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Donald Trump was 18 when a foreigner put his adored Monroe Doctrine to the test. In 1964, Charles de Gaulle toured Latin America, where he agitated against US influence over the region and offered France as an alternative partner. The mission was no more credible at the time than it now reads on paper. A broken empire that had just failed to hang on to nearby Algeria was never going to eclipse the “yanquis” in their own hemisphere. Still, lovely crowds for the old man.
It would profit Donald Trump and his movement to reflect on a trip that Time Magazine called “De Gaulliver’s Travels”. Doing so might clarify something about Europe that tends to get lost as the Maga crowd flirts with the continent’s hard right.
Europe’s nationalists are often anti- or at least counter-American. In their view, the US is a force for rootless commerce rather than for blood and soil. Wittingly or not, it homogenises things across the world — food, cultural norms — that should be peculiar to nations. For some, the source of the problem is sectarian. The US is not Catholic or Orthodox.
This wariness of the US only intensifies as we cross from Gaullism, which was and is well within the political mainstream, to the harder right. Today’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) has a pro-Russia bent in what has been a deeply Atlanticist country since the war. Viktor Orbán of Hungary, also “eastern” in his orientation, might be China’s best friend in Europe. Still the anti-China world of Maga extols him like no one bar Trump himself. It is the single oddest thing about an odd movement.
The US might come to rue this embrace of its enemies. Americans who cheer on Europe’s nationalist parties cannot be dissuaded with ethical arguments or appeals to conscience. So, let me sidle up to them like a huckster and whisper the cynical case into their ear instead: What’s in it for you? If the US interest is always and everywhere paramount, how is it served by installing governments in Paris and Berlin that are likely to oppose American influence over time? How do you reconcile America First with sponsorship of other nationalisms?
For the second consecutive year, a Trump delegate to the Munich Security Conference has given succour to Europe’s far right. Marco Rubio did it with more tact (and to the extent that we can ever know these things, reluctance) than JD Vance did last year. Even so, his allusions to “civilisation” and “Christian faith” amount to coded praise for Orban, who was Rubio’s first stop after Munich. It is natural that European liberals detest these interventions. It is bizarre that American nationalists don’t. Which is likelier to obey Washington’s will over a given period: a garden-variety German federal government or an AfD-inflected one?
Even if these parties did not nurse an existing mistrust of the US, they would have to feign one to win and retain power. None of them wants to gain the reputation of subservience to Trump that was so fatal to the Canadian and Australian right in 2025. How telling that Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally in France, has deplored America’s “imperial” menaces towards Greenland.
In the end, though, this electoral incentive won’t be needed. There is enough underlying prejudice against the US in these political movements. It traces back to the anglophobia of previous centuries: the continental conservative view that Britain was too commercial and scientific a nation to represent real Kultur.
It is hard to know how the US has got itself into such a self-defeating caress with people who dislike it. One possible answer is pig ignorance. Maga, like its leader, is not stupid but seldom lingers over details. It might just not know the rich pedigree of anti-Americanism among continental rightwingers: their perception of the US as not so much a nation as a well-integrated market with a flag on it. European politics can be confounding to an American eye as the hard right overlaps with the hard left in a way that is much less true of the US. Both extremes tend to mistrust the free market, for example. If Vance wants Europe to be a “vibrant economy again”, he is daft to put hope in parties as hostile to competitive reforms as the National Rally and Nigel Farage’s ill-named Reform UK have been.
The other possibility, of course, is that Maga just doesn’t care. Easing hard right parties into office in ancient European capitals would cause pandemonium, and that is an end in itself. Pointing out the awkward implications for American grand strategy is for dorks.
A decade on from its electoral breakthrough, my abiding impression of populism is that commentators take it more seriously than populists themselves do. Calling them “fascist” does not just cheapen what happened in the 1930s and 1940s but grants an unearned seriousness to people who regard politics as just a smashing indoor sport. If they are moved by an -ism, it is nihilism. The love of Orban, whose mistrust of America has not escaped the CIA’s vigilant eye, could not exist in the mind of a sincere America Firster.
In the end, even De Gaulle only bucked the US so much. He was a realist who knew how to set limits on even his most vainglorious schemes. The jingoes of today’s Europe might not show the same restraint. America’s willingness to find out is bizarre. As ever, the best criticism of the Trump government is that it is not even good at selfishness.
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