(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Washington declara a Europa en quiebra civilizacional y en Bruselas se esfuerzan por darle la razón)

The political leadership and the colossal institutional bureaucracy of the European Union hate and fear Donald Trump as much as they do the European national, conservative and sovereigntist forces. They know in Brussels that there is a direct relationship between this president’s second arrival at the White House and the conservative revolution spreading across the United States, Europe and now also Ibero-America, which makes the forces that are at least partly in political tune with the North American president grow without pause.

Now in Brussels, Berlin and Paris they have more reason to hate Trump. On the one hand, they have the 33-page United States Strategic Policy document, which warns that the economic decline and the political and social degradation in Europe are no longer problems of circumstance but a crisis of civilisation that makes the countries of the European Union, dragged along by a destructive ideology, weak societies incapable of being reliable and valid allies for the United States.

That is how serious they see the situation in Washington, and that is how serious many of us in Europe see it. And the media and the political caste of Brussels may eclipse and silence those of us Europeans who think this way, but not the administration of the United States. That does an enormous favour to the truth, which enters through new cracks in the perfectly mendacious and failed discourse of the European Commission and of governments as failed and weak as the German and the French.

One of the causes identified in the report as the origin both of the political degradation and of the economic decline is the fear of freedom and the ever greater censorship and persecution of dissent. Well, the European Union rushed to prove the White House report right before it had even been published by announcing a fine against Elon Musk’s platform, X. They cite misleading advertising, but everyone knows that the European Commission and its attack dogs against the national and anti-socialist forces cannot bear the degrees of freedom of expression that Elon Musk reintroduced at X when he bought the platform. And Musk himself has confirmed that the EU offered him a way to avoid fines if he went back to applying censorship to certain opinions, which are always the same ones, the conservative and national ones.

We members of the European Parliament are witnesses to a European Commission policy marked by the same panic felt by the social-democratic majorities of the People’s Party and the socialists in Germany, in Austria or in France, who block national governments that are already the leading force. The president of the European Commission feels no ridicule at all when she states that they are going to make a great deal of money available to independent media. Nor do they feel any shame when they are confronted with facts that are hard to call legal, such as the subsidising with thousands of millions in past years of NGOs, all of them leftist and with woke ideology, always devoted to the war against the conservative forces. Now with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which they have used to fine X, and with the “Democracy Shield”, which is the programme against supposed disinformation and attacks by external enemies but which is in reality first and foremost the joint command of extraordinary measures to combat the national, conservative and sovereigntist forces that grow ever stronger in the member states.

The direct relationship between Trump’s election and the spectacular growth of these forces of the real right does exist. But it is not that this spectacular conservative expansion across countries in the Americas and Europe was caused by a president who personally is not a conservative. The change of era has been maturing for years because the failure of social-democratic policies and their ideological hobbyhorses of climate, gender, immigration, multiculturalism, degrowth and impoverishment is a catastrophe that endangers the whole of Western civilisation in Europe.

The direct relationship that most unites these forces with Washington is the certainty that the arrival of the new Trump administration has prevented the social-democratic majority of the People’s Party, socialists and greens in Europe, which has imposed its policy for decades, from having a free hand to crush, by methods that are in no way orthodox, in no way democratic and very often in no way legal, the national forces that keep on growing.

They do not have a free hand because the European national forces are ever larger, but most especially because Washington denounces them and holds up a mirror to the European democracies that makes all their contradictions explode. One of the first, and much talked about, came in Munich at the beginning of the year from the mouth of Vice President JD Vance. This strategic paper is no less significant.

The whole political caste and the European elites bet on an electoral tandem as grotesque, mediocre and leftist as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on the Democratic ticket in 2024, because with them globalist social engineering would already have been launched in unrestrained and perhaps irreversible fashion. It is no exaggeration to state that a victory by Harris and Walz would have brought with it in Europe a wave of bans on national parties. And that with a leftist administration in Washington they would not have exerted themselves much in looking for pretexts to impose that ancient and well-worn practice of prohibiting forces that in freedom could wrest power from them from speaking, acting and standing for election.

The North American administration says in its paper on Strategic Policy that Europe faces serious problems caused by the policy of the European Union and other transnational organisations which undermine the political freedoms and the sovereignty of nations and encourage an immigration that is transforming the continent and creating conflicts, the imposition of censorship, repression of freedom of expression in general and suppression of political opposition, in addition to the collapse of the birth rate, with a loss of national identity and self-esteem.

It is a pity that in the European Union there is not enough honesty to publish similar documents, and that when strategic papers are commissioned it is always done in the knowledge that they will be written by some member of the Europeanist caste who endorses the failed EU policy of past decades or at least does not openly fight it. Without allowing within the institutions any opinions other than the inbred ones of the two-party social-democratic caste, failure is assured. And Trump’s enemies once again prove him right.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.