The United States’ national security strategy depicts the state the Trump administration wants to see in Europe. It is culturally united, militarily strong, has low levels of crime and immigration, and is “majority European,” or white. There is nothing better than making a country rich by producing products that people all over the world want to buy.
What would such a country look like? Denmark may be the place to start. It has some of the strictest immigration laws in Europe and one of the lowest crime rates. Conscription is compulsory and overwhelmingly white. It even makes drugs that make Americans thin. If the welfare state is too easy, or if climate change policies are too environmentally friendly, no one will be perfect.
But instead of elevating Denmark as a country worth working with, President Donald Trump spent the first month of this year antagonizing Denmark by threatening to seize Greenland, Denmark’s autonomous territory. Although Trump ultimately backed off, his maneuvers alarmed mainstream Europe and even some nationalist leaders who were once proud of their ties to Trump have distanced themselves from him.
Jourdan Bardera, president of France’s far-right National Assembly and a disciple of Marine Le Pen, accused Trump of “coercion” and accused him of “imperialist ambitions”. Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, just weeks ago hailed the National Security Strategy as the beginning of a “conservative renaissance” and said Trump had “violated his fundamental campaign promise of non-interference in other countries.”
Analysts told CNN that President Trump’s aggressive push to annex Greenland was a failure, but it could hamper his administration’s hopes of building a “civilized” alliance of far-right parties in Europe. They added that by threatening the national sovereignty of European countries, the president undermined the kind of nationalism the administration hopes to foster among its “patriotic” European allies.
“Greenland was a huge miscalculation,” said Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Freedom Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. While Trump could easily gain support in Europe with his anti-immigrant, anti-wokeness and anti-environment policies, Krastev said the president had unwittingly crossed the line by threatening national sovereignty.
“Trump is always called a nationalist, but he is a nationalist who doesn’t understand nationalism, especially the nationalism of others,” Krastev told CNN, describing Trump as a nationalist with “no history.”
“When it comes to land, his view is that of a real estate agent. He believes he is in the business of gentrifying the world,” he said.
By contrast, the principles of land and borders are almost “sacred” to European nationalists, who intuitively remember what happens when borders are redrawn by force. “European nationalism is very sensitive to territorial integrity, because this is what crushed Europe in the past,” Krastev added. “This is why Trump’s actions are indefensible to them.”
Leadership candidates in France and Germany harshly criticized Trump, but the backlash in Central and Eastern Europe was more muted. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister and Trump’s most vocal cheerleader in Europe, brushed off questions about Greenland, calling it an “internal issue,” while Polish nationalist President Karol Navrocki said only that the dispute should be resolved “diplomatically.”
For Orbán in particular, Trump’s antics could cause problems. More than any other European leader, Mr. Orbán has built a career on being fiercely opposed to the EU, even though he doesn’t want it to leave. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has long denounced the power he envisions as an tyrannical and even imperialist one, arguing that it erodes the national sovereignty of member states.
Dimitar Bechev, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, said similar criticism could be leveled against President Trump.
“If you’re campaigning on sovereignty issues and taking back control from Brussels, you can’t be seen as fighting for a hegemon,” Bechev told CNN. European nationalists need to be “careful” in how they respond to Trump’s latest antics, he said. “You don’t want to disown Trump, but at the same time you don’t want to seem like you’re Trump’s agent.”
President Trump used his speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos last week to backtrack on his threat to seize Greenland from Denmark by force, but managed to anger his European allies again with his baseless claim that NATO forces were “a little bit back” from the front lines while fighting in support of the United States in Afghanistan.
Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was praised by President Trump last year as “beautiful and powerful”, said his comments were “unacceptable”. “Friendship requires respect,” Meloni said in a brief statement this week.
Even Nigel Farage, leader of the populist party Reform UK, who has campaigned for Mr Trump in the US, felt the need to distance himself from the president, calling his comments “wrong” and calling Mr Trump’s threats against Greenland a “very hostile act”.
Liberal European leaders were even more vocal in their criticism. Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Weber said President Trump’s repeated threats and insults were an insult to Europe’s self-respect. “It’s one thing to be a happy vassal and another to be a miserable slave,” he told Davos. “If you back down now, you will lose your dignity, which is probably the most precious thing in a democracy – your dignity.”
Krastev said President Trump underestimated the extent to which nationalism is based on pride. “If you don’t go and appeal to the pride and dignity of these countries, these parties have no choice (but to oppose you),” he said.
Jeremy Shapiro, head of research at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Trump administration’s hopes of fostering “like-minded” allies in Europe may already be backfiring. Shapiro told CNN that the Greenland debacle is “the latest in a series of ways President Trump is stepping out on his own.”
A major poll released this month by ECFR showed that President Trump has squandered some of the influence he had in Europe when he took office. Currently, only 16% of EU citizens consider the US an ally, and 20% consider the US a rival or enemy.
Shapiro said President Trump’s antics won’t stop some populist parties from capitalizing on his influence and working with MAGA on a “transactional basis.” Prime Minister Orbán, for example, made a major contribution to President Trump’s support ahead of April’s Hungarian general election, in which he will face a credible challenger for the first time in years.
But he said there is no question that Trump has “lost some influence” among the nationalist parties that the Trump administration is trying to court. “They’re becoming increasingly wary of him, and I think what that means in the long run is that we don’t see some sort of ‘illiberal international community’ with Trump at the forefront.”
