With his acolyte Mark Rutte at his side — Secretary General of a NATO that should safeguard collective North Atlantic security, rather than follow Washington’s global ambition— Donald Trump has issued an ultimatum to a Europe he knows is held hostage by its own security anxieties.
If there were a modicum of dignity on this side of the Atlantic — and there are growing reasons to doubt there is much left — someone should be saying, loud and clear, to Trump that it is for the United States to extricate itself from the quagmire into which it has slipped in the Gulf, in tow with Israel.
It was Washington’s choices, not Europe’s, that triggered the tensions now threatening to spread. Europe cannot be asked to foot the bill for adventures in which it was not even consulted. It is obscene to hear the United States claim it is acting in defence of the interests of those it repeatedly despises and insults. Those interests were, for example, clearly reflected in the nuclear agreement signed with Iran — an agreement Trump abandoned.
It is, of course, recognised that there are now very concrete interests at stake. Iranian oil is needed, energy routes matter, and stability in the Gulf has a real impact on European economies. But the short-term logic of interests cannot become a licence for strategic irresponsibility. Europeans cannot be dragged along into a region where, at any moment, they could be caught in a new cycle of war — a cycle Israel makes no secret of being keen to restart.
And this is where indignation cannot be restrained by any calculation of convenience. After the outrage of recent hours in Lebanon. After Gaza — the systematic destruction of a population, documented, filmed, and counted in tens of thousands of deaths. After the West Bank, where settlement continues with the slow, relentless method of those who know the world is looking the other way. In the face of all this, either Europe is able to take a firm stance towards Israel — and let it be clear: much of Israel’s military equipment is still supplied by European states, making Europe objectively complicit in the crimes committed with it — or it loses, definitively, what remains of its former moral authority, on which its civilisational project was built. Not the authority proclaimed in summit after summit, but that which is built on coherence between words and actions, between declared values and the destination of the weapons that are sold.
A pragmatic objection will be anticipated: a firm position would irritate Trump. It could lead him to try to divide the continent, playing capitals against one another, as was done so effectively in the Iraq war, when Rumsfeld separated “old” Europe from “new”.
Of course that risk exists, and it would be naïve to deny it. But what more can Trump do? More tariffs? Withdraw his troops from Europe? The Americans are not in Europe for our “beautiful eyes”; they are here, as at Lajes, because it forms part of their security project — to protect their interests, which until now have also aligned with ours.
The alternative — complicit silence, quiet submission, anticipatory alignment — has a name Europe was once thought to have learned to detest: appeasement. And appeasement cannot be a vice only when directed eastwards, as dominant rhetoric often suggests. It is equally degrading — and equally dangerous — when practised towards those who, from Washington or Tel Aviv, expect Europe to accept, head bowed, that its values are negotiable and its principles merely decorative.
These are the moments when Europe has an obligation to remember that it is a democratic entity, that it has public opinions to which its governments are accountable, and that it stands for a project with a moral foundation — the same one that led almost everyone to condemn when they heard Trump threaten that “an entire civilisation” would perish if it did not do as he wished.
European citizens deserve leaders who do not confuse prudence with capitulation. To see their governments falling in line like lambs behind Trump would not only be a betrayal of the values they proclaim — it would be an abdication that history rarely forgives.
Looking at how the world has reacted in recent days to the drama in the Gulf, it seems clear that taking a stand against Trump, without hostility but with calm firmness, would strike a chord with large sections of European public opinion. Indeed, one might say: for once, in a long time, Europe would become popular with its own citizens. If only there were the courage to do so.
