When the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are held in Washington next week, several officials from the European Union traveling to the US capital will not carry smartphones or regular computers. Their devices will be prepaid phones and basic computers. The reason is that the more primitive the devices are, the harder it is to hack into them.
These are standard security measures for EU officials traveling to, for example, China. But not for a supposedly allied and democratic country like the United States. Their revelation on Monday by the British newspaper Financial Times reflects how exactly 90 days with Donald Trump in the White House have deteriorated relations between the two sides of the Atlantic to unimaginable extremes before January 20.
The transatlantic alliance is simply broken. George Kennan, one of the ideologists of US strategy during the Cold War, is attributed the phrase -theoretically spoken before the invasion of Iraq-: "The US and Europe will not divorce, although we will sleep in separate rooms." Now, just twenty years and one month after his death, Kennan's prediction falls short. With Trump, the United States seems not only to have divorced Europe but also to believe that the marriage was a mistake from day one.
The divorce is for a very profound reason: for the United States, the European political, economic, social, and institutional model is literally the enemy. As historian Robert Kagan explained three weeks ago to the Wall Street Journal, "when [Trump and his team] say 'Europe,' what they are actually saying is 'liberal Europe'." The US president publicly admires the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban. Vice President JD Vance has shown sympathy for the far-right German party AfD. Vox has a very close relationship with The Heritage Foundation, the Washington think tank that designed Project 2025, on which Trump's government agenda is based. Mike Gonzalez, a senior researcher at Heritage, is part of the International Advisory Council of Disenso, Vox's think tank...
But aside from parties of that ideology, today's Republican Party sees Europe - and especially the European Union - as the earthly representation of the worst threats to the West. The very idea of a supranational organization assuming competencies of the member states, which is the basis of the EU, is a direct attack on the concept, stated by Trump in 2017, that "the nation-state remains the true foundation of peace and harmony." One of the EU's main identities, the disappearance of national borders, opposes the slogan "if you don't have borders, you don't have a country," which Trump has repeated dozens of times since he first said it on June 16, 2015, in the speech where he announced his candidacy for the presidency, and which has been echoed by some of his allies, like Elon Musk.
The EU's immigration policy - especially the reception of Muslim refugees from Syria adopted by Angela Merkel in 2015 - clashes with Trump's zero tolerance on immigration, who since September 2023 has stated on several occasions that undocumented immigrants "poison the blood of our people," are "beasts," "animals," "killers," and "rapists." For the US president, Europe is the ultimate example of multiculturalism, something he opposes, despite two of his three wives being foreigners and his eldest daughter, Ivanka, converting to Judaism. As the president told the British newspaper The Sun in 2018: "It's a shame that Europe allows immigration."
Trump also does not seem convinced of the benefits of immigration due to racial reasons: that is, that countries with a white majority are accepting newcomers of other races. This was hinted at in a meeting in the Oval Office with a group of senators in 2018 when he asked: "Why can't we attract immigrants from Norway?" instead of people "from shithole countries", referring to Africa and Central America. European secularism also does not align with the current US government's vision, whose State Department has instructed its officials to report colleagues who "show anti-Christian biases." Trump has proudly mentioned on numerous occasions having shaped the current Supreme Court, which in 2022 allowed US states to ban abortion, a practice that, at least in Western Europe, few consider banning.
All these differences highlight that in 2025, the disparities between the US and Europe are not limited to trade policies, Europeans taking charge of their own defense, or Brussels regulating Silicon Valley's tech giants. The clash is about the societal model. If tomorrow Europe were to become self-sufficient in defense, exempt US companies from VAT - a demand Trump has been making since his first presidency - and accept Russia's occupation of Ukraine, relations would only experience a circumstantial improvement.
The transatlantic fault line would still exist because it is a values fault line, not a policy one. And Trump would continue to feel more comfortable with Vladimir Putin than with Ursula von der Leyen or Keir Starmer. "Trump's sympathy for Putin is because the latter is illiberal," Kagan declared to the Journal, who is not exactly a pro-European. The historian belonged to the group of neoconservatives who devised the Iraq invasion and coined the phrase "Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus" to refer to the alleged bravery of the former and the presumed hedonism of the latter.
