Trump Is Right to Snub the EU
The White House has signaled that it wants sensible partners, not wild-eyed Russia hawks, in Europe.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems to have cancelled, at the last minute, a meeting last Wednesday with Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy. An EU spokesperson cited “scheduling issues,” but the cancellation happened while Kallas was already in Washington, where she had planned to discuss the Ukraine war with America’s top diplomat. Instead, she held meetings in the Congress and hawkish DC think-tanks.
Adding insult to injury, the next day President Donald Trump vowed to slap a 25 percent tariff on goods from the EU and said that the supranational union was created to “screw the United States.”
Trump may be a mercurial president, and he is certainly wrong about the origins of the EU: It wasn’t created to harm Americans, but to prevent the Europeans from killing each other, which is what they had done with gusto for centuries. President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged European integration as a means to secure a lasting peace on the continent and reduce the need for American intervention.
Still, this string of diplomatic embarrassments shows how extremely poorly the EU has played its hand with the new Trump administration so far.
Perhaps no EU leader has performed more poorly in this regard than Kallas, who was the prime minister of Estonia from 2021 to 2024. (She seems to have done poorly at that job too, considering how unpopular she was in her home country before landing a top job in Brussels.) Kallas is an unbridled Russia hawk whose hostility to negotiating with Moscow has riled Republican officials. At a closed-doors meeting at the Munich Security Conference, Kallas scolded U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after he said, in a remarkable speech, that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO and recapturing lost territories, according to Mark Ames of the Radio War Nerd podcast, citing eyewitnesses. Predictably, Kallas’s lecture did not go down well with the U.S. administration.
Kallas has a long track record of extreme positions, which she has not seemed to moderate in her new job in Brussels. Before becoming the EU’s chief diplomat, she spoke in favor of Russia’s dismemberment. She was also a cheerleader of NAFO—the North Atlantic Fella Organization—an anti-Russian social media movement that levels xenophobic attacks against anyone perceived as “soft on Russia.” Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, is just one of many whom NAFO has smeared as a Kremlin agent.
Sumantra Maitra, senior writer at The American Conservative, has long deplored the tendency of figures like Kallas and her close ally Sanna Marin, former prime minister of Finland, to adopt provocative stances towards Russia while hiding behind American security guarantees. In 2023, Maitra characterized their efforts as “a grating combination of sanctimony, arrogance, historical ignorance, philosophical ineptitude, and ceaseless demand.”
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Yet Europe’s hawkish echo chamber extends far beyond Kallas, who, after all, is not the most influential official in Europe. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, politically adrift at home, is taking up the mantle of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher by toying with the idea of sending British troops to Ukraine. His Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen muses that “peace can be more dangerous than war” (translation: let more Ukrainians die as we bleed Russia). The Economist, which has seldom found a war it didn’t like, dubs the potential American-Russian deal over cessation of hostilities in Ukraine “Europe’s worst nightmare.” An unnamed European official, quoted by the Financial Times, now calls America “the enemy of the West.” And Gideon Rachman, the Times’s chief foreign policy commentator, questioned Vice President J.D. Vance’s mental health for making a strong realist case for peace in Ukraine. Vance had been pushing back against the all-too-familiar charge of being soft on Putin, this time hurled by the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson, a U.S. citizen from Britain.
No wonder, then, that Brussels and the leading European capitals are now seen in Washington as major obstacles to ending the war in Ukraine. Obviously, it is not the task of the United States to seek regime change in Europe or even to undermine the EU as such—returning it to its original purpose of securing the peace in Europe, including with respect to Russia, would be sufficient.
Eventually, the Trump White House will need to find a modus vivendi with the EU, not only to achieve a durable ceasefire in Ukraine, but also to rebuild Europe’s security architecture on more solid, sustainable foundations, which would help the U.S. to finally extricate itself from the region and pivot to the Asia-Pacific. But the Trump administration is right to signal that it needs sensible partners in Europe who are capable of negotiating with Russia—even if sending that signal requires embarrassing Kallas and the other war hawks in the old continent.
