Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: ‘Pathetic’

 

Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: ‘Pathetic’

 

Trump officials have demanded more European military spending and questioned the continent’s values. Leaked messages show the depth of the rift.

 

Jeanna SmialekSteven Erlanger

By Jeanna Smialek and Steven Erlanger

Jeanna Smialek reported from Brussels, and Steven Erlanger from Berlin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/world/europe/signal-jeffrey-goldberg-message-hegseth.html

March 25, 2025

Updated 11:16 a.m. ET

 

Trump administration officials haven’t kept their disdain for Europe quiet. But the contempt seems to be even louder behind closed doors.

 

Europeans reacted with a mix of exasperation and anger to the publication of parts of a discussion between top-ranking Trump administration officials, carried out on the messaging app Signal. The discussion, about a planned strike on Yemen, was replete with comments that painted Europeans as geopolitical parasites, and was revealed on Monday in The Atlantic, whose editor was inadvertently included in the conversation.

 

“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again,” wrote Vice President JD Vance, asserting that the strikes would benefit Europe far more than the United States.

 

“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, later replied. “It’s PATHETIC.”

 

The exchange seemed to show real feelings and judgments — that the Europeans are mooching and that any American military action, no matter how clearly in American interests as well, should be somehow paid for by other beneficiaries.

 

A member of the chat identified as “SM,” and believed to be Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, suggested that both Egypt and “Europe” should compensate the United States for the operation. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM wrote.

 

The apparent disregard by administration officials of security protocols by having such a discussion — which included operational details — on a consumer chat app, even an encrypted one, prompted concern that Russia and China could be listening in.

 

“Putin is now unemployed: No point in spying anymore,” Nathalie Loiseau, a member of the European Parliament, wrote on X, saying the leaks now came from the Americans themselves. “No point in crushing Ukraine anymore, Trump will take care of it.”

 

The commentary in the exchange is the latest blow to one of the world’s most storied alliances, which took generations to build and strengthen but which the Trump administration has managed to weaken in mere weeks.

 

“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”

 

The European Union is, in many ways, the antithesis of the principles that Mr. Trump and his colleagues are championing. The bloc is built around an embrace of international trade based on rules. It has been at the forefront of climate-related regulation and social media user protections.

 

Europe has been on alert ever since Mr. Vance delivered a speech at a security conference in Munich last month that questioned European values and its democracy and shocked European leaders. He followed that up by warning that Europe was at risk of “civilizational suicide.”

 

If the relationship between the United States and Europe were merely transactional, it would be relatively easy for Europeans to just spend more on the military and give Mr. Trump some sort of victory, said François Heisbourg, a French analyst and former defense official.

 

But in Mr. Vance’s speech attacking European democracy in Munich, let alone in the newly public exchange, the distaste for Europe is about more than transactions.

 

“Vance was quite clear: We don’t share the same values,” Mr. Heisbourg said.

 

He and others, like Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the U.S. depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts.”

 

China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Strait of Hormuz and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Ms. Tocci noted.

 

For months, Washington has been sending barbed statements and actions Europe’s way.

 

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, even as European leaders warn that they will defend territorial integrity. Usha Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, are visiting the island this week, uninvited, its government says, and to an agitated response.

 

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly warned that Europe must pay much more for its own defense, threatening not to come to the aid of nations that do not pay up sufficiently, and has pivoted sharply away from Ukraine. He has simultaneously rolled out plans to slap hefty tariffs on Europe and argued that the European Union was created to “screw” America.

 

Christel Schaldemose, a Danish politician who is a center-left member of the European Parliament, said the way the U.S. has been talking about the E.U. in general lately is “not helping.”

 

“Could we start talking to each other as allies and not enemies?” she said.

 

Even as European leaders try to maintain the friendship, they are racing to try to bolster their defense expenditures, cognizant that it would be nearly impossible to replace American military capabilities overnight.

 

They are meeting on Thursday in Paris to discuss Ukraine, and NATO foreign ministers meet early next month to discuss progress.

 

They are also scrambling to strike a trade deal with the United States, with the E.U. trade commissioner headed to Washington on Tuesday to talk with his American counterparts.

 

But with America’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Europe, the continent’s officials are contemplating a future where the prized relationship stretching across the Atlantic, a foundation upon which decades of relative peace and prosperity have been built, might never be the same.

 

“The international order is undergoing changes of a magnitude not seen since 1945,” Kaja Kallas, the top E.U. diplomat, said last week, echoing a line from the bloc’s defense preparedness plan, which is meant to help Europe to become more militarily independent.

 

Splintering from the United States is an expensive prospect. The E.U. has already unveiled an initiative that could be worth 800 billion euros, about $865 billion, to help European nations achieve desired military spending levels.

 

Still, the group chat leak underscores why a divorce may be necessary: The United States is not the reliable ally it once was, either rhetorically or practically.

 

It is highly unusual and possibly illegal for sensitive military plans to be discussed on a messaging app, rather than by a more secure means of communication.

 

That disregard for normal security procedures will “cause allies to be very reluctant to share analysis and intelligence,” said Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. forces in Europe. Barring major change, people “will assume America can’t be trusted.”

 

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times. More about Jeanna Smialek

 

Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union. More about Steven Erlanger