Trump’s wrecking ball menaces European leaders as they gather in Munich

A wrecking ball’s damage is surely harder to manage if it is swinging from inside the house. As Europe’s security establishment meets in Germany this weekend, the Munich Security Conference’s organizers have already announced the (creative) destruction of global norms ushered in by US President Donald Trump as a “demolition man” era. While this has … The post Trump’s wrecking ball menaces European leaders as they gather in Munich appeared first on Egypt Independent. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn A wrecking ball’s damage is surely harder to manage if it is swinging from inside the house. As Europe’s security establishment meets in Germany this weekend, the Munich Security Conference’s organizers have already announced the (creative) destruction of global norms ushered in by US President Donald Trump as a “demolition man” era. While this has been presented as an opportunity, in truth, it is unclear how constructive the conference will prove. The dust of the previous year’s Munich mauling by senior US officials has not settled, rather become obscured in a wider cloud, as weak foundations cause the pillars of Pax Americana – the peace in the West since World War 2 – to begin to crumble. This time last year, US Vice President JD Vance’s broadside against Europe’s liberal democracies shocked his audience – assailing what he falsely called their impinging on free speech and backsliding on democracy. Now this contrarian view is policy: enshrined in black and white, in both the White House’s and Pentagon’s national security and defense strategies. US Secretary of State Marco is leaving no room for shock this time – rather telling his hosts to brace. “The old world is gone, frankly, the world I grew up in, and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to sort of reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be,” he told reporters on the eve of his arrival in Munich. Rubio is also visiting two Trump-doting prime ministers, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and the embattled Hungarian Viktor Orban, in the runup before arriving in Germany. Do you get it now, America seems to ask? Europe does. It would be tempting to forget the week-long rollercoaster that was Trump’s assault on Danish sovereignty, which forced fellow European NATO members to send troops to Greenland in a show of continental unity. But Europe’s lessons from the flash crisis are two-fold, and may bring comfort at the customarily tedious three-day Munich meeting. First, Trump often says what feels exciting simply to see how far it will take him, rather than because of a shrewdly detailed policy. Midnight Truth Social posts can mark the peak of months of military planning to snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Or they can dissolve a vast crisis of Trump’s own making, taking NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s off-ramp to switch gears on Greenland from threatened aggression into negotiations. Those talks continue, Vance recently said, but their resonance is partially lost in the white noise of growing US pressure on Iran, and the global fallout from the release of more files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. There is simply too much crazy to catch up on for singular crises to sound out long enough, let alone echo. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte addresses committees of the European Union Parliament about Greenland negotiations on January 26, 2026 in Brussels, Belgium. Omar Havana/Getty Images The second lesson is that when confronted by allies, Trump seems to dislike being disliked. The Rutte off-ramp was eagerly seized, and the Greenland invasion threat swiftly evaporated. Trump even near-apologized to British troops, after suggesting that NATO forces who fought alongside the US in Afghanistan had done so “a little back, little off the front lines.” Britain lost 457 troops in the conflict. Populists like to remain popular. The “king” likes to have allied courtiers fawning. Europe’s challenge is to change enough, now the old world order is broken, to ensure its own security, but not so irrevocably that it cannot revert to welcome a stabler successor to Trump. One European diplomat described the mood ahead of Munich as: “Careful confidence that we have found our feet, although a sense of dread of the task ahead.” There are nine months to go until the US mid-term elections potentially hobble the president and fire the starting gun on Vance’s likely bid to succeed Trump. From that point on, a combination of global calm and flattering allies could be helpful to those who seek to follow Trump, in the two years before 2028’s presidential elections. Even though every week of Trump foreign policy can feel like an age, his time in office is limited. The practical changes, thus far, are reassuringly few. US forces may step back from the NATO supply chain for Ukraine as it continues to fight Russia’s invasion, and ask Europe to pay for a lot more. This White House, while trying to negotiate with Moscow, and perhaps out of wider sympathy or diplomatic expediency, has stepped back from openly calling Russia a threat. But we are yet to see the wholesale departure of US troops from Europe. Or an end to US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Or a radical alteration of Washington’s nuclear doctrines. Instead, Europe’s larger powers have half-committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, a step which most European officials seem to think was long overdue. The threat from Russia, which can barely dominat