The process of European unification is in profound crisis. The integration process began on the old continent in the 1950s, a project designed to counteract the nationalisms of the 19th century and the ideologies of the 20th. But in the early decades of the 21st century, Europe seems to have lost faith in its own narrative of progress. Thanks to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and the growing threat to Eastern Europe, in recent years defense has become the main argument for deepening the European Union. This month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen began her State of the European Union address with the words “Europe is in a fight.”
Europe is in a fight, and the logic of integration—which long seemed headed toward Immanuel Kant’s idea of Perpetual Peace—has done a sharp turnabout. First the European Community, and later the European Union, aimed to achieve “ever closer union.” For decades, the European project represented the world's most advanced attempt to escape Hobbes' state of nature and live in peaceful coexistence in the wake of two world wars.
But these days no one really believes that Europe’s lessons from history have universal validity. At least, this is what decision-makers’ statements have suggested in recent years: In 2018, Sigmar Gabriel, then German foreign minister and previously a long-serving leader of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), warned Europeans that “in a world full of carnivores, vegetarians have a very tough time of it.” In 2022, Josep Borrell, then EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and a former Spanish foreign minister, envisioned a “European garden” surrounded by jungle. General Thierry Burkhard, the recently retired French chief of staff, also made use of the metaphor, warning that Europeans risk becoming “hunted animals” if they cannot at long last find a way to rebuild their military capacity.
For those looking on from outside Europe, the EU is no longer the vanguard of a more peaceful world. Instead, the EU has recently come to look like the ragged rearguard of the Western order in retreat. This is in keeping with another change: These days, the European outlook on the future is less about self-confidence and more about appeals to stay the course. Calls to defend the status quo are in keeping with another fact of European life: the arms industry is now the continent's most important growth sector. This is undoubtedly necessary. But it’s not exactly going to fire up younger generations with hope or optimism, let alone joy.
Transatlantic Renaissance
Pessimism about Europe’s future, it is rightly said, plays into the hands of political forces which feed on fears of decline and anxieties about the future. For this reason, anyone critically assessing the EU's current situation will quickly face accusations that they are talking things down and accelerating institutional decline. But no one seriously contests that today’s EU is in poor shape. Criticism of candid assessments becomes problematic when it obscures crucial insights, not least when it prevents us from seeing that only the far right is offering a clearly defined vision of the future. This vision is presented by both the American and European far right, and increasingly by an alliance of the two.
Since the start of 2025, far from the trans-Atlantic establishment, rhetoric promising a renaissance has been growing louder. In both Europe and the United States, New Right intellectuals and politicians of every conceivable intellectual stripe are calling for a return to shared roots, invoking Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian ethics, English parliamentarism, and Enlightenment ideals. In May, an essay by Samuel Samson, an advisor to the US State Department, attracted attention with its claim that “civilizational allies” were needed in Europe. The United States, Samson wrote, remained grateful to Europeans for a shared intellectual and cultural heritage. But Europe was in the process of forgetting this heritage, he warned, citing the impassioned speech given by US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February.
One might dismiss such warnings as the ideological fantasies of the MAGA movement. In February, Vance claimed censorship and threats to free expression were the greatest dangers facing European societies, rather than the growing threat of Russian and Chinese influence. To Eastern Europeans, this must have sounded like mockery.
During Trump’s first administration, discussion in Germany was dominated by those who saw Trump as an accidental phenomenon, an odd outgrowth of US democracy. He was, it was thought, an exception to the transatlantic status quo. The next election would make everything right; the transatlantic relationship would be steered back to its traditional course. Trump’s re-election in November 2024 prompted great dismay, but now we risk repeating the same blindness. Once again, experienced European observers are underestimating the appeal of an alternative transatlantic relationship, one which is gaining influence.
Observations from both France and Germany confirm the dynamism of this alternative relationship.
A French “Project 2027”
France could be a key domino in Europe in the coming years. If France falls—if the Rassemblement National (RN) party wins the 2027 presidential election—pressure on the EU is likely to intensify significantly. Right-wing populist parties already hold positions of power in major EU states, including Italy, Hungary, and Poland. A far-right president of France, whether that is Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, would be different by an order of magnitude, and could mark a tipping point for Europe.
