Two words now sum up European policy towards Donald Trump’s United States: strategic supplication. The countries of Nato, including the UK, will render unto Caesar that which he declares to be his — in the hope that he does not ask for too much and looks kindly on their most urgent requests.
This perhaps explains the muted reactions to Trump’s latest military and diplomatic claims on Venezuela and Greenland. European leaders may talk a bigger game but this week much of the pretence has been stripped away. Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller was more succinct: “We are a superpower and we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The former French premier Gabriel Attal says Europeans are now “powerless spectators of the unravelling of global rules”. The world will be “governed by force” and those who lament the loss of an international order “no longer have the means for such indignation”.