La cinquième colonne de Trump

La diplomatie est censée être l’art de gérer les relations internationales par la négociation. Sous la présidence de Donald Trump, les plus hauts diplomates américains en Europe semblent toutefois pratiquer une forme d’action qui relève davantage de la confrontation.

The US ambassador to France recycles street violence into political polarisation, denouncing what he calls a rising threat of violent radical leftism in France. The ambassador to Belgium brands a police investigation into illegal Jewish circumcisions as antisemitic persecution. The envoy in Poland escalates political criticism of Donald Trump into a matter of state. The nominee for Iceland openly advocates Iceland becoming a US state. The new US ambassador to the European Union openly warns Europe not to lose its identity. And America’s diplomat in chief, Secretary of State Rubio, recently campaigned in Hungary for Prime Minister Orbán’s re-election.

This is the new normal in Trump’s America, carried from Washington into the very fabric of the US diplomatic corps. Senior envoys are increasingly less career diplomats than personal loyalists who revere the president and his dogmas. They are, to put it equally undiplomatically, akin to diplomatic clones — embodying and imitating Donald Trump in substance and in style on foreign soil. Including the kitsch personality cult around Trump as the great and visionary leader. Including the “art of the deal” business lens applied to diplomacy — the US ambassador in Belgium publicly declaring that his mandate is to secure $50 billion in Belgian investment for America.

Not only the tone and tenor are radically undiplomatic. The very boundaries of what diplomacy can and should be are being redrawn. Under Donald Trump, senior American diplomats intervene unashamedly in the internal affairs of their host states. Not only domestic politics, but even independent police and judicial investigations are treated as fair game for diplomatic and media broadsides – Trump-style capital-laden social media posts included. Anything that qualifies as red meat for the MAGA doctrine apparently becomes a legitimate target. It serves the provocation and agitation that is signature Trump and that his domestic base appears to love. But it also fits into a broader strategy: the deliberate export of America’s culture war — to Europe as much as to Latin America as to South-Africa.

The latest US National Security Strategy, formalised at the end of last year, explicitly seeks to cultivate resistance in Europe against what Washington portrays as harmful European trends in civilisation, identity and immigration. In that light, American ambassadors have become a forward brigade for the internationalisation of the MAGA revolution — a de facto “fifth column” residing and operating within Europe as opponents and subverters of what they consider a dangerously misguided continent. Their actions deliberately move beyond interference into influencing and manipulating public opinion for the sake of ideological alignment, even – and perhaps especially so – in electoral contexts such as upcoming local elections in France or national elections in Hungary. In Germany, Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America already converge in their support for the radical and Eurosceptic party Alternative für Deutschland. That, in itself, pretty much says everything.

Europe will not be answering US claims on Greenland with territorial counterclaims against the US, just as it will not stoop to interfering in American politics on American soil. But we must, calmly but forcefully, continue to enforce the boundaries of acceptable diplomacy in defence of our own rule of law and democracy – indeed, in defence of our own identity. American ambassadors who overstep these boundaries deserve the immediate and firm response national authorities in France, Belgium and Poland have so far been keen to give — and rightly so. Yet words of protest are not enough. Action is also required.

Action at home, to inoculate our public opinion against external influence and to raise awareness among citizens, especially in electoral periods. And action vis-à-vis Washington itself, through a united European front, as part of a necessary reset in transatlantic relations. That relationship, we now understand, must be transformed from a unilateral culture war into a bilateral civilisational dialogue. Absent a renewed form of engagement, we risk the United States sliding toward a milder variant of Russia’s interference and disinformation machine.