Trump thinks he wants a Europe without the EU — he shouldn’t

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.

“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true,” Aesop’s fable goes.

And any American cheering alongside the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, calling for the dismantling of the EU on the grounds that it’s a bureaucratic Moloch guilty of “civilizational erasure,” should take that lesson seriously.

Setting aside the blatant contradiction between the MAGA movement’s putative veneration of national sovereignty and the high-handed manner in which the administration is dispensing advice to Europeans on how to organize their continent or whom to vote for, the anti-EU animus on full display in Washington suffers from a deeper problem.

Namely, a Europe without the EU wouldn’t be a thriving continent of “sovereign” nation-states at all.

In reality, divorced from the European project, the continent would resemble something akin to the Western Balkans following the former Yugoslavia’s disintegration: A place where all old grievances suddenly spring back to life. And that would be especially true if the EU’s imagined dissolution were to take place at the hands of the NATO movement’s supposed allies — the so-called “patriotic” forces in European politics.

After all, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s long-term political project is all about restoring “Greater Hungary” as it existed prior to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and at the obvious expense of his country’s immediate neighbors like Romania, Ukraine or Serbia.

Then there’s the fact that bordering nationalist firebrands may have their own ideas in mind. Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić, for instance, venerates Slobodan Milošević, a dictator who launched murderous wars to keep Serbia dominant in the Balkans. Would he simply cede Subotica — or Szabadka in Hungarian — to his fellow strongman in Budapest?

And what about the views of those like Diana Șoșoacă, a rather colorful member of the European Parliament who wants to annex “historically Romanian” territories like Northern Bukovina from Ukraine?

The main reason why these, and many other, forms of historic revisionism are kept under a tight lid has to do with the achievements of the European project, and that includes things like free passportless travel and a high standard of rights for minorities. Take the EU away, and a whole host of previously unthinkable events become possible — from wars to “frozen” conflicts of the sort that Russia and Serbia maintain in places such Transnistria or Kosovo.

No doubt, in such an event, the bigger players would have their say too — like an already emboldened Russia that’s being egged on by the Trump administration in Ukraine and is rather keen to demonstrate the hollowness of NATO’s Article 5; or even a Germany under the possible leadership of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which Trump ally Elon Musk urged to move beyond the country’s historic guilt.

What could go wrong, really?

The suggestion that the EU represents a dead end in Europe’s civilization betrays a profound ignorance of the continent’s history.

Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe has always been balancing cultural and political unity and diversity, and its succession of unwieldy quasi-federal institutions are a part of that. Far from being an aberration, the EU continues in the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League or the Polish-Lithuanian Republic.

Of course, one may argue that what happens in Europe should be Europe’s problem, not America’s. But that’s, at most, an argument for disengagement, including a withdrawal of the U.S. security umbrella from Europe — not for the current efforts by Musk and Washington to put their finger on the scales of European politics.

Plus, the case for U.S. disengagement is weak and ahistorical. Both in 1917 and in 1941, Americans learned the hard way that while they might not be interested in a European war, a European war could very well be interested in them. In the former case, the threat to U.S. interests came from German naval attacks against U.S. vessels heading to and from Britain. In the latter, Germany declared outright war after its emboldened ally Japan struck Pearl Harbor.

America’s postwar policy toward Europe, which always included broad support for the project of regional economic integration, wasn’t a product of naiveté or the “stupidity” of previous U.S. leaders. It was guided by an effort to prevent another European war. And that policy was a stunning success, coinciding not only with an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity in Europe but also with America’s rise as the world’s uncontested global power — in part, thanks to the transatlantic relationship.

Culture wars are always thrilling, and set against the backdrop of a virulently anti-European national security strategy, the one being waged against the EU by the Trump administration is no exception. But while it’s all fun and games right now, if the EU were to crumble at the hands of Russia and Trump’s U.S., rest assured Americans would come to regret it very quickly.