Trump, Europe and the new culture wars

‘June is the decisive month for EU–US relations,’ stated European Council President António Costa, referring to the upcoming G7 summit in Canada and the NATO summit in The Hague. Leaders are expected to commit to doubling defence spending by 2030, a major recalibration of Europe’s strategic posture. But security is only one of several fronts.

The second is economic: Trump’s trade war with Europe is unpredictable, toggling between escalation and tactical pause. One day tariffs are a means to achieve long-term economic goals (US jobs), the next a whimsical tool to extract concessions from partners.

Yet the most profound challenge lies in the ideological realm, constituting a third front: the spread of Trumpism. The legacy may well outlive the president himself. This is not just about politics, it is a culture war.

Take Poland’s nail-biting presidential election, a narrow second-round victory for the PiS candidate on 1 June. During the campaign, Trump explicitly expressed his support for his Polish admirer. ‘You will win,’ he pronounced, shaking Karol Nawrocki’s hand in the White House. It couldn't be more emphatic. What would have happened without this show of support from the US president? Would the pro-European mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski, supported by Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform, have defeated his previously little-known opponent? We will never know. Yet the electoral margins were so narrow (50.9 vs. 49.1 per cent) that the possibility cannot be excluded. For the administration in Washington, DC, ‘decisive’ June opened with a major electoral triumph in Europe.

Today’s White House seems to have been leafing through the USSR’s Cold War playbook, when Moscow sought to weaken Europe’s liberal democracies by supporting far-left parties, such as the Italian or French communists. Trump and his entourage, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, support European far-right nationalists, from Germany’s AfD to Poland’s PiS and France’s National Rally, in many cases increasing their credibility and electoral chances. The MAGA intrusion can also backfire, as happened in May in Romania, where the pro-European candidate (Nicuşor Dan) ultimately beat the local mini-Trump (George Simion) following an unexpected surge of support for Dan.

Of course, the notion of the US government backing right-wing forces abroad, even going so far as engineering coups and regime change, is not a MAGA invention. Such interference may come as a shock to many Europeans (per the German dismay after JD Vance’s speech in Munich in February of this year), but the scenario revives painful Cold War memories for many in Latin America, not to mention Greece or Spain.

The ideological battleground is different now. The Cold War was framed as ‘liberty versus equality’, a narrative strife between two modern values, sisters from the French Revolution’s 1789 motto ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Today's clash pits conservative, religious nationalism against progressive, secular individualism; it identifies freedom with the will of the people, embodied by Trump, rather than with the checks and balances of the US Constitution. In this respect it resembles the culture wars after 1789: reaction versus revolution; the Church, monarchy and family versus enlightenment, republic and individual rights.

MAGA’s illiberal ideology taps into tensions in Europe’s own history stretching from the Ancien Régime to the present. This explains in part why its ideology resonates so strongly with many electorates, why Trumpism is so easily exported to Europe and why – after the elections in Romania and Poland – we may well see further knife-edge elections in the years ahead.

Keenly aware of the power of ideas, the Trump White House will do all it can to exploit these tensions and further its own cause. The US has a ‘need for civilizational allies in Europe’, as a recent memo published by the US State Department admitted. Its author Samuel Samson claims there is ‘an aggressive campaign against Western civilization’ that risks undoing its ‘anchors of nationhood, culture, and tradition’. In step with JD Vance’s Munich speech, it flips the script on an authoritarian US administration and accuses Europe of ‘democratic backsliding’ and ‘digital censorship’. To defend US interests, the memo calls for ‘Europe and the United States [to] recommit to our Western heritage’.

This kind of thinking flows out of the undercurrent of America’s (neo-)conservative intellectual sphere, sourced by ideas from the likes of Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand. Since it has existed for decades without much direct effect on them – bar the war in Iraq – Europeans run the risk of underestimating its current potency. But its ideologues are in power now and voice such ideas with absolute urgency. For the MAGA party, the survival of Western civilization itself is at stake, fuelling Trump’s agenda with energy and ruthlessness. Domestically, the federal executive arm asserts itself in the streets of Los Angeles; tellingly, migration is framed not just as a cause of crime (the classic Republican discourse) but as a threat to American civilization. In such situations, all forces seem justified.

In a famous 2016 essay, conservative author Michael Anton, in reference to the 9/11 plane which crashed before reaching its target as passengers and crew attempted to stop the terrorists, framed the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the ‘Flight 93 election’. He wrote, ‘Charge the cockpit or you die. . .. You – or the leader of your party – may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.’ In January 2017, Anton joined the Trump administration to serve on the National Security Council. Today, he is director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.

European leaders and diplomats spend most of their energy on ensuring decent outcomes for security (NATO and Ukraine) and prosperity (tariff wars). Yet, ultimately, the battle for ideas and values will shape the long-term trajectory of Europe–US relations – and risks the future of Europe’s own pluralist civilization.