https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/27/no-mr-trump-the-eu-was-created-to-screw-russia/
Trump: “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it”
No Mr Trump, the EU was created to ‘screw’ Russia
US threat of 25pc tariffs on Europe is the bitter fruit of 30 years of grievances
27 February 2025 7:31pm GMT
Donald Trump is right that the EU has engaged in semi-disguised mercantilism for decades, free-riding on the American consumer rather than generating its own demand.
He is right that Europe has exported its manufacturing unemployment to the US by means of invisible tax, fiscal and currency policies, hollowing out the rust belt industries of the Ohio Valley.
He is right too to choke on Europe’s regulatory imperialism, or what EU enthusiasts rapturously call the “Brussels Effect”.
Did the European Commission think it could ram the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) down everyone’s throats without inviting a backlash? If you wish to be top dog, you had better be sure that you are not dependent on a foreign superpower for your energy, defence and political survival.
Trump is nevertheless wrong about the origins of the EU. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it,” he told his cabinet.
Actually, the EU was an American project created to “screw” Russia. Declassified documents show that Washington pushed European integration from the late 1940s onwards, funding it covertly from Truman through to Nixon until the proto-EU was strong enough to stand on its own feet.
Euro-Godfather Jean Monnet lived in America and served as the eyes and ears of Franklin Roosevelt back in Europe during the early 1940s. Charles de Gaulle considered him a US agent.
President Truman threatened to cut off Marshall Aid in September 1950 unless the French agreed to kiss and make up with post-war Germany.
The Schuman Declaration, the founding text of the coal and steel community, was largely cooked up by US secretary of state Dean Acheson in Foggy Bottom. “It all began in Washington,” said Robert Schuman’s chief of staff.
The purpose was obvious. The US needed a rearmed and cohesive Western Europe as a bulwark against Sino-Soviet expansion.
Stalin had violated Yalta by gobbling up Czechoslovakia in 1948. Two years later North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the South, triggering a war that pushed US military spending to 11pc of GDP – orders of magnitude greater than the modest sums spent on US forward defence in Ukraine.
As this newspaper first reported in 2000, state department files reveal that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades.
It was an arms-length operation run by veterans of wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
One document shows how it paid most of the European Movement’s budget in 1958, treating some of the EU’s early “founding fathers” as hired hands. It engaged in skulduggery.
A memo dated June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community to pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable”.
That was too clever by half, which takes us to the euro. Washington’s strategy blew up in its face in the 1990s. Once the Soviet bloc collapsed, West Europeans felt safer and quickly became cantankerous, much as Britain’s American colonies became rebellious after the French lost Canada in the Seven Years’ War.
There was a strong whiff of anti-Americanism in the EU of the 1990s as it strove to create the machinery of a full-spectrum superpower, culminating in the triumphalism of the Lisbon Agenda of March 2000.
It was to overtake the US to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” within a decade. When that deadline hit, the EU was instead grappling with the onset of its terrible “lost decade”.
The euro never became a reserve currency on steroids but it did have large global consequences.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade guru, says the warped mechanisms of monetary union enabled Germany to keep the implicit Deutsche Mark “grossly undervalued”, allowing German exporters to lock in a trade advantage over US and Club Med competitors for much of the last two decades.
Berlin and Brussels responded to the eurozone debt crisis – in reality an intra-EMU capital flows crisis – by imposing hairshirt austerity and pushing the Club Med bloc into an economic depression. The South was told to export its way out of the slump via “internal devaluations”.
The aggregate effect was to lift the eurozone’s current account surplus to €343bn (£283bn) by 2018, five times larger than China’s surplus that year.
The bloc was sucking away world demand rather than agreeing to a fiscal union needed to make the euro work properly. None of this has served Germany well, and the surplus has since shrunk, but Navarro’s analysis of events from 1995-2020 is basically right.
Navarro is also right that Europe has a tapestry of regulations, VAT taxes and state aid, that skew the economy towards exports.
It shields EU farmers by blinding us with bad science. There was no justification for banning CRISPR gene-edited crops – not to be confused with transgenic plants – as the EU now acknowledges.
If you think chicken welfare is worse in America, visit the giant industrial batteries of France or Poland.
Trump’s warning this week that he aims to go ahead with 25pc tariffs on the EU is the bitter fruit of 30 years of grievances. I do not expect the UK to be spared.
The obvious answer for Europe is to rearm on a larger scale than anything planned so far by Germany, France, Italy and Britain, both as a form of military Keynesianism but also to take on the defence of Ukraine and dictate the outcome of this war rather than submitting to Trump’s pro-Kremlin proclivities.
If rich Europe cannot find the wherewithal to produce or obtain the artillery shells and anti-aircraft missiles needed to stop middle-income Russia in its tracks, it deserves to end up in the dustbin of history.
Russia has wasted men and materiel on a gothic scale to gain barely 1pc of Ukraine’s territory over the last year. It has not taken any new towns of importance, or come close to conquering the four annexed oblasts.
Russia will win the war slowly if we talk ourselves into defeatism but it is not winning yet, and don’t be fooled by the Potemkin statistics of its strained war economy.
Europe has the naval and air power to bring the country to its knees in four months by blockading the Kremlin’s dark fleet of tankers at the Skagerrak, with or without American help.
Strategic realists argue that Trump is right to try to peel Russia away from China in a “reverse Nixon” move, and that sacrificing Ukraine is worth the price – if Trump really has such clarity of vision, which I doubt.
Others say Britain’s national interest does not depend on Ukraine or the trio of Baltic states next on Putin’s menu, whatever one’s human sympathies.
Well, perhaps, but we Europeans must rearm in any case. It would be better to do so with the battle-hardened, million-strong army of Ukraine on our side of the ledger, and infinitely cheaper to help the Ukrainians fight back now rather than go along with the charade of Trump & Putin Inc.
Otherwise, we may have to defend a false peace with 100,000 troops at ruinous cost for half an eternity, without US air power or Article 5 cover from Nato.
Unresolved conflicts are toxic. Some 28,000 American combat troops are still patrolling the 38th Parallel a full 72 years after the end of the Korean War.