Europe woke up with “astonishment” to senior figures in Donald Trump’s administration attacking the continent’s “PATHETIC” free-loading, according to Britain’s left-wing Guardian.
Such messages—also sent to a journalist included in a White House messaging group—should come as no surprise, as they are only a more direct—indeed, more Trumpian—assertion of what the U.S. president and his representatives have been saying for quite some time.
Perhaps the most astonishing element of this story is that this (now not-so) private discussion between a group of high-ranking politicians was consistent with the stances they take in public.
Objecting in a Signal chatroom to military plans which he argued were not in America’s interest, Vice President JD Vance said:
I just hate bailing Europe out again.
To which Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth responded:
I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.
The officials also agreed that the U.S. ought to get something back in return for defending Europe’s interests—that “there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
This is totally in keeping with Trump’s demands over recent years for European nations to drastically increase their defence spending, rather than to ride on America’s coattails, in line with the demands of NATO membership. And, more recently, with his criticism of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron for not doing “anything” to end the war in Ukraine—the protection of which he also believes should be down to Europe.
Neither are the leaked messages a million miles away from Vance’s jibe at Britain and France earlier this month, that Ukraine won’t receive proper protection from “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
In fact, former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt is right to describe the texts as just “another wake up call for a real European defence” (emphasis added).
As Rod Dreher recently wrote for europeanconservative.com,
Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, and nearly forty years after the end of the Cold War, the American president has decided that enough is enough. It is time for Europe to grow up.
The message is the same, however it is being conveyed.
