Trump isn't an isolationist. He's something much worse

He wants to transform Europe, not leave it

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In case you haven’t already heard, last week U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he exploded a lot of people’s preconceptions about what Trump’s foreign policy towards Europe was going to be.

During the speech, Vance barely even mentioned the topic of the conference - security, which for most Europeans means what to do about Russia. Instead, Vance critiqued Europe’s domestic politics and values. He accused countries on the continent of suppressing freedom of speech and religion, refusing to listen to their own electorates, and undermining their values by admitting too many immigrants. He also referenced the apparent attack which had happened in Munich that very day, in which an Afghan immigrant rammed a car into a crowd:

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?

Let’s ignore for a second the lie that this is a “story we’ve heard… too many times in the United States as well”. That’s not actually true, because no refugee has ever killed anyone in a terrorist attack in the United States, ever.

Let’s focus instead on the mention of “our shared civilization”, and the fact that Vance is showing a lot of apparent interest in its “direction”. This is actually quite different to the way that people in Europe usually talk about Trump’s foreign policy.

He and his administration are usually portrayed as “isolationist”, meaning that they want to withdraw from Europe and stop funding its defense. But what Vance is saying instead is that he sees the United States and Europe as a region united by a common civilization, and that the United States wants to make sure that Europe stays on the righteous path. One of my friends called it “the emperor lecturing the barbarians”.

This is, in many ways, more alarming than isolationism. A Europe which could no longer rely on the United States to defend itself might eventually be able to get its act together to counter Russia. In this scenario, the United States would be gone, but it wouldn’t actively be trying to undermine the European order.

This was basically the position of pre-WW2 isolationists in the United States - some of them had ideological sympathy with the fascists, but most of all they just wanted to leave Europe to its own devices.

But this MAGA crowd are different. They don’t plan just to go home, but instead to be actively involved in shaping the future of Europe. They want to undermine liberal governments and encourage the nationalists and racists who are their own ideological bedfellows. They’re crusaders against everything that most Europeans hold dear - and they’re showing themselves to be perfectly willing to use coercive tools like tariffs, military intervention and interference in domestic politics to get what they want. It’s not clear that Europeans can deal with this sort of aggression, when what they seem to have been expecting at worst was a sort of benign neglect.

But European leaders shouldn’t be surprised. The idea that Europe and United States share the same “civilization” and that it’s the job of Washington to make sure that Europeans uphold this civilization’s values dates back to the first Trump administration. (In fact, it’s quite literally my academic pet theory - I wrote a paper about it, which you can read here if you’re into that type of thing.)