Jaded veterans of peace negotiations have cynically observed that if you aren’t at the table, you’re on the menu. But even hard-bitten realists were surprised by Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for shaking Volodymyr Zelensky down for every last mineral and rare earth that Ukraine might own. The story of the US negotiator threatening Zelensky with consequences if he didn’t immediately sign the minerals deal (half of all the profits from Ukraine’s mineral and energy resources) reads like a scene from a sub-Scorsesian movie: Don Donald makes an offer that can’t be refused.

This has scandalised Ukraine’s champions in Europe who had been looking for a more genteel way of letting Ukraine down, one where the inevitable loss of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine could be cushioned by bumf about European solidarity and reiterations of NATO’s steely commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty. This was hard to do when Trump’s principal henchmen, his vice-president, J.D. Vance, and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, went out of their way to underline that NATO’s doer, the United States of America, was no longer committing to guaranteeing Europe’s security.

Does this new posture represent a break with the US’s traditional foreign policy posture? On the face of it, it does. It’s hard to imagine a generic US president of either party threatening to annex Canada or take over Gaza and turn it into a Palestinian-free Riviera. Musing about owning Greenland, the territory of a loyal European ally, or retaking the Panama Canal, is a form of public diplomacy that has been pioneered by Trump. Instead of speaking softly while carrying a big stick, Trump threatens and blusters, assuming that his bluff won’t be called. When it is called, he sometimes backs off. He paused his tariff war with Mexico and now seems to have backed off from his plan to evacuate Gaza and turn it into a seafront property. But it’s undeniable that his willingness to dispense with diplomacy and bully friend and foe alike is novel.

Trump’s break with the past is based on three MAGA axioms: one, Russia isn’t an existential threat to the US’s preeminence in the world; two, China is, and three, Europe, aka the Old World, is a dying continent that is either a regulatory nuisance or a confederation of vassals waiting to be squeezed. The first is a fact; it has been over thirty years since the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia is now a runt economy attached to a legacy arsenal. So is the second; China is, without question, America’s foil. The third conviction is based both on a perception of Europe’s relative decline vis-à-vis the US and China and the reality that MAGA voters aren’t sentimental or nostalgic about America’s historical connection with Europe or the Anglosphere in the way that the traditional coastal establishments of both parties used to be.

The only affinity that the likes of Steve Bannon, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk feel for Europe is the kinship of whiteness. It isn’t a coincidence that Vance went out of his way to name-check the Alternative for Germany and meet with its leader on his visit to Europe, or that Bannon, MAGA’s original ideologue, exchanges notes with neo-fascists in France and snaps out Hitler salutes. Which brings us neatly to that other practitioner of the ‘Roman’ salute, Musk, the White, South African billionaire, who has declared that White South African farmers who own 72% of all private agricultural land in that country are suffering racist persecution. Trump, Musk’s boss, plans to sanction the South African government for anti-White racism and has offered refugee status to Afrikaners.

You can’t make this up because it’s true. For Trump, Musk, Vance and Bannon and their core political constituency, White people being ‘replaced’ by criminal immigrants or pampered non-White minorities is an existential concern. Their natural allies are European political parties of the extreme Right that have been dealing in the currency of White supremacy, Fortress Europe, and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hatred for decades.

It’s worth noting here that the European Right concurs with two out of three MAGA axioms. Viktor Orbán and the leaders of Europe’s far-Right parties have long argued that Russia is a friend, not an enemy. They are agnostic on China but wholly on board with the idea that Europe is a White civilisation in crisis, diminished by steep declines in White fertility, corroded from within by non-White migrants, and menaced by radical Islam.

But even while noting the congruence between MAGA’s world view and that of Europe’s neo-fascist Right, it would be a mistake to think that Europe’s Centrist establishment is fire-walled against far-Right politics. The shunning of National Rally and Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel and the AfD is temporary; it can last only so long as these parties don’t win a working majority in their legislatures or a presidential election. Giorgia Meloni is the living example of this.

But even without a far-Right ruling party, Centrist parties like the Labour Party in England and the ruling Social Democrats in Denmark have begun to organise their public image around their anti-immigration credentials. The British government recently released videos of illegal migrants being rounded up in shackles to demonstrate that it was tough on illegal migration while Denmark’s Social Democratic Party has one of the harshest refugee policies in the world. This might be political pragmatism at a time when immigration is a hot-button issue but the direction of travel for Keir Starmer, Mette Frederiksen and Sahra Wagenknecht (the leader of an economically left-wing German Party who takes a hard line on immigration) is the same as that of Trump or Weidel.

For observers outside the West, the distinction between the liberal Centre and the extreme Right in Europe and the US is less a bright red line than a smudged frontier that sees a lot of traffic. To hear Simon Schama, historian and professional liberal, talk, you would think that Trump was the devil incarnate, different from him in every way. And yet, Schama’s and Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza throughout the war rivalled Trump’s.

For liberals of a certain stripe, Trump serves the same function as Benjamin Netanyahu: denouncing him demonstrates their liberal credentials while providing cover for a politics that circles Western wagons against an encroaching non-Western world. Just as Israeli liberals like Fania Oz-Salzberger deliver Israel from evil by chanting ‘Hamas’, so do muscular Centrists like Olaf Scholz and Starmer perform their patriotism, their liberalism even, at the expense of minorities and immigrants.

For those desis who have stepped through Trump’s looking glass and emerged on the other side, who actually believe that Trump and Vance and Musk are free speech absolutists, ask yourselves why no MAGA leader has ever put out so much as a contrarian tweet about Gaza. The truth is that for outsiders, the debate between Trump and his critics is an internal Western conversation between Centrists who crave respectability and extremists who don’t give a damn. This is not a disagreement about fundamentals: it’s a quarrel about process and optics. We have no dog in this fight.

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