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Gnesotto, N. “Trumpism, the new revisionist ideology of the century”, Blogpost, Jacques Delors Institute, February 2025

The European Union can try to reassure itself as much as it likes, but Trump’s world will be a dramatic ordeal for itself, the Atlantic Alliance and the international system. We were familiar with Russian revisionism: Putin wants to destroy the European order established at the end of the USSR. We were familiar with Asian revisionism: Xi Jinping wants to revise the Asian order by denying the legitimacy of an American presence in the area. We are now going to discover global revisionism: Donald Trump and Elon Musk quite simply want to abolish the international order that their ancestors established in 1945.

This was based on three pillars: economic liberalism, democracy and the rule of law. They want to replace them with protectionism, authoritarian interference and the abolition of all rules that could hinder the freedom of American power.  Elon Musk’s support for the German and British far right, and the Nazi salute he dared to give at Donald Trump’s inauguration, are on a par with the interference of Putin and China in European electoral processes: Elon Musk is even more dangerous, because his interference is direct, brutal and provocative, compared to the clandestine actions of the two communist leaders. Why does Europe not solemnly condemn him, as it does other foreign interference against our democracy?

As for the primacy of the law over the arbitrary actions of a single individual, whether in international law, business law or private law, it is being called into question in a spectacular fashion. Donald Trump wants to seize the Panama Canal or the mineral resources of Greenland, trampling on the principles of state sovereignty and the inviolability of national borders in the process. Elon Musk’s mission is to deregulate the American and global economy and remove all the rules restricting technological innovation. In the process, he is trampling on the rights of private individuals by stealing thousands of pieces of data from the US administration. In the name of the interests of a privileged few in the United States and freedom of action, the arbitrariness, power and will of one man will prevail. If all this does not usher in a global, ideological revolution, powerful and destructive of democracy and international law, one wonders what it could be.

Certainly not, in any case, the continuation of our traditional Atlantic alliance. The new American president has no time for principles, alliances or values: NATO will only be maintained if it serves his interests, in other words if the Europeans give in to all of Washington’s demands. It is no longer all for one and one for all, as the NATO treaty suggests, it is all for one and one for no one but himself.

Because Donald Trump’s strategy is as simple as it is simplistic: it begins with a kind of family racket, with allies and neighbours, obtaining from them, through unfriendly or even violent blackmail, what the president considers necessary to strengthen American power. In a second phase, he will have to face the only real anti-American challenge: Chinese power. The allies can therefore expect a revival of Donald Rumsfeld’s formula, then George Bush Junior’s Secretary of Defense in 2003 during the Iraq war: ‘you are either with us, or you are against us’.

However, one is still astonished by the naïve or terrified statements made by various European leaders on the strength of the Alliance and Europe’s confidence in its American ally. It is true that Europe is more vulnerable than ever before in its 70-year history: threatened by Russian aggression in the East, threatened by American abandonment in the West, threatened by the far right at home, against a backdrop of massive economic decline. This accumulation of vital risks to European security and democracy is paralysing Europeans and naturally leading to division. Of the three scenarios now available to the European Union, the most immediate is that of submission: the institutions, like most European leaders, are waiting to see but are ready to accept American injunctions in the name of their collective defence. For fear of Russia, we will buy American shale gas (at the expense of the green deal); for fear of trade sanctions, we will buy American weapons (at the expense of European defence) and we will unravel everything that was the beginning of European leadership on the climate or the protection of internet users. Simultaneously, a second scenario is taking shape, without being antithetical to the previous one: the negotiation, separately, of favourable treatment for this or that state that still believes itself to be America’s best ally. Italy, Hungary and Slovakia are cultivating this illusion. The third scenario, that of resistance, is slow in coming. But it is in the process of emerging. The Poland of Donald Tusk today carries on its shoulders the hopes of all true Europeans. With Antonio Costa, the Polish prime minister has only four and a half months to lead the Union in resistance against what no one, not even Tocqueville when he analysed the seeds of dictatorship in democracy itself, had dared to imagine coming from America: a new form of fascistic imperialism. This European resistance is essential and urgent. Beyond the responses on customs duties against American products, the agitation over industry and defence budgets, and the competitiveness compasses proposed by the President of the Commission, what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of the Union and of democracy itself.