When will European populists dump Trump?

National-populist parties must articulate a coherent foreign-policy framework in line with Europe’s core economic and geopolitical interests — this means breaking with Washington and its forever wars

This will ruffle some feathers among friends on the European right, but friends owe each other hard truths. In my latest piece for UnHerd, I argue that the European sovereigntists’ and national-populists’ love affair with Trump — who since returning to the White House has been undermining European interests in several ways, most recently by blowing up the Middle East — reveals what is arguably the movement’s most glaring intellectual failure: a poor understanding of the structural logic of US foreign policy, and a near-total absence of geopolitical vision.

Ultimately, virtually all European right-populist parties share the same transatlantic outlook of the liberal-globalist establishment they claim to oppose. Most appear either comfortable with Europe’s structural subordination to Washington — a remarkable position for parties that claim to champion national sovereignty — or genuinely blind to its structural character, which led them to believe that Trump would somehow be different. In fact, things have only gotten worse.

Indeed, the war against Iran is also a war on Europe: if the proxy war in Ukraine was designed to decouple Europe from Russian gas, the Iran war is aimed at decoupling it from Mediterranean resources altogether. And this is not to mention the war’s other potential consequences: mass refugee flows towards Europe, as previous US Middle Eastern wars have generated, and growing pressure on European governments to become more directly involved militarily.

Europe now faces two devastating wars on its doorsteps — one to the east, stoked by Washington, and one to the south, actively waged by it. The first pushed Europe into economic and geopolitical vassalage, but the second may be the shock that finally breaks it, plunging it into economic and social collapse.

No wonder rifts are starting to emerge between MAGA and the European populist camp, and most visibly in Germany, the country most economically affected by these wars — with the Eurocentric and anti-Atlanticist wing of the AfD becoming increasingly influential.

But similar fault lines will inevitably open in other right-populist parties across the continent and beyond — and indeed they already are.

This much is clear; any national-populist party that wants to seriously challenge the European liberal-globalist status quo — and wishes to retain credibility with its voters — can’t limit itself to anti-immigration, anti-“woke” and anti-establishment domestic politics. It needs to articulate a coherent foreign-policy framework in line with Europe’s core economic and geopolitical interests. As De Gaulle understood 60 years, this necessarily means breaking with Washington and its forever wars.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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