"Ok, we’ve reached peak European vassalism, even medieval serfs had more self-respect.

It’s frankly astonishing. Europe’s major mistake in Trump 1.0 was not to use that opportunity to gain strategic autonomy from the US, and Rutte’s SMS shows that not only Europe are making the exact same mistake in Trump 2.0, but that if anything they’ve become even more sycophantic and submissive.

And this is despite Trump being even more aggressive towards Europe this time around, literally threatening to annex 98% of an EU state and NATO member (namely Denmark) and 100% of another NATO member (namely Canada). As well as him having launched a trade war, during which he routinely calls Europe “very, very nasty” and designed to “screw” the US (when the very contrary is actually the case).

I mean, read the thing: no European with a modicum of self-respect wouldn’t be embarrassed by it.

Rutte:

1. congratulates Trump on his “decisive” and “truly extraordinary” action in Iran. Despite it being a complete violation of international law and all principles and norms that Europe supposedly cares about. And no, it doesn’t “make us all safer” as Rutte embarrassingly writes, quite the contrary (as I argued in my latest article, all Trump did was prove Kim Jong Un was right about everything: https://open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbertrand/p/the-key-lesson-from-iran-kim-jong)

2. spends the rest of the text telling him how “Europe is going to pay [for NATO] in a BIG way” and how this “big success” will be Trump’s “win”. Because, essentially, this isn’t about Europe replacing America to finally defend itself, but about Europe paying America a bigger tribute for its defense. Which is quite a fundamental difference.

Sure, there could be a scenario where this is in fact Rutte playing Trump, trying to cajole him while Europe in fact builds genuine strategic autonomy behind the scenes - but I’m afraid this would be giving Rutte far too much credit. Real strategic manipulation wouldn’t come with actual policy capitulations that serve American interests, yet this is what we keep seeing.

Europe is genuinely committing to transfer massive resources to American defense companies (a reminder that an astonishing 63% of all EU defense orders are placed with U.S. companies: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/09/09/eu-buys-too-much-defense-equipment-abroad-especially-from-us-report/) while framing it as Trump’s personal victory, which is absolutely crazy when you think about it.

This also says a lot about “democracy” in Europe. European citizens almost unanimously despise Trump (with only 9% considering him a friend of Europe: https://geopolitique.eu/en/2025/03/20/in-the-face-of-war-and-trump-taking-the-measure-of-european-public-opinion-10-points-on-our-exclusive-eurobazooka-survey/) and they overwhelmingly want independence from the U.S. because they understand this would be in Europe’s interests.

Yet when democracy, as far as I understand it, is supposedly leaders representing their people and their interests, we get the exact opposite: leaders who seem more concerned with pleasing a foreign president their own citizens despise than with pursuing the independence those citizens overwhelmingly support.

It’s a remarkable inversion of democratic principles, where popular sovereignty has been replaced by elite deference to external power."