“Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and Western Germany should form one federated state. To help this America could afford to spend a lot, because we’d get something successful, strong, sturdy. But the [European] politicos throw up their hands in fright and hopelessness.”
These words come from The Eisenhower Diaries, chapter VII, dealing with the very early days of both NATO and European integration after World War II. The year is 1951—Nov. 24, to be precise. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s Allied war hero, had been sent back to Europe by President Harry S. Truman as NATO supreme allied commander earlier that year. Anyone wondering if there is some truth in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent remark that the European Union “was formed to screw the United States” should read this diary. It shows how active and keen U.S. leadership was in the early 1950s in shepherding quarrelling European nations into any kind of political agreement, as well as how much money and energy (including despair) the United States spent trying to achieve this rather herculean task. It also illustrates in clear, economic sentences how immense the contrast is between American attitudes toward Europe then and now.
“Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and Western Germany should form one federated state. To help this America could afford to spend a lot, because we’d get something successful, strong, sturdy. But the [European] politicos throw up their hands in fright and hopelessness.”
These words come from The Eisenhower Diaries, chapter VII, dealing with the very early days of both NATO and European integration after World War II. The year is 1951—Nov. 24, to be precise. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s Allied war hero, had been sent back to Europe by President Harry S. Truman as NATO supreme allied commander earlier that year. Anyone wondering if there is some truth in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent remark that the European Union “was formed to screw the United States” should read this diary. It shows how active and keen U.S. leadership was in the early 1950s in shepherding quarrelling European nations into any kind of political agreement, as well as how much money and energy (including despair) the United States spent trying to achieve this rather herculean task. It also illustrates in clear, economic sentences how immense the contrast is between American attitudes toward Europe then and now.
Earlier on that Nov. 24, Eisenhower had met Jean Monnet, the Frenchman who had been one of the architects of the Schuman Declaration proposing to place the coal and steel industries of Europe’s “historic rivals”—France and Germany—under one European, independent authority, so they could not wage war anymore against one another. By the end of 1951, Monnet was on his way to presiding over this High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, implementing the plan. He had come to see Eisenhower because he was worried that continued European bickering would endanger two more ambitious plans in the pipeline—a political union and a European army—and asked the general for his support during an upcoming summit meeting of Western Europe’s leaders.
Imagine this today: a European asking for American blessing of a more federal Europe. And getting it, because after their conversation, Eisenhower wrote: “Since I believe implicitly in the idea, I shall do so, even if some of the politicos present resent my intrusion into their field. America has spent billions in ECA [the Economic Cooperation Administration, set up to administer the Marshall Plan] and is spending more billions in MDAP [Military Defense Assistance Plan] and much of it will be sheer waste unless Europe coalesces.”
Trump doubtless has no desire to read The Eisenhower Diaries. Facts do not seem to interest him, especially if they prove his narrative wrong. But for Europeans, the book is highly recommended right now. Sometimes, looking at the past makes us more clear-eyed about the present. The book shows how, under rather similar circumstances—a substantial security threat from Moscow—the United States was doing everything it could at the time to get European integration off the ground and foster it, whereas today it is unsupportive and often outright hostile.
For example, the Heritage Foundation—the organization that composed the radical Project 2025 plan for Trump’s second administration—convened a meeting on March 11 with several American Euroskeptic groups, where they discussed the best way to bulldoze the EU. On the basis of a working paper titled “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union,” participants examined the possible dismantling of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice.
According to the paper, the EU is “evolving into a quasi-federal state, limiting national decision-making power” and is imposing “ideologically motivated policies on member states, without any mandate.” Under the plan, the EU should cease to function in its current guise, and be changed to a loose body for intergovernmental cooperation of limited scope called the European Community of Nations.
The plan is puzzling, because the 27 member states have never been so powerful in decision-making in Brussels as now. Not only are they the ones who decide on each new European policy step—from a European energy policy to the recent ReArm Europe plan financing and boosting Europe’s defense industry—they also actively steer its implementation as never before. Moreover, Europe is becoming more intergovernmental. For instance, the European Parliament, which has proved to be a formidable counterforce against the member states, is increasingly sidelined by the 27 capitals.
But the larger point is, of course, that the Heritage paper serves as an example of how futile eight decades of trans-Atlantic closeness seems to have become for the current U.S. administration. In the span of just a few weeks, Washington has managed to damage a relationship that was politically, economically, and culturally strong enough to survive frequent difficulties and clashes since the end of World War II. But while disagreements over NATO missiles or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were deep, they never broke the relationship. With Trump in the White House, a breakup could happen any day. Trump’s hatred of Europe is unparalleled.
During Trump’s first presidency, European leaders did not believe it could ever come to this. That changed in February, after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s blistering attack on Europe’s values at the Munich Security Conference, and Trump’s brutal dressing-down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Both incidents caused a huge shock in Europe. According to an opinion poll for the French online magazine Le Grand Continent, only 9 percent of Europeans in nine EU member states call Trump a friend of Europe (and 51 percent call him an enemy). A high EU official told me privately: “Trump’s plan is to destroy the EU.”
Trump refuses to meet EU leaders, preferring to do business only with national leaders of European countries to try to pit one against the other. His administration nurtures warm ties, however, with the pro-Russian, Euroskeptic, Trumpian far right all over Europe. Contrast this with Eisenhower’s frank admission in his diary on June 11, 1951: “I am coming to believe that Europe’s security problem is never going to be solved satisfactorily until there exists a United States of Europe.” According to Eisenhower, this “United States of Europe” needed to have a single government that put the common interest first: “I think that the real and bitter problems of today would instantly come within the limits of capabilities in solving them, if we had this single government.”
No one knows what Eisenhower would advise European governments to do if he were still alive today. But it seems like Europe is closer to having this single European government than in his time, and Eisenhower would most probably have applauded it. Like many Europeans, he would have been shocked by the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law. With Trump dismantling the independent judiciary, bullying independent media, and leaving billionaire oligarchs to supervise their own companies, Vance has identified European values as the main obstacle to the Western world.
Many Europeans proudly want to pick up the gauntlet, push back against this, and try to uphold the respect for democracy and the rule of law that once made the West so powerful. Eisenhower often remarked in his diary that his European interlocutors were unsure and did not believe in themselves. He would have been content to see what the main effect is of Trump’s hostility, at least so far: a tendency to build a stronger Europe capable of believing in itself and standing up for itself.
He told them this so many times. In his diary, on Dec. 21, 1951, he explained why a stronger, more confident Europe was important. Today, those words still ring awfully true. This is how he put it: “A more politically unified Western Europe is essential to the welfare and security of the free world.”
The post This Is the Europe Dwight Eisenhower Wanted appeared first on Foreign Policy.
