NEWS: Trump trash talks U.S. allies in Europe. Now they’re cutting us off.

America’s closest partners see the United States as a “security threat."

Donald Trump spent this week belittling America’s closest European allies, calling them “weak” and “decaying.” Within hours, news broke that one of those same allies had formally designated the United States as a security threat for the first time in history.

This comes after an unprecedented development just weeks ago, when the United Kingdom quietly suspended intelligence-sharing with Washington because it no longer trusts Trump’s legality or judgment. America’s alliances — the backbone of the free world — are cracking under the weight of a single man.

In a sprawling POLITICO interview, Trump unleashed his harshest attack yet on Europe, dismissing the continent as a “decaying” collection of nations run by “weak” leaders incapable of controlling migration or confronting Russia. He mocked their politics, promised to reshape them, and signaled he may intervene directly in European elections to back MAGA-aligned candidates.

Rather than reassure NATO allies about Russia’s aggression, especially during an ongoing war right on their doorstep, he ridiculed them. This is unprecedented language from an American president in the modern era. But now it’s our reality, and Europeans are adapting to it in the way I was afraid they would.

Denmark now views the U.S. as a security threat.

On the same day Trump’s insults aired, Denmark’s defense intelligence agency released its annual threat assessment. For the first time ever, it identified the United States as one of the security risks facing the country.

The report warned that the U.S. is now “using its economic and technological strength as an instrument of power, including toward allies,” and noted growing concerns about Trump’s erratic posture toward Europe and the Arctic. It explicitly referenced his hunger for control over Greenland and the possibility that he might use coercive tactics (military or economic) against Denmark itself.

The assessment reads like something a European ally would have written about a Cold War frenemy, or at least a nation on the periphery about whose allegiances it was questioning. There is “uncertainty about the U.S. role as guarantor of Europe’s security,” the agency wrote. That vacuum, Danish analysts said, is likely to embolden Russia’s hybrid attacks against NATO.

If you’re reading this from Moscow, you’re smiling. A NATO ally is saying, in public and in print, that the United States — the alliance’s leading power — has become unpredictable enough to destabilize Europe and embolden Putin’s Russia.

Meanwhile, the UK has cut off intelligence sharing.

The news about Denmark doesn’t come out of nowhere. America is seeing its closest friends actively lose faith in the United States and even withhold cooperation. Last month, in a dramatic rupture with the closest intelligence-sharing partnership on earth, the United Kingdom suspended critical information exchanges with Washington about suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.

The reason? London believes Trump’s new program of lethal military strikes on civilian vessels — which has killed more than 80 people — is illegal under international law. British officials fear their intelligence could be used to pick unlawful targets. And so they’ve cut off the flow of sensitive intelligence in protest and in self-protection.

I cannot overstate how unusual this is. For decades, UK surveillance has been essential to U.S. interdiction of everything from foreign terrorists to drug-cartel operatives. Now that sharing has been halted because our closest ally no longer trusts America to use their intelligence responsibly.

At the same time, Canada has similarly distanced itself. Colombia has severed intelligence-sharing on maritime targets entirely. And as a result, the alliance network that underpins American security is actively coming undone before Trump has even reached the one-year mark of his second presidency.

Donald Trump is doing more to weaken the West than Russia or China could dream of.

For decades, Moscow and Beijing have poured billions into cyberattacks, propaganda, covert ops, energy blackmail, and economic leverage with the pie-in-the-sky goal of splitting America from its allies. Now they are feasting on that pie. Donald Trump reached up high and grabbed it for them and handed it over on a silver platter.

The American president openly insults our allies, threatens economic punishment, questions NATO’s value, and flirts with authoritarian leaders in a manner that would have been branded “treasonous” just before the era of Trump began. This conduct has since been normalized, so much so that the words I’m writing here will soon sink into today’s frothy sea of squabbles and sideshows and be forgotten.

And Donald Trump’s detonation of the global security architecture the United States built after World War II — the one that millions died for and which prevented major-power war for 80 years — will be accepted as almost inevitable.

So the world becomes more dangerous for Americans.

The consequences of this unraveling are far from abstract. They reach directly into the lives of ordinary Americans. When close allies like the United Kingdom stop sharing intelligence about deadly threats (whether drug networks, terror cells, hostile cyber actors, or foreign militaries), the United States loses its early-warning system. For decades, British intelligence has alerted U.S. agencies to dangers we could not see ourselves. Without that flow of information, threats that used to be intercepted may now slip through the cracks.

This is real. I’ve sat in secure briefing rooms receiving intelligence directly from the UK government about imminent threats to American lives at home and abroad. To have them withhold it is such a potent sign of how badly we’ve screwed up and how little they trust us. If our partners withhold information because they fear the recklessness of the American president, the result is brutally simple. People may die who otherwise would have been protected.

There are economic consequences as well. Trump has already threatened further punitive tariffs against American allies, especially ones who don’t march to the beat of his drum, and no country absorbs those blows in silence. Retaliation is virtually guaranteed, meaning higher prices for American consumers, new barriers for U.S. businesses, and fresh taxes on goods made by American workers. When partnerships collapse, prosperity falls apart in the aftermath.

What’s more, Americans will also feel the impact when they travel. The safety U.S. citizens take for granted when they’re abroad — the quiet cooperation between embassies, the law-enforcement partnerships I used to oversee, the shared watchlists that stop dangerous individuals before they strike — all of it depends on trust. When that trust erodes, so does the invisible shield that protects Americans when they step onto foreign soil.

The reorientation of the world order has begun.

At the risk of re-stating it too clearly, Trump has now achieved what only America’s adversaries have ever wanted. He’s convinced our own friends that the United States is a possible adversary, too — unstable, untrustworthy, and potentially dangerous to partner with. That’s not normal. No modern president — Democrat or Republican — has talked this way about our friends or behaved this warmly toward our enemies. Not Nixon. Not Carter. Not Reagan. Not Bush. Not Obama. Not Biden.

Only Trump.

The result is a historic reversal. The United States is no longer the guarantor of Western security. It is becoming the risk.

If America continues down this path, our alliances will dissolve piece by piece, deal by deal, until one day Americans wake up to find themselves more isolated and more economically vulnerable than any time in at least the past century. So I wonder, will we continue to let a single man destroy the alliances that generations of Americans built? Our friends are already signaling the answer they fear is coming.

I’ll close by noting that we are not completely helpless here. This doesn’t have to happen. We don’t have to let the president recast who we are to the world, while he’s trying to duct-tape our mouths shut. As long as free speech is still possible in the United States, we must say loudly: Don’t listen to this man. This is not who we are. When this is all over, we will restore our friendships — lest we become the foe.

Your friend, in defiance,

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