Commentary: If this is how Trump treats Europe, what about Asia?
From a special Greenland envoy to travel bans, US President Donald Trump has political-cultural and territorial designs on Europe. Here’s the good and bad news for Asia, says RSIS’ Kevin Chen.
by Kevin Chen · CNA · JoinRead a summary of this article on FAST.
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SINGAPORE: Even for those who are no longer surprised when United States President Donald Trump goes against international norms, two developments in US-Europe ties in December should be alarming.
The first was that five Europeans, including former European Commissioner Thierry Breton, were hit by travel sanctions – banning them from US soil. Sanctions are usually reserved for American adversaries.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified this by their involvement in a “global censorship-industrial complex” to “suppress American viewpoints they oppose”. This was ostensibly in response to a US$141 million fine that the European Commission imposed on X for violations of the Digital Services Act.
The second concerned Mr Trump appointing a special envoy to Greenland, with the express goal of making the Danish autonomous territory “a part of the US”, which he has maintained is needed for “national security” reasons. The prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark responded in a joint statement: “You cannot annex other countries.”
Mr Trump wants a Europe more closely aligned with US conservative political values and sanctions and threats of annexation are the great lengths he is willing to go to get it.
The good news, from Asia’s perspective, is that the US does not have such political-cultural or territorial designs on the region. The bad news is that Washington still desires to exert leverage over this region, through its trade policy and the use of “poison pill” termination clauses.
EXTENDING AMERICA’S CULTURE WARS TO EUROPE
For decades, US-Europe ties have been underpinned by shared liberal norms, along with strong economic and security ties. Even the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) document, published by the first Trump administration, noted that the US “is safer when Europe is prosperous and stable, and can help defend our shared interests and ideals.”
The recently released 2025 NSS, however, reframed this relationship. On one hand, Europe is deemed “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Yet, the document goes beyond the typical criticism of Europe’s failures to meet defence spending pledges.
It takes aim at a fusion of politics and culture, warning of “civilisational erasure” caused by policies that erode Europe’s “national identities and self-confidence”. The policies in question include mass migration, which is portrayed as a destabilising blight on Europe’s social and cultural cohesion. Censorship is also a bugbear for US officials, with the belief that far-right views are unfairly targeted and suppressed by European governments.
Put simply, the NSS implies that Europe’s liberal leadