Trump’s extraordinary attack on key ally
Donald Trump has branded European allies “weak” and while saying very little about Russia’s aggression. Some European leaders are over it.
The mayor of London has said Donald Trump is “obsessed” with him after the US president went on yet another rant at his expense.
Sadiq Khan had joined a number of senior figures in Europe who have pushed back against Mr Trump after he called the allies “weak” in an explosive interview on Tuesday, US time. He also railed against immigration and signalled he was growing weary of Ukraine.
The US president’s Europe backlash comes despite the US being key to the NATO military alliance which is designed to deter attacks on the continent.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the US’ new national security strategy, which reflected many of Mr Trump’s interview points, was “unacceptable”.
In an interview with US website Politico, Mr Trump doubled down on his extraordinary recent criticisms of a region that Washington has long counted as a key ally, recycling far-right tropes about civilisational decline in Europe.
“Most European nations, they’re decaying. They’re decaying,” Mr Trump said during the interview, conducted on Monday.
The 79-year-old billionaire, whose political rise to power was built on inflammatory language about migration, echoed far-right talking points as he said that Europe’s policies were a “disaster”.
“They’re coming in from all parts of the world,” Mr Trump said.
“But they want to be politically correct, and they don’t want to send them back to where they came from”.
Mr Trump’s broadside comes days after his administration’s new national security strategy sparked alarm by calling for the cultivation of “resistance” in the EU against liberal migration policies.
Asked if European countries would not remain US allies if they failed to embrace his administration’s policies on the issue, Mr Trump replied that “it depends”.
“I think they’re weak, but they also want to be so politically correct,” Mr Trump said.
Mr Trump did say he had personally good relations with a number of European leaders.
But he listed countries including Britain, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden that he said were being “destroyed” by migration, and launched a new attack on the “horrible, vicious, disgusting” Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor.
European leaders push back at Trump
In response, Mr Khan, who has never tried to be in Mr Trump’s good graces, said he had “literally no idea why President Trump is so obsessed with this mayor of London”.
“I’m not sure what he’s got against a liberal, progressive, diverse, successful city like London.”
“I suspect that’s one of the reasons why we have record numbers of Americans coming here to holiday, coming here to live, coming here to invest, or coming here to study”.
On Tuesday, Germany’s Mr Merz pushed back on the White House’s pronouncements about Europe.
He said the security strategy, which openly said the US supported far right European parties, was “unacceptable to us from a European perspective”.
Mr Merz said he was “not surprised” by the content of the strategy. “Some of it is comprehensible and some of it is understandable,” he said during a visit to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The paper “confirms my assessment that we in Europe, and thus also in Germany, must become much more independent from the US in terms of security policy”, he added.
However, he also urged the United States to continue working constructively with Europe.
“In my conversations with Americans, I say: America First is fine, but America Alone cannot be in your interest. You also need partners in the world, and one of those partners can be Europe.”
Alice Rufo, the number two minister at the French defence ministry, said the US’ mew strategy was “an extremely brutal clarification of the ideological stance of the United States”.
“This is where we are and it’s going to continue. We live in a world of carnivores. Europe is not an island, and it will earn respect if it learns how to command respect”.
In his Politico interview, Mr Trump also brushed off the fact that the Kremlin had hailed the new US national security strategy as being in line with its own views.
“I think he (Putin) would like to see a weak Europe, and to be honest with you, he’s getting that. That has nothing to do with me,” he said.
Mr Trump also criticised Europe’s role in resolving the war between Russia and Ukraine, saying: “They talk but they don’t produce. And the war just keeps going on and on”.
The White House has left European leaders out of key areas of its Ukraine peace plan, a plan which some have said is light on detail including, for instance, when it comes to security greatness for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the UK and France have said they were willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine as peacekeepers but the US has pushed back against the idea.
Originally published as Trump’s extraordinary attack on key ally