For the US, Europe is the model to avoid if the country is to survive. As JD Vance said in an interview with the Trumpist TV channel Fox News in 2018: "Europe is in danger of committing the suicide of its civilization." Vance has played a leading role in this anti-European offensive, such as when in February, in a diplomatic slap in the face for the history books, he stated at the Munich Security Conference before the Western defense elite: "The greatest threat to Europe is not external. It is not Russia, it is not China. It is the internal threat." A threat that, according to him, lies in the European institutions' rejection of far-right political parties, their tolerance of radical Islam, and opposition to Russian interference in the internal affairs of countries.
Last July, Vance stated that "the UK could become the first Islamic country to have nuclear weapons", referring to the significant British Muslim community, overlooking that Pakistan has had nuclear weapons - thanks to US assistance - since the late 1980s. On Monday, the British Trumpist website UnHerd published an interview with the vice president, in which he said: "Frankly, if the Europeans had been a little more independent and willing to stand up, perhaps we could have prevented the strategic disaster that was the US invasion of Iraq from affecting the world." Vance thus distorted the fact that several countries, such as France and Germany, had outright opposed the war, to the extent of not allowing the use of their airspace for US military flights to the front.
Europe and the United States have a long history of disagreements. The Suez Crisis - when President Eisenhower forced France and Great Britain to halt their joint invasion of Egypt with Israel - France's withdrawal from NATO under De Gaulle, Nixon's abandonment of the gold standard, the deployment of Euromissiles, and, of course, Iraq, were moments of tension in transatlantic relations. But these were disagreements over specific policies, not fundamental beliefs.
Other, deeper changes did not question the premises of the relationship. Since Obama announced the "pivot to the Pacific" in 2011, the United States has looked more towards Asia than the Atlantic and the Middle East. But this was an inevitable change given the new distribution of global power and the rise of India and, above all, China.
Europe and the US had a strategic alliance. Washington blessed the European integration process from the beginning, even supporting Jean Monnet when he took the first steps in that direction. No one took seriously the words of London School of Economics philosopher John Gray, who in 1998 wrote in his book False Dawn that "although they continue to share vital interests, Europe and the United States are drifting further apart in their cultures and values. The massive collaboration period from World War II to the immediate post-Cold War years may be considered an aberration in US-Europe relations."
Gray's words now make sense. The antipathy is not for state policies but visceral. When journalist Jeffrey Goldberg uncovered Signalgate - the astonishing leak of a Signal chat where top Trump administration officials planned a large-scale bombing of Yemen from March 11 to 15 - it became clear how much the Trump team despises the Old Continent. "I hate rescuing Europe again", Vance wrote to his counterparts. "I totally share your hatred for Europe. It's PATHETIC," responded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. "By order of the president, we are working with State and Defense to compile the costs of this and pass them on to the Europeans," added National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
The conversation is significant because, unlike Vance's statements, it was not prepared to send a public message. It was a chat among colleagues discussing matters of utmost strategic importance that theoretically were never meant to be made public. In private, US foreign policy leaders calmly discuss how much they hate Europe minutes before commenting that it is important for the bombings not to impact Saudi Arabia. Anyone who thinks Washington's constant snubs towards Europe are a negotiating tactic to gain trade concessions or more support against China should think again.
The "geopolitics of sympathy" that Kaarel Piirimäe from the University of Tartu in Estonia has written about, referring to Kennan's ideas, has been replaced in just 90 days in the transatlantic relationship by the "geopolitics of deepest antipathy". It is the antipathy that Trump and his team feel towards Ukraine, a country that looks up to the EU and is under the threat of disappearance at the hands of an illiberal power: Russia. If it weren't for being an economic and military threat, even Xi Jinping's China would have a better rating with Trump than Europe.