Trump’s wrecking ball menaces European leaders as they gather in Munich

A wrecking ball’s damage is surely harder to manage if it is swinging from inside the house.

As Europe’s security establishment meets in Germany this weekend, the Munich Security Conference’s organizers have already announced the (creative) destruction of global norms ushered in by US President Donald Trump as a “demolition man” era.

While this has been presented as an opportunity, in truth, it is unclear how constructive the conference will prove. The dust of the previous year’s Munich mauling by senior US officials has not settled, rather become obscured in a wider cloud, as weak foundations cause the pillars of Pax Americana – the peace in the West since World War 2 – to begin to crumble.

This time last year, US Vice President JD Vance’s broadside against Europe’s liberal democracies shocked his audience – assailing what he falsely called their impinging on free speech and backsliding on democracy.

Now this contrarian view is policy: enshrined in black and white, in both the White House’s and Pentagon’s national security and defense strategies. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leaving no room for shock this time – rather telling his hosts to brace – by visiting two Trump-doting prime ministers, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and the embattled Hungarian Viktor Orban, in the days before arriving in Germany. Do you get it now, America seems to ask?

Europe does. It would be tempting to forget the week-long rollercoaster that was Trump’s assault on Danish sovereignty, which forced fellow European NATO members to send troops to Greenland in a show of continental unity. But Europe’s lessons from the flash crisis are two-fold, and may bring comfort at the customarily tedious three-day Munich meeting.

First, Trump often says what feels exciting simply to see how far it will take him, rather than because of a shrewdly detailed policy. Midnight Truth Social posts can mark the peak of months of military planning to snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Or they can dissolve a vast crisis of Trump’s own making, taking NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s off-ramp to switch gears on Greenland from threatened aggression into negotiations. Those talks continue, Vance recently said, but their resonance is partially lost in the white noise of growing US pressure on Iran, and the global fallout from the release of more files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. There is simply too much crazy to catch up on for singular crises to sound out long enough, let