The Blueprint to Kill the EU: Complacency About the Trump-Threat to Europe Would Be Fatal
Dániel Hegedűs
December 18, 2025
Europe is torn between shock, indignation, and a surprising complacency in its reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the various versions of the text that have surfaced.
There is a growing recognition that Europe is now largely on its own and can no longer rely on the United States. As German Chancellor Merz put it bluntly, “the decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe […] It no longer exists as we knew it. That’s the way it is.”
Yet beyond the recognition that “the Americans are now very aggressively pursuing their own interests,” there remains widespread complacency about the fact that the Trump administration has already acted on this shift by politically attacking and undermining the United States’ formal allies in Europe since the president’s inauguration in January—and about what this may mean for the continent in the near future.
The recently published National Security Strategy is therefore not a document meant for the shelf, outlining abstract, long-term priorities for U.S. foreign policy. Rather, it is a post festum acknowledgment of developments already under way—underlined by the U.S. interventions in the German parliamentary and the Polish and Romanian presidential elections earlier this year.
Not the threat feared most
European foreign and security policy is currently focused on the United States’ broader geopolitical shift, which increasingly appears to prioritize dividing spheres of influence and pursuing transactional business opportunities with Russia over contributing to European security and the rules-based international order.
This focus is partly understandable for two reasons. First, the immediate consequences of this shift for the war in Ukraine are profound. Second, the current situation remains blurred and transitional. The United States is still bound to its European partners by a formal legal alliance and is politically far less united behind the administration’s new priorities than the Trump team’s messaging might suggest.
In this context, it is in Europe’s overriding interest—particularly vis-à-vis Russia—to preserve at least the appearance of strategic ambiguity about whether the United States can still be counted on as a security provider. Publicly acknowledging that the Trump administration is rapidly moving toward the posture of a hostile adversary—as, in practice, it already is—may be premature. Such recognition risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and could encourage Russia to intensify its hybrid warfare against Europe.
Europe therefore needs time—to marshal at least a minimum level of strategic unity and to develop capabilities that scarcely exist today—and clarity, to guide planning and decision-making in parallel.
The blueprint to kill the EU
That clarity, however, may be seriously at risk.
Language contained in an unofficial draft of the U.S. National Security Strategy—calling on Washington to “work more with Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”—sent shockwaves through Europe, revealing a clear intention to weaken, and ultimately dismantle, the EU.
The complacent reactions of senior European policy figures, such as Wolfgang Ischinger in his Welt interview, illustrate how closed and uninnovative much of the European foreign-policy mindset has become. They reveal a failure to grasp the EU’s structural vulnerabilities and an inability to identify, or even imagine, the strategies of adversaries. Ischinger’s suggestion that a Brexit-style departure from the EU may not even serve Viktor Orbán’s Hungary exposes these intellectual limitations with particular clarity.
The good news is—and in this limited respect Ischinger is right—that no one currently intends to leave the EU’s internal market. That step lies further down the road.
What the Trump White House and its European allies—primarily radical-right parties grouped around Patriots for Europe and the Europe of Sovereign Nations—seek is not immediate withdrawal from the internal market, but “The Great Reset”, the dismantling of the EU as a political union and as an organizing framework for the economic, social, and political life of European nation-states, as well as for their joint action in international affairs and security.
For Europe’s radical right, this is the path to gaining control and entrenching power; a price they are willing to pay.
For the Trump administration, the demise of the EU would yield a divided and exploitable Europe—one half it could dominate, the other it could trade off to Russia. It would also eliminate a viable pluralist democratic alternative capable of inspiring resistance to its own domestic illiberal and autocratic ambitions.
The threat revealed by the NSS should not be understood as an effort to lure like-minded radical-right governments into formally leaving the Union. Instead, Washington is likely to provide political—and potentially financial and economic—support through various “deals” to governments that challenge EU law, defy joint decisions, and refrain from implementing them. Opportunities for such interventions will be plentiful.
One example suffices. Hungary and Slovakia oppose the phase-out of Russian energy imports. Following a peace settlement that restores U.S.–Russian cooperation in the energy sector, Budapest and Bratislava could receive encouragement from Washington to defy what they portray as “the verdict of Brussels,” undermining EU efforts to cut energy ties with Russia and emboldening other actors, such as Germany’s AfD, to follow suit.
Each such episode would expose an existential truth: the European Union was designed as a framework for member states committed to sincere cooperation and possesses very limited means to enforce joint action in the face of determined political opposition by its own members. Over time, the binding nature of EU law and the meaningfulness of joint decisions would be questioned with increasing frequency, deepening perceptions of institutional and political crisis.
This dynamic would inevitably undermine the internal market, which depends on the primacy of EU law and on independent, effective courts and institutions. Yet this prospect does not trouble Europe’s radical-right parties. The more dysfunctional the EU becomes, the lower the perceived economic costs of exit—creating a mutually reinforcing and accelerating process.
Compressed Timeline
The sobering reality is that, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of European elites, this represents the more immediate threat—not Russia’s conventional military power. According to military planners, Russia may be able to challenge EU and NATO member states with conventional forces around 2030. By contrast, U.S. intervention in support of radical-right parties and governments could set centrifugal dynamics within the EU in motion as early as 2026–27.
The pivotal moment may come with the 2027 French presidential election. Rassemblement National and the French radical right are not pro-Trump or pro-American, but they may converge with Washington on a shared pragmatic objective: dismantling the EU as a political project. A France that “falls,” combined with a growing number of Trump-aligned radical-right governments across the continent, could create a critical mass of opponents around the table—rendering the current model of European integration unsustainable.
This is likely the pathway envisioned by the authors of the NSS when they wrote about “pulling” member states out of the EU. It is the strategy EU institutions and pro-European governments must counter. Strategic clarity about the intentions of adversaries is essential for planning. Yet analysis and planning, however indispensable, will not suffice on their own.
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Author:
Dániel Hegedűs is regional director for Central Europe at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The AUTHLIB consortium does not take collective positions. Publications only represent the views of their individual authors.
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