POLITICO: Donald Trump won't deal with the EU. The EU can't deal with Trump

Trump wants to destroy the EU — and rebuild it in his image, writes POLITICO.

Donald Trump tried and failed to find a chink in the EU’s armor through a trade war in his first term.

But now he’s found a more vulnerable spot: The massive security crisis he’s engineered by withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine is exposing potentially lethal cracks in the 27-nation bloc.

Little could please him more.

The U.S. president has long seethed with undisguised disdain for the EU, which he has described — inaccurately — as having been created “to screw the United States.” For Trump, the EU sits alongside his other supranational bêtes noires like the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization, which need to be slapped down for fleecing America.

In only the first few frantic weeks of his second term, his administration has shown it will give short shrift to Brussels. The EU’s trade chief visited Washington, only for Trump to dial up his tariff plans; its foreign policy chief was brutally snubbed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and EU parliamentarians had to fly home with the chastening message that America would defy their tech rules as European “censorship.”

The message is clear: Trump will sideline the EU and play divide-and-rule with national leaders. That wasn’t possible in the trade war of his first term, when Europe united to hit him back. And now, splits over the war in Ukraine are asking existential questions of the bloc’s unity.

The EU as a bloc is scrambling to prove its relevance as national leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, step to the fore to take charge of Europe’s response to Trump.

The European Council, where the 27 national leaders are supposed to take big foreign policy decisions by consensus, is being agonizingly exposed as too divided and insufficiently nimble to respond to the scale of the storm that Trump is whipping up over Ukraine.

Indeed, EU diplomats are already playing down expectations of any major breakthroughs at an emergency Council summit in Brussels this week because of Hungary’s opposition to further aid for Ukraine. Instead, Starmer and Macron are having to work round the EU in ad hoc diplomatic formats, inviting countries such as Turkey and Canada, and conspicuously not inviting the EU’s pro-Russian leaders.

The crisis is “moving Europe’s center of gravity back to the national capitals,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a think tank. “The role of the institutions in this context is important but not mission-critical.”

“That’s the new equilibrium and the new reality” that the EU’s top officials, Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, “have to accommodate themselves to,” he added. Von der Leyen heads the EU’s executive Commission while Costa is president of the European Council.

One EU diplomat, who like others in this piece was granted anonymity to speak freely, voiced confidence the bloc would be able to weather the Trump hurricane, if only just. “The EU is hanging on by the skin of its teeth but, each time, it does make us stronger,” they said.

The more pessimistic observers in Europe argue the Trump administration is hell-bent on promoting populist nationalist forces in Europe to help destroy the EU and pull it back to a far looser confederation of countries, all of which would be more beholden to the United States — or, perhaps, to Russia.

While von der Leyen met with Vance — who has repeatedly incurred European outrage — in Munich, neither she nor Costa have scored an in-person meeting with Trump since his inauguration.

Those granted time with Trump officials don’t have much to show for it.

When EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič went to Washington in January, he not only came back empty-handed but learned a week after his return that things risked getting even worse than the original threat of reciprocal tariffs.

Indeed, it transpired that Trump intended to impose a 25-percent tariff on all imports from the EU, taking no heed of the offers Šefčovič had prepared to avoid a trade war, including buying more American liquefied natural gas and lowering the EU’s own tariffs on cars to match those of the U.S.

As for top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas, she didn’t even get a chance to meet with her U.S. counterpart. The former Estonian prime minister and Russia hawk, who rose to her post last year, was meant to meet Rubio late last month.

Kallas duly arrived in Washington, only to learn that Rubio would be unable to see her due to “scheduling issues.” Speaking to CBS that weekend, Kallas played down the missed encounter, but the damage had been done.

“We keep on hearing that the EU is not influential, that we count for less than nothing,” said an EU official. “But if Trump and Putin find common ground in identifying us as their enemy, it’s probably because at the end we actually count for something.”

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