If Only...
Messrs Macron, Merz and Starmer were seen huddling in Munich.
A curious passerby recovered the discarded, crumpled draft of what might have been a joint letter…
Dear Herr Trump,
Merci. You have made us all increase our defence spending. You have woken us up to the existential threat that Putin’s Russia poses and we are proud to be re-arming. And we were particularly reassured to hear your Secretary of State, Marco Rubio in Munich pour a little, much needed emollient on our very open wounds- a consequence of your vice-president’s less friendly words a year earlier at the same conference; and your own designs on Greenland, among the many other slights and gauntlets from denigrating our soldiers fighting on the US side in Afghanistan to tariffs. The Munich Security Conference’s own pre-conference report was the most unGerman and blunt recognition of the threat you represent to Europe. The gloves are off.
Yet apparently according to Marco, you still love us and we remain linked by a common civilisation. It seems we are all the descendants of White Christian Europe – even Mr Rubio, despite a long multi-generational family spell in Cuba. Reading the speech we wonder whether he is of conquistador stock. A descendant of the slayers of the indigenous peoples of the Americas appropriate perhaps for the spokesman of a new, equally pernicious white supremacy.
When we reread Marco’s speech we were a little less reassured. It’s one thing to be asked to confront a common external enemy who clearly means us harm. It’s another to face off against an ‘enemy within,’ when the overwhelming majority of its number are some of our best and most hard working citizens. We are each proud of our multiracial societies.
London Burning
Not least of all London which you seem to have seized onto as the poster boy of “civilisational erasure”. The last census showed that 40% of Londoners were not born in Britain. For you, that indicates a London infested by crime and social breakdown for us its the very foundation of its vitality and appeal. Perhaps it’s why so many of your fellow Americans are fleeing your country to enjoy its diversity, cultural richness and political freedom.
Record Number of Americans Apply for British Citizenship
New data from the U.K. government showed applications surged in the first three months of this year, which some analysts attributed to the political climate in the United States. - NYTimes
The Russian Bogeyman
So does your push for rearmament have us chasing the right enemy? Russia, which you seem to think isn’t hostile anyway, has an economy smaller than Texas. In 2024 EU countries spent €343.2bn on defence1. The UK was the third highest spender in NATO, spending $84.2 billion on defence2. Also in 2024, well into Russia’s mobilisation into wartime, Russia’s military expenditure reached double the level in 2015 - which was still estimated at $149 billion. And its dismal progress against a much smaller neighbour, Ukraine, where 4 years in it has taken roughly 20% of its territory. Its casualties are thought to be numbering more than 30,000 a month. This is a war Putin anticipated polishing off in days. On current form it seems unlikely that Russian tanks and drones will be swarming into the Baltics or Poland any time soon.
More likely is that Putin will pursue his tactics of disruption and disinformation. This risks dividing our countries because they gnaw at those very multiracial bonds of trust and legitimacy that we value so much. He will look for asymmetrical ways to make trouble- sowing low-cost, high-return social media polarisation. Bots, not tanks.
That said we need a backstop against the bully. It’s clear the two of you have ushered in an age where military power counts. We need to rebuild ours, no argument. But is it the main threat? The real frontline seems to be internal trust or rather lack of it- in our institutions and our democracy.
The New Right
That real frontline is reflected in the rise of the new right in our countries. We have lazily denigrated them as movements harking back to a sentimental past of village cricket and warm beer, or boules and vin ordinaire, populated by white natives. Just writing those words reminds us how foolish this characterisation is. As Mark Leonard argues in an important new paper, for a white working class that has seen several decades of stalled or declining earning power and the hollowing out of their country’s manufacturing base, these parties have a well-crafted and contemporary, grievance-based messages. Uninhibited by the legacy structures of old parties they operate on efficient social media organising platforms. They are part of the political future- not the past as we too complacently sought to dismiss them.
“The policy responses adopted by governments raised crucial questions about whom the state serves, and often suggested that the answer was not ordinary working people. For example, during the financial crisis, governments rescued the banks but cut welfare payments and let people’s houses be repossessed. On the climate crisis, they raised heating costs for households but allowed oil companies to keep growing. Migration helped corporations turn incredible profits but has driven down wages, driven up house prices, put pressure on public services and changed the character of more vulnerable communities. In Ukraine, Western governments have rallied to help a foreign country in need, but at the cost of an inflation crisis due to rising energy bills and of defence spending hikes funded by higher taxes or cuts elsewhere. During the covid-19 pandemic, many white-collar employees could work from home while blue-collar and low-wage service workers had to risk their lives on the front line.” - Mark Leonard, The new right: Anatomy of a global political revolution
In the US the foreign policy counterpart was “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the flawed handiwork of detached elites whose sons and daughters were not the ones who paid the price of life and limb for these failed adventures.
But exploiting that sense of grievance has become a license for corruption on an epic scale. Most notably you, your family and chums like Steve Witkoff are making fortunes out of government. Foreign policy, like domestic policy, is for sale.
Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.” - New Yorker, Jan 2026
We have seen it alleged in this Substack before: you are in quantitative terms almost certainly the most corrupt leader in human history. And as that becomes understood and absorbed into the politics of both your country and ours it is going to further damage the standing of institutions and a political class that is letting you get away with it.
Just as you have converted the Republicans from a country club to a working class party, so that same conversion has turned our politics on its head. The Labour Party in the UK risks being reduced to a supper club for liberal human rights lawyers in north London.
In Germany, working-class support for the social democrats is down from 48% in 1998 to 12% in 2025. Meanwhile, the AfD won 38% of working-class votes in the 2025 election (up 17 points on 2021) compared with 21% in the overall electorate.
In France, the contrast is even starker. In the first round of the 2024 snap parliamentary election, Le Pen’s RN secured 59% of the working-class vote, while the PS, LR and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists combined only scraped together 41%.
So it’s time we got out and knocked on doors. Oops – not the right metaphor in the new digital world our opponents have embraced. But you get our point. After all, JD Vance in his infamous Munich speech a year ago said that Europe’s main enemy was within. We just disagree about who it is.
Swords into Rappers
You are now apparently planning to fund these new right groups, as you seek to reverse that “civilisational erasure”. Well this is the real new battleground and we are on different sides. We stand for the diversity that makes us great- and, before you, made America great. Our natural American ally for this battle is Bad Bunny, not Pete Hegseth and your Department of War. The Super Bowl halftime show reassured us America has a future if it can escape the grip of its current rulers.
Pew, Feb 2026 - Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. About a third (31%) say they have not heard of him. Still, more hold an unfavorable view (41%) than favorable view of him (26%).
That show also expressed the enduring power of art and entertainment as tools of soft power. A halftime show largely in Spanish and celebrating people of colour was sedition pure and simple in your America.
And we need to tend to our soft power abroad too. Our foreign assistance programmes have been cut catastrophically to fund defence; the UK has actually cut by a higher percentage than the US where Congress has reversed some of the Musk-Rubio cuts; the funding for the BBC World Service hangs by a thread; most importantly, our foreign policy needs to jump its Atlanticist tracks and make new friends in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not based on past history but a new one of mutual dependence in trade terms and shared values in a multilateral system. Mark Carney, Pedro Sanchez and Lula are leaders who get it. We are not breaking with you, Donald, but we do need to “derisk”, a word reintroduced for dealing with China but now applied to you, as we do believe you have hastened, not postponed, the moment when America no longer commands the room.
We must seek common cause with countries everywhere who refuse to submit to this power alone model of international relations. The limping UN may have a deathbed recovery as countries rally to it as the antidote to your Board of Peace with its runaway ambitions as a global peacemaker under its chairman-for-life, Donald J Trump.
The Holy See “will not participate in the Board of Peace because of its particular nature, which is evidently not that of other States,” Parolin said.
“One concern,” he said, “is that at the international level it should above all be the UN that manages these crisis situations. This is one of the points on which we have insisted.” - Reuters
On defence, we in Europe need to put in place procurement rules that move to dramatically reduce our dependence on American kit and technology. Not easy but necessary. We need to recover defence independence- not without NATO or its US leadership- but the autonomy to defend ourselves if one day America does not meet its Article 5 mutual defence commitments.
But we need to double down on the soft power we have strayed from. You’ve vacated that space. Nobody takes the US seriously anymore on calls for democracy, human rights or the rule of law. Not that you even bother to make them. Oil (Venezuela and Iran), neighbourhood mates (Argentina and El Salvador), real estate (Greenland, Gaza and Diego Garcia) and Big Power carve-up (Ukraine) seems to be the motives – plus, of course, pursuit of that annoyingly elusive Peace Prize.
Perhaps as Nobel made his money out of dynamite we could ask the Norwegians to mint a special one-off prize: for the man who blew up the world.
Many of our officials, and at times we too, comfort ourselves that it is only three more years. They cannot bear to let go, London’s Whitehall most notably. But at various side gatherings in Europe around Munich, the word was that you are set on subverting this year’s midterm elections by suppressing voting and messing with the count. And even if you don’t succeed, the new right is not going anywhere. AI and global competition are going to increase, not lessen, the pressure on blue collar voters in all our countries. The grievances will not diminish.
Most difficult to say, once a superpower has behaved as it has under you, trust doesn’t recover. We’ve seen the price of overdependence on the US and our impotence when you walk away. We are not going to go down as the leaders who failed to set in motion a process of recovering our independence. Ironic that in the 250th year of your independence we must embark on recovering our independence from you.
But we cannot blame our condition on you alone. The biggest threat to trust and legitimacy remains at home where we have exhibited a Biden-like failure to understand and address the underlying economic grievances of falling real incomes for blue collar workers. And unlike the US, we have a dismal recent track record of failing to grow our economies at a level that might satisfy our voters’ aspirations. As a consequence each of us faces, before long, a likely career-ending political reckoning.
So we are not quite sure whether this is an open letter or a last will and testament.
Regards,
Your European Frenemies
Further material:
A recent ODI panel, with my co-authors on the BWI at 80 report:
An exciting initiative to close data gaps - and make the existing data more useful and more timely. More info here and a first report here, underscoring how crucial MDBs are and will continue to be
I enjoyed my conversation with Professor Ayse Kaya at Perry World House on the future of development
In case you missed it, opportunities for economic growth in the UK, from Best for Britain https://www.bestforbritain.org/growth_report
Like Bad Bunny, Beyonce represents an alternative to Trump’s vision of America https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/podcasts/beyonce-tour-us-politics.html
Bobi Wine update: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz0pr807yz7o
Germany tops the list by a wide margin with €90.6bn, accounting for 26.4% of total EU defence spending. France follows with €59.6bn, or 17.4% of the EU total. - source
This is the first year since 2014 where the UK has not been the second highest spender in NATO, being behind the USA and Germany.
Your perspective & detail with a side of humor makes reading about complex issues somewhat easier to digest ‼️