Donald Trump’s increasingly bitter exchanges with the European Union have intensified concerns about the future of Nato and the strength of the transatlantic alliance.
European leaders were reportedly shocked after the US president announced that he had reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel fuel.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky described the deal as “a gift” to the Kremlin, while governments across Europe accused Trump of helping replenish the funds supporting Russia’s war.
Trump responded swiftly, accusing the European bloc of double standards in a sharply worded post on Truth Social on Monday.
“The European Union paid Russia 250 Billion Dollars for Energy, and the Fake News Media doesn’t want to get near that story,” he wrote. “I made the right choice for the American People – ALWAYS, AMERICA FIRST!”
The confrontation is the latest in a series of clashes between Trump and European governments, raising fresh questions about the reliability of the transatlantic partnership during a period of global instability.
Since returning for a second term, Trump has engaged in repeated public disputes with Europe. His administration accused the continent last December of approaching “civilisational erasure”, blaming unchecked immigration for the alleged decline.
The US president has also claimed that unrest in France is not primarily linked to conditions in schools, but instead reflects mass migration and what he described as “Islam wanting to take over”.
Trump’s attacks on Europe have added to concerns over the future of the transatlantic alliance as international tensions mount
Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly clashed with Donald Trump, who recently criticised the French president over what he viewed as inadequate support during the conflict with Iran
An aerial view shows an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants across the Channel towards England
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
Trump’s administration has previously portrayed Europe as an “incubator” for extremism, arguing that mass migration is enabling what it calls the growth of “alien cultures”.
A counterterrorism strategy issued by Washington in May stated: “It is clear to all that well-organised hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals.
“The more these alien cultures grow, and the longer current European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed.”
The Republican administration has also focused heavily on left-wing movements. Its counterterrorism report singled out Europe and criticised what it described as “violent Left-wing extremists, including anarchists and antifascists”.
“As the birthplace of Western culture and values, Europe must act now and halt its willful decline,” the strategy said. It was overseen by counterterrorism coordinator Sebastian Gorka.
The latest attacks followed a National Security Strategy from the White House that warned Europe faced “civilisational erasure” because of uncontrolled borders and could become “unrecognisable” within the next two decades.
“It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European,” the 33-page document stated.
Migrants attempt to board small boats bound for the UK earlier this month
Families picked up from a dinghy in the Channel disembark from a UK Border Force vessel at Dover on October 6
One figure who the president has consistently sparred with is President Emmanuel Macron, who Trump earlier this year singled out for his lack of assistance in the US-Israel war with Iran.
In April, the US president referenced the viral video from last year that appeared to show the French First Lady, Brigitte Macron, pushing her husband in the face as they prepared to disembark from a plane in Vietnam.
‘Then I call up France, Macron – whose wife treats him extremely badly – he’s still recovering from the right to the jaw,’ Trump joked during an Easter lunch at the White House, hours before delivering a televised address to the nation about the conflict with Iran.
‘And I say: “Emmanuel, we’d love to have some help in the Gulf, even though we’re setting records in knocking out bad people and knocking out ballistic missiles, we’d love to have some help… could you please send ships immediately.”‘
Trump then imitated Macron’s response, using a mock French accent: ‘No, no, no, I cannot do that Donald, we can do that after the war is won.’
He continued: ‘I said: “No, no, I don’t need [them] after the war is won, Emmanuel.”
‘So I learned about Nato – Nato won’t be there if we ever have the big one, you know what I mean by the big one,’ Trump said, without elaborating.
A furious Macron hit back at Trump, saying that the comments about his marriage were ‘neither elegant nor up to standard’.
Trump’s comments sparked widespread anger among politicians in France, including Macron’s critics.
‘Honestly, it’s not up to par,’ said Yael Braun-Pivet, president of France’s lower house of parliament.
‘We are currently discussing the future of the world. Right now in Iran, this is having consequences for the lives of millions of people, people are dying on the battlefield, and we have a president who is laughing, who is mocking others,’ she told news service franceinfo.
Even Manuel Bompard, coordinator of the hard-Left France Unbowed party, rushed to Macron’s defence.
