Here be dragons

In February 2025, US Vice president JD Vance amazed the audience of his Munich safety Conference speech with the following statement: “the threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any another external actor […] what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from any of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.” In November the same year, Europeans reading the US National safety strategy found out that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure”, brought about by the “activities of the European Union and another transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty”. America, “understandably attached to the European continent”, wishes “Europe to stay European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation”.

The “Department of State’s Agency strategical Plan Fiscal Years 2026-2030” released at the beginning of 2026 highlights the necessity of helping “European partners recommit themselves to a fresh American transatlantic civilizational alliance”. nonsubjective 4.3 in the paper commits the US to “defend civilizational values and reassert national sovereignty” of European states. Recently, the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned in Normandy that “different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies”, asking himself if it is not besides late for European capitals to do something about it. An optimist, Hegseth then responded that there is inactive time.

Much more pessimistic are the representatives of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a country which is presently engaged in an actual military invasion of Europe. Unlike the MAGA administration, which considers Europe to be falling, for them Europe has already fallen and has transformed itself into a kind of “Luciferian utopia” taken consecutive out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, abounding in decadence and debauchery. Yet despite this difference, both the MAGA administration and Putin’s government share a profound revulsion towards the European Union as an integrating and unifying European polity, and both search to cripple, defang, and yet abolish the Union.

As the National safety strategy reveals, achieving this result requires cultivating “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. specified opposition materializes in the form of nationalist parties that either straight push for the exit of their associate state from the Union, or adopt a long-term strategy of weaking the Union from within. This is done by abusing and misusing the legal and political levers in the Union’s constitutional and organization architecture.

MAGA-related think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute, are hard at work in attempting to supply nationalist parties across Europe with doctrinal depth. Nile Gardiner, manager of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, warns that there is no salvation for western civilization unless the European Union, a dictatorial Leviathan run by an antidemocratic cabal of socialist and unelected bureaucrats impossible to hold to account, is abolished. This hallucinating image of the EU features regularly across the commentaries published by The Heritage Foundation.

In February 2025, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and Ordo Iuris Institute, think tanks affiliated with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party, presented The Heritage Foundation with “The large Reset: An Urgent request for Drastic Reform”. This paper proposed 2 scenarios: either dissolution of the European Union, or a alleged improvement that would see its current national characteristics removed. Rebranded as a “European Community of Nations”, it would lose its functioning interior marketplace and be paralyzed by expanded requirements of unanimity. Additionally, the powers of the European Parliament and Commission would be greatly reduced, and the Court of Justice muzzled.

Obviously, this alleged improvement would yet lead in practice to the same consequence as the first scenario. The interior marketplace of the European Union cannot function if the law governing it is simply optional and subject to the whims of all associate state. Trade barriers, discriminatory practices, marketplace fragmentation, investment uncertainty, and a failure of competitiveness would sink the economies of the associate states. Social upheaval would follow due to mass unemployment, advanced prices, reduced mobility, and utmost wealth disparity. The United Kingdom is presently reeling from the economical and social consequences of uncoupling from the interior market, which will proceed to worsen unless Brexit is overturned.

Ideologically speaking, what animates MAGA’s obsession with Europe is the crucial function Western Europe plays in the movement’s worldview. According to this outlook, the United States of America is the continuation of Christian Western Europe in a brave fresh world. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out at the Munich safety Conference in February 2026, “America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men who settled and built the nation […] arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian religion of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old planet and the new.” Modern post-Christian Europe has thus endangered this link and western civilization with it. It is up to the MAGA movement, aided by the Christian nationalists of a beleaguered Europe, to reverse this calamity.

However, it is precisely this reversal that would be calamitous for Europe. Not only economically and socially, but besides culturally and politically. This is due to the fact that nationalism is simply a downward spiral ending in destruction, as the erstwhile 2 centuries of European past have made clear. By elevating antipolitical concepts like national interest and national sovereignty to ultimate ends, nationalism yet abolishes liberty, constitutional democracy, and pluralism.

Through tearing down the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital across the Union, nationalism would besides extinguish the vitality and kinetic energy required for the genuine creation and advancement of culture. Furthermore, the puritanical Christianity on which the MAGA movement bases its spiritual authority and with which it aims to replace mainstream European Christianity is inherently anti-cultural in its rejection of human creativity and diversity.

“The mind”, muses a fallen angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “is its own place, and in itself can make heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven”. Reality is moulded by perception but it besides harshly punishes self-deception. Europeans must reject the deceptive depiction of the nationalist Dark Age of the past as a Golden Age, which MAGA and its minions across Europe so eagerly propagate.

The process of European integration and unity is an affirmation of the human capacity for fresh beginnings, as well as of the possible of humans to assert freedom through imagination, speech, and action. MAGA’s civilizing rhetoric on Europe and its attacks on the European Union betray its anxiety towards the life-affirming political and cultural existence the European Union is capable of supporting. The Union’s multi-layered democracy, its celebration of dynamism, and its nonacceptance of fundamentalism are anathema to the would-be nihilistic and fossilized autocracy MAGA seeks to impose at home. And since Western Europe is central to MAGA’s mythology, the hostile rhetoric towards the European Union as a full will proceed to exist.

Nonetheless, Europeans should refuse to be dragged down by culture wars that would only further strain the already anaemic transatlantic relationship. MAGA’s conquest of the American republic is barely assured. Europeans request to focus their energy on reforming the European Union, which is surely deserving of legitimate criticism, and prepare for its federalization. It is not adequate for the dragons that so frighten MAGA ideologues to endure, they must besides thrive.

Radu Cornea holds a bachelor’s degree in global and European law from the University of Groningen and a master’s degree in European law from Maastricht University. He has worked as a policy investigator regarding the regulation of law in the European Union and as a democracy rapporteur on Romania.

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