European leaders held a top-secret midnight summit to plan for a future free from U.S. dependence as Donald Trump’s second term pushes historic alliances to breaking point.
The crisis talks, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, drew almost 30 national leaders to the European Council’s headquarters in Brussels in January. A year of Trump’s hostile rhetoric and flip-flopping on tariffs had rattled the continent. The final straw came days earlier, when the president suggested he might take Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO member Denmark, by force.
Attendees arrived alone and left their phones behind, according to the Journal. The venting session got so raw that leaders apparently later compared the summit to “group therapy.” French President Emmanuel Macron laid out just how desperate the situation had become, telling the room that by that point, just a year into Trump 2.0, there was no “going back” to the way things had been before.
The mood was mutinous, according to the Journal. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever warned that Europe risked being reduced to a servile vassal state of Washington. Danish leader Mette Friedrickson reportedly appeared so rattled after a week of sparring with Trump that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at one point leaned over to ask if she was feeling OK.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, while not present, loomed large over the talks. He had been quietly messaging Europe’s heavy hitters for weeks, arguing that Washington could no longer be depended on to secure the continent’s economy and security. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told the room that Carney, long a skeptic of U.S. world dominance, was only saying aloud what they had all been thinking anyway.
The Wall Street Journal’s exposé also lays bare the alarm that Trump’s second-term leadership has sparked inside European spy agencies. One assessment by a southern European country’s intelligence community warned leaders they were not facing a government with normal processes but “a single volatile individual,” according to the Journal.
MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, apparently went so far as to tell U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer that Trump’s second White House resembles The Crucible meets Wolf Hall—a nod to dramas about the Salem witch trials and the notoriously murderous court of English King Henry VIII. Their assessment further warned London officials to steer clear of the subject when chatting with their CIA counterparts.
Patience had begun to fray by the time a follow-up gathering was held in March. Trump’s strikes on Iran had pushed European fuel prices up, and Germany’s Merz fumed that only Russia stood to gain from the conflict. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a lone voice of support for Trump at the prior meeting, conceded that the U.S. president is “not reasonable.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