‘You are aware of the extent of my disagreements with the president, but for Donald Trump to speak to him like that and to speak of his wife in such a manner – I find that absolutely unacceptable,’ he told broadcaster BFMTV.
The US president also recently launched a verbal attack against Spain’s socialist government, following a dramatic surge of migrants entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta.
At least 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta on July 30 and 31, with most swimming around a border fence.
At least 100 people died during the mass crossing.
The North African enclave declared a national emergency, with Juan Jesús Vivas, the president of Ceuta, demanding changes to Spain’s immigration framework, saying legal shortcomings exposed by a recent Supreme Court ruling needed to be addressed.
Earlier in July, the Supreme Court ruled that migrants intercepted at sea while attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla, another Spanish special territory in North Africa, cannot be summarily returned under the enclaves’ special border-rejection regime.
‘We are facing a situation of absolute humanitarian and social emergency,’ Vivas told Cadena SER radio, adding that facilities for unaccompanied minors were operating at 2,400 per cent of capacity.
Trump branded the crisis a ‘catastrophe’ and an ‘invasion’, and warned the US could face a similar fate if Republicans lose power this November after the all-important midterm elections.
‘I saw Spain yesterday, and I watched the catastrophe that took place. It looks like an invasion of a country,’ Trump said at a cabinet meeting at Camp David on the second day of the crisis.
‘Hundreds of thousands of people. And that same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger, much easier to get into.’
The vast majority of the migrants returned to Morocco within hours of their arrival, but several thousand remained in Ceuta, many of them children, and most were left to sleep rough on beaches or streets.
‘Nobody’s seen anything like it. That will look good compared to what’s going to happen to the United States,’ Trump said.
‘The biggest thing, the worst thing that Biden did is allowing 25million people into our country, because many of those people are criminals. They’re murderers. A lot of them are gone now. We got them out. But they allowed people to come into this country that you can’t allow to come into a country.’
The sudden arrival of the migrants fuelled criticism of Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish government and its handling of the border, as well as its lone opposition to tough new EU migration policies.
Earlier that month, the president demanded that all US trade with Spain be cut off after the ‘terrible partner’ defied the president when it would not let the US use its airspace or bases for the Iran war and has refused to commit to Nato’s new defence spending.
‘Spain is a wasted cause,’ Trump said at the Nato summit in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8. ‘We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.
‘Spain is a terrible partner in Nato. They don’t participate; they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, including visits.’
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Trump made the demands while sitting next to Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, noting how Spain has treated the Nato boss poorly as the nation, in his estimation, dramatically underpays on its defence obligations.
Spain has been the only nation out of the 32 Nato partners to refuse to spend five per cent of its GDP on defense by 2035.
Trump had demanded in March that trade with Spain be halted, though it has continued normally.
‘Don’t even talk to them, they’re hopeless, bad people, because they have everybody else going and paying,’ Trump fumed at a press conference.
‘They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less, I want no business with them.’
At least 72,000 migrants crossed from Morocco into the North African enclave of Ceuta on July 30 and 31
People waded through the sea as they attempted to cross from the Moroccan northern town of Fnideq to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on July 31
The Ceuta migrant crisis fuelled criticism of Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government and its handling of the border
It is not only Spain and France who Trump has condemned this year, but the entirety of Nato.
He has even threatened to pull America out of the 32-member bloc after accusing his allies of failing to support the US in its military campaign against Iran.
‘Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER!’ Trump said in a social media post in March.
‘They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices,’ he wrote on his platform Truth Social.
‘So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER!’ the president warned.
The Pentagon is now looking into a drastic plan to pull aircraft, ships, weapons and tens of thousands of American troops from Europe, despite warnings from the transatlantic alliance about the growing threat of Russian aggression, according to US’s NBC News.
The reduction could be roughly one-third of all US troops on the continent, or about 25,000.
A US official and another person with knowledge of the deliberations say it could be even larger – as much as half, or up to 40,000 troops.
According to three US and Western officials with knowledge of the matter, the nations impacted would likely include Germany, Italy and Spain,.
The three countries host the majority of American troops in Europe, but leaders of all the countries have also clashed with Trump over the war with Tehran.