A French president has significantly more power than a Polish president or an Italian or Hungarian prime minister. An RN election victory would inevitably lead to conflict with the European Commission and the European Court of Human Rights. The RN has said that if it wins the 2027 election it will hold referendums to impose strict limits on immigration and introduce “national preference” for citizens. Both goals will very likely present challenges to existing European law.
For this reason, France seems to be a priority for those in the Trump administration who want to bring about change in Europe. At the end of May, a delegation from the Heritage Foundation visited Paris. Arguably the most influential think tank in the world, the Heritage Foundation presented “Project 2025” in April 2023, a comprehensive program for Trump's second term. Its president, Kevin Roberts, held meetings in France with representatives of the RN, with Reconquête (R!), another far-right party, and with the former center-right Republican Éric Ciotti, along with others associated with these parties. On May 26, for example, Roberts attended an event in Paris entitled “The Future of Conservatism in France and the West.” The following day, Samson’s essay calling for “civilizational allies” in Europe was published in the United States.
French media reports suggested the meetings were organized by conservative circles in Paris which have long promoted transatlantic far-right networking. A key role here was played by Alexandre Pesey, director of the Institut de formation politique (IFP), an organization dedicated to training and developing young conservative talent. He and Kate Pesey, his American wife—who organizes “Tocqueville scholarships” to send young French conservatives on visits to the United States—now have the backing of major donors. One such figure is Pierre-Édouard Stérin, a French billionaire who has been promoting networking between center-right and far-right parties ahead of the 2027 presidential election. One associate of Stérin, who also advises the RN, expressed inspiration after meeting with Roberts: The visiting Americans “are good salespeople,” he said, describing Roberts himself as a “metapolitics professional.” In an interview, the Franco-American Nicolas Conquer, the French spokesman for Republicans Overseas, expressed his hope for a French “Project 2027.”
Exchange of Ideas
That Roberts and the Heritage Foundation are now considered role models in Europe is interesting for two reasons. First, because US think tanks and parts of the MAGA movement have long been influenced by European politicians and ideas. In an interview in Paris, Roberts spoke of how he had been inspired by Hungary, noting that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had “revived national identity in Hungary,” including in opposition to the EU.
One example may serve to illustrate the concrete impact this has had on policy ideas in Washington. In September 2024, Melissa Ford Maldonado of the conservative America First Policy Institute (AFPI) published a comparative study of border security in Hungary and the US state of Texas. Ford Maldonado worked for the first Trump administration after 2016 and in 2024 was a visiting scholar at the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank. In both Hungary and Texas, she wrote, governments face resistance from a higher level of administrative authority: the EU and the US federal government respectively. This means Texas and Hungary can learn lessons from each other.
But the influence of European ideas and policies in the United States goes well beyond particular cases and methods. In recent months, many European scholars have expressed astonishment at the strong influence of 18th-century reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre and medieval Catholic scholasticism on elements of the American new right. This is particularly so with the post-liberal wing of the MAGA movement, which centers on Patrick Deneen and Vance (who has repeatedly quoted Thomas Aquinas). Other segments of MAGA may have little in common with such thinkers, specifically the circles around Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and the Silicon Valley transhumanists. But the new US right—which so shocked the transatlantic establishment at Munich and is becoming increasingly active throughout Europe—makes explicit links to the history of European ideas.
This may help alter another variable which will help balance the equation of US-European far-right networks. It is striking how the younger generation of far-right activists in France are much more open to conversations with and influence from US foundations and political tendencies. For decades, Gaullism and even the French hard right viewed the United States as an adversary. During the Cold War, it was as important to keep one’s distance from Washington as from Moscow. The 1970s New Right in French, which also attempted to create European networks, thrived on hostility to the “Atlantic,” “liberal,” or “transatlantic” world order and disliked the cultural influence exerted by the United States on its Western allies. Today, this seems to be changing. A momentous generational shift is under way on both sides of the Atlantic.
The AfD Finds US Patrons
While French interlocutors of the new US right may be on the verge of election victory, different issues are at stake in Germany, specifically in its relations with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In recent years, keeping the United States at a distance has been deep in the AfD’s foreign policy DNA, informing its sovereigntist agenda. But Trump’s return to the White House has opened up new possibilities, and old equilibria in the party are shifting.
Early in 2025, during the German election campaign, Elon Musk boosted the AfD with an opinion piece and by hosting an hour-long conversation on his platform X with Alice Weidel, the party’s candidate for chancellor. Vance’s Munich speech was also regarded as providing support for the AfD as the election campaign heated up. Vance met with AfD leaders and yet couldn’t find the time to meet with Olaf Scholz, then German chancellor. Vance also warned his assembled NATO partners that “a new sheriff” was calling the shots in the United States.
This new tone is increasingly also being heard in Europe. The recently-appointed US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, a close Trump associate, has already clashed with the French government on several occasions, particularly over President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize the Palestinian state. The Trump administration has yet to appoint a diplomatic representative to Berlin, but conflicts are likewise looming in the German capital. One member of the Bundestag reported on a US embassy reception for members of the parliamentary committees on foreign affairs and defense, noting that about half of the attendees were from the AfD. The party is seeking to establish closer relations with the US government, and not only in Berlin.
In mid-September, the AfD parliamentarian Beatrix von Storch paid a visit to Washington. Von Storch’s network of US contacts has reportedly long been envied by her party colleagues. Among AfD state parties in eastern Germany, these connections had previously earned her a reputation of subservience to the US. This time von Storch was accompanied by Joachim Paul, a member of the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament. Allegations of extremism led to Paul’s exclusion from the mayoral election in the city of Ludwigshafen and he subsequently lost a legal challenge to the ban.
Now Paul has traveled to Washington to present his case to the US government. The AfD suggests that the case is an example of how it is oppressed by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The party is clearly attempting to exert some foreign policy pressure: 18,500 US soldiers—half of all US soldiers in Germany—are stationed in Rhineland-Palatinate. The state also hosts 12,000 civilian employees of US forces, as well as 25,000 family members. As Berlin waits for the publication of the new US Global Force Posture Review, including a possible decision to reduce the American presence in Germany, the AfD could exert influence in a sensitive area.
The EU Is a Sitting Duck
Over the coming years, the success of the MAGA movement in influencing European politics will depend on a number of factors.
First, in the short term, Washington’s interest in supporting European far-right parties will likely significantly depend on who emerges as Trump’s heir. Even if American pop culture and soft power continue to exert significant influence on the public in different European countries, a “Make Europe Great Again” movementand civilizational transatlanticism would need time to have an effect, more time than the three years between now and the next US presidential election. But if Vance emerges victorious in November 2028, European capitals must prepare for the extension of an agenda that undermines—and in some cases actively opposes—the transatlantic aims and values of years gone by.
Second, much is likely to depend on the French presidential election, just as it did a decade ago. In May 2017, the presidency was won by Emmanuel Macron, a young politician who ran what was by French standards an exceptionally pro-European campaign, bucking the trend of Brexit and Trump’s first election victory. By 2027, however, the portents may well be quite different. Given France’s dramatic budgetary situation and the simmering conflicts between Paris and Brussels—for example, on free trade and on asylum and migration policy—it would be surprising if opponents of the RN ran another actively pro-EU campaign. In any case, the EU is now a long way from Macron's vision of an autonomous union.
Finally, in the long term, a crucial factor will be whether European integration can somehow recreate a positive image, both in how it sees itself and in what others think of it. In recent years, the EU has become a sitting duck, partly because its opponents—whether in Washington, Moscow, or Beijing—have been able to exploit its many disagreements and internal squabbles. The EU is no longer expanding and seems increasingly unreformable, with citizens losing confidence in its ability to give Europeans a strong voice in a globalized world.
Here lies the real key to Europe’s future. The European Union and its members must resolve its endless crisis or face the collapse of the EU as it currently exists. Without a solution to the crisis, even electoral defeat for Bardella in 2027 or Vance in 2028 will only delay European disintegration.—translated from the German by Brían Hanrahan
Jacob Ross is a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), focusing on France and Franco-German relations.
