On this side of the pond, the takeaway from the astonishing security breach over US airstrikes on Yemen has been the deepening hostility of the Trump administration to Europe, or at least the charge that it free-rides on US security.
The most colourful exchange on the Signal thread on which Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was copied in, saw Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth b**** about the Europeans.
In response to Vance's reservations about the US taking military action to safeguard a shipping route through which only 3% of exports are American, Hegseth said: "VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC."
This after the vice president griped: "I just hate bailing Europe out again."
Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, weighed in. President Trump was dead set on attacking Houthi positions "but we soon make clear to…Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what?"
That the Trump administration runs statecraft through a prism of transactional pressure has been increasingly beyond doubt, but it was painfully laid bare here.
A military assault which killed 53 people, according to Houthi authorities in Yemen, would not just be about getting the Europeans to pay up, it would be about profiting further.
As Miller added: "If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return."
President Trump has taken the same approach to Ukraine. The minerals and rare earths deal which he is expected to sign with President Zelensky is not just about "compensating" the United States for the military and financial support since Russia’s invasion but about making a profit.
"We've been able to make a deal where we're going to get our money back and we're going to get a lot of money in the future," President Trump said on 26 February.
European leaders who believed the trick with Trump 2.0 was to blend sycophancy with an appeal to economic realism (the transatlantic business relationship cuts both ways, you know), are now learning that won’t cut it.
Indeed, the European Commission’s initial carrot - buying more US liquified natural gas (LNG) - appears to have got the Europeans not very far, either on tariffs, reducing the bellicose rhetoric about Greenland, or a European place at the negotiating table when it comes to ending Russia’s war on Ukraine.
"Ultimately, [the Signal thread] just shows that these people aren't serious, quite frankly, either in their handling of obviously highly classified material, but also just in their overall level of analysis, the types of argument they make," says Jacob Kirkegaard, non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
"[The airstrike] isn't viewed as part of any broader national security strategy, either vis-a-vis Europe or, for that matter, the US position in the Middle East. It's just viewed as, oh, they have more trade than we do, we can extract some cash from them."
The problem is that it is not just about getting more cash.
President Trump appears to respect Britain’s Keir Starmer and even French President Emmanuel Macron. Europe’s problem is the ideologues he has elevated such as Vance, Hegseth, Kash Patel (FBI chief) and Tulsi Gabbard, head of the National Intelligence Council (NSC).
In other words, whatever purchase an EU leader can get through a tête-a-tête with President Trump might well unravel once the US president briefs his VP.
JD Vance takes pleasure in vilifying Europe at every turn, most notoriously at the Munich Security Conference when he accused the EU of being a greater threat to itself than Russia or China, with a litany of denunciations about European attitudes to migration, free speech, regulation of tech giants and abortion, not to mention an attack on electoral integrity in the EU (this from the vice-president to a man who attempted to overturn a legitimate presidential victory in 2020).
"Denmark, which controls Greenland, it’s not doing its job and it’s not being a good ally," Vance told Fox News.
"If that means we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us."
Vance’s animosity towards the EU "also animates the next generation of foreign policy-minded Republicans, who see the liberal democratic establishment in Europe as a crumbling, godless society of elites," writes Michael Warren, a senior editor at The Dispatch.
"Helpfully for him, this scorn Vance has for Europe often aligns with Trump’s own zero-sum calculus on international relations."
That calculus must be worrying for the EU trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič, in Washington today to plead with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to rethink President Trump’s trade war ahead of the expected announcement on 2 April of reciprocal and other targeted duties on European goods.
Nor is it reassuring for Europeans continuing to impress upon the Trump administration that Russia cannot get away with a clean victory in Ukraine given the threat to EU member states.
The president seems able to forgive Vladimir Putin for just about anything if it leads to a restoration of commercial ties.
The US president is nothing if not consistent in ensuring his every policy announcement chimes with the MAGA base, a constituency in thrall to such ideologues as JD Vance and Pete Hegseth.
That European militaries such as the UK and France have had a presence in protecting Red Sea shipping from Houthi and Iranian attacks appears not to matter to the Trump administration, nor that open shipping lanes have been the sine qua non of the postwar order of open markets and free trade atop which the US sat astride for decades.
