across European parliaments, MP after MP stood up to warn colleagues that “democracy was on the ballot”, that Donald Trump’s role in January 2021’s Capitol riot should have him barred from office for life and that all the legally contentious lawfare aimed toward Trump and his campaign was entirely justified. At every possible opportunity, Europe’s intelligentsia stood up to condemn Trump as a threat, menace, psycho, dissembler, misogynist, racist, or “islamophobe”; in hindsight, if you can’t think of an election that entertained the same level of piercing foreign commentary prior to 2024’s, its likely because it’s never happened before.

But all their stated reasons weren’t actually their reasons; below the public indignance and virtue spraying lie some of the most awkward, practical reality sets in history.

Easy ride

Being a politician in the United Kingdom (UK) is one of the easiest places in the world to do it. The salary is largely agreeable and keeps on being bumped up, the benefits are sound, the subsidised menus in parliament do their job and the environment doesn’t feature political hit squads – with the exceptions of two UK politicians killed in their constituency offices in the past decade.

But if being a politician in the UK is better than being a politician in Bogota or Islamabad, then being a politician in Brussels is better than being a politician in the UK.

There, some of the most generous packages are handed to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who’ve completed domestic cycles, not gotten anywhere and chosen the EU as the semi-retirement channel. Allowances include schools, travel, furniture-moving companies, and even champagne and nail salons for the girlbosses. Attendance isn’t enforced to the level it should be, so much of the time but especially for minority members possessed of an adversarial narrative, the place is empty.

But semi-luxury in London or extravagance in Brussels comes with burdens: explicit knowledge of Europe’s dependence on the United States and the costs associated with guaranteeing protections through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, established in 1949.

To date few politicians from EU member states and the UK have adequately (let alone successfully) campaigned for their governments to institute the kind of defence allocation and spending that would appease America’s increasing impatience with the arrangement. Doing so, of course, would amount to career suicide, with no prospect of winding down in Brussels.

Wrong obsessions

Instead of solving this imbalance at the heart of the continent’s politics, its political elite started obsessing about identity, climate and legacy – something they thought could be resolved by parachuting millions of fighting age men into their countries.

The result refers; hard-right movements such as the Alternative for Germany erupted seemingly out of nowhere, eastern European states gifted with memory distanced themselves from Brussels, and serious people would laugh at a generation of uniparty UK politicians who spoke as though not a single another lump of coal would ever be needed again to keep London’s lights on.

You could see it happening, the madness. In 2018, Dutch Green MEP Judith Sargentini published a report on Hungary accusing the country of stifling human rights in its rush to protect itself from forces and stratagems allegedly sponsored and conspired by billionaire financier George Soros and his family. On 12 September that year, Sargentini and fellow MEPs whistled, clapped, and cheered as the report was presented in Brussels – like a McKinsey team urinating on each other in the shower after bankrupting another utility in working-class Appalachia.

But all of Europe’s political elite – from non-entities such as Sargentini to prominent faces such as the curtain-haired maniac Guy Verfhofstadt and the stumbling Jean-Claude Juncker – knew deep down that a time would come when their cards were pulled, and they’d be exposed for their dithering irrelevance.

Greenland

In 2019, reports leaked from a White House briefing indicated that Donald Trump had discussed Greenland with a long-time friend – the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, Ronald Lauder, who Trump had known for over 50 years. Lauder had previously flirted with New York’s mayoral candidacy (losing to Rudolph Guiliani in the Republic primary to become the party’s candidate for mayor of the city in 1989); one of his business partners is the husband of Denmark’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

It's helpful to know these things in erecting a fine balance between imperial bravado and cold fact. Europe is in trouble – culturally, militarily, and importantly, economically. It is this mix of anxieties that contributed to its jerking reflexes; they hate Trump not because he’s Trump, but because he’s found them out. These people knew, throughout their careers, that they were ignoring the most critical feature of their existence and inheritance and worse, replacing it with obsessions that would divide their own societies. Their public anger and indignation is telling: worse than being exposed is being exposed by the most garish and louche US President in history.

There is still some distance to go before the situation unfolds to its most awkward point – but happily the signs are encouraging. On Monday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed the media remarking that it was only Greenlanders who could decide their future. But his government and its sly negotiators did not afford native Chagossians the same courtesy when he handed their island(s) to Mauritius. It's inevitable Trump will seize this point, despite having initially approved the “deal”.

The post-war European political consensus will conclude mostly as a failure. We have suspected this for some time, but more importantly, they’ve always known.