The US president has previously said it would be ‘ridiculous’ for Washington to continue its current level of support for Nato, saying his country’s place in the Western alliance was ‘one sided’ and ‘not reciprocal’.
Another source of tension between Trump and Western allies has been his longstanding and controversial demand to take over Greenland, the semi-autonomous Danish territory.
His repeated threat to take control of the strategically located and mineral-rich island has provoked a rift with his allies on the continent, who have rushed to emphasise the territory’s sovereignty.
The saga climaxed in January when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on eight European countries until America acquires Greenland, with February 10 given as a deadline.
In reaction, the EU was weighing up retaliatory tariffs on £81 billion worth of US goods, including Levi’s jeans, Harley Davidson motorcycles, Kentucky bourbon and politically sensitive exports like Republican-state soybeans.
The bloc was also contemplating unleashing the biggest weapon in its arsenal – the ‘trade bazooka’, or the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI), a legal defense and deterrence mechanism created by the EU, hitting the US with tariffs, import and export restrictions, curbs on trade in services, and reduced access to banking and capital markets.
During this time, the US president trolled European leaders by uploading an AI image of them looking at a map in the Oval Office showing Greenland and Canada as US territory in a post on Truth Social.
Eventually, Trump announced a U-turn, backing off tariff threats against Europe and ruling out taking Greenland by force.
In September, he announced a new deal had been reached with Nato that he said granted the US total and permanent access to the semi-autonomous territory.
A majority of Greenlandic lawmakers signalled support for the Arctic island’s recent security agreement with Trump in a debate on Monday, although some opposition party members questioned the deal’s economic value.
The US, Denmark and Greenland last month signed the agreement, aimed at ending tensions after Trump’s repeated threats to take control of the island.
The deal expands the US military’s role in Greenland, paving the way for two new military bases and Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system, while reaffirming Danish sovereignty and Greenlanders’ right to self-determination.
Despite the deal, the US president hasn’t stopped trolling his European allies about his desire to take over Greenland.
This week, he uploaded an apparently AI-generated image on Truth Social, showing himself looming over a Greenlandic village with the caption: ‘Hello, Greenland!’
The EU-US trade deal has been another point of contention since Trump returned to office.
Last year, he threatened to impose a 30 per cent tariff on imports from the European Union, sending shockwaves through the 27-country bloc.
The tariff threat strained diplomatic relationships with some of the closest US partners, as European nations rushed to protect essential transatlantic supply chains.
Following months of tension and wrangling, the EU agreed in July 2025 to accept a 15 per cent tariff on most of its exports to the US, while the bloc’s tariffs on US goods would drop below the then-average of around 1 per cent.
EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic conceded that it was ‘the best deal we could get under very difficult circumstances’.
But it wasn’t all smiles across the bloc, with some heads of state viewing the 15 per cent tariff – more than triple the average 4.8 per cent levy formerly in force – as a capitulation to Trump.
Some national leaders, including the former French prime minister, François Bayrou, wanted the European Commission to play as tough as Trump in the talks, while others acknowledged it would have been risky to provoke him.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Trump’s Russian diesel deal would grant ‘legitimacy to Moscow while its bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities’, and bring fresh revenues into Putin’s war chest
The latest rupture between the EU and Trump is about Ukraine and the growing perception that the American president is capitulating to Putin.
It comes as Trump has in recent days demanded Zelensky quit as leader, signed a ‘treacherous’ deal with Putin to buy Russian diesel, blamed the Ukrainian leader for spiralling energy prices, and surprised him with a fabricated ceasefire – which Russia has since obliterated.
‘We take note of the agreement between the United States and Russia on diesel exports,’ German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in Berlin on Monday. ‘For Germany and Europe, such a decision is out of the question.’
‘The outcome of this decision is questionable, the risks are clear,’ Italy’s Giorgia Meloni said in her fiercest critique of a policy championed by her erstwhile political ally.
She said Trump’s Russian diesel deal would grant ‘legitimacy to Moscow while its bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities’, bring fresh revenues into Putin’s war chest and cause ‘an implicit weakening of the leverage provided by sanctions’.
As the EU rallies behind Zelensky in his time of need, the question remains whether Trump will realign himself with his European allies or deepen the division.