Here be dragons

In February 2025, US Vice President JD Vance surprised the audience of his Munich Security 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 other external actor […] what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.” In November the same year, Europeans reading the US National Security Strategy found out that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure”, brought about by the “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty”. America, “understandably attached to the European continent”, wishes “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation”.

The “Department of State’s Agency Strategic Plan Fiscal Years 2026-2030” released at the beginning of 2026 highlights the necessity of helping “European partners recommit themselves to a new American transatlantic civilizational alliance”. Objective 4.3 in the document 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 too late for European capitals to do something about it. An optimist, Hegseth then responded that there is still time.

Much more pessimistic are the representatives of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a country which is currently 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 sort of “Luciferian utopia” taken straight out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, abounding in decadence and debauchery. Yet despite this difference, both the MAGA administration and Putin’s regime share a profound revulsion towards the European Union as an integrating and unifying European polity, and both seek to cripple, defang, and eventually abolish the Union.

As the National Security Strategy reveals, achieving this outcome requires cultivating “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. Such resistance materializes in the form of nationalist parties that either directly push for the exit of their member 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 institutional architecture.

MAGA-related think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute, are hard at work in attempting to provide nationalist parties across Europe with doctrinal depth. Nile Gardiner, Director 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 picture 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 Great Reset: An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform”. This document proposed two scenarios: either dissolution of the European Union, or a so-called reform that would see its current federal characteristics removed. Rebranded as a “European Community of Nations”, it would lose its functioning internal market 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 so-called reform would eventually lead in practice to the same result as the first scenario. The internal market of the European Union cannot function if the law governing it is merely optional and subject to the whims of every member state. Trade barriers, discriminatory practices, market fragmentation, investment uncertainty, and a loss of competitiveness would sink the economies of the member states. Social upheaval would follow due to mass unemployment, high prices, reduced mobility, and extreme wealth disparity. The United Kingdom is currently reeling from the economic and social consequences of uncoupling from the internal market, which will continue to worsen unless Brexit is overturned.

Ideologically speaking, what animates MAGA’s obsession with Europe is the crucial role 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 new world. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out at the Munich Security 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 faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world 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 also culturally and politically. This is because nationalism is a downward spiral ending in destruction, as the previous two centuries of European history have made clear. By elevating antipolitical concepts like national interest and national sovereignty to supreme ends, nationalism ultimately abolishes liberty, constitutional democracy, and pluralism.

Through tearing down the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital across the Union, nationalism would also 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 religious 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 also 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 new beginnings, as well as of the potential 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 whole will continue 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 hardly assured. Europeans need to focus their energy on reforming the European Union, which is certainly deserving of legitimate criticism, and prepare for its federalization. It is not enough for the dragons that so frighten MAGA ideologues to endure, they must also thrive.  

Radu Cornea holds a bachelor’s degree in international 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 researcher regarding the rule of law in the European Union and as a democracy rapporteur on Romania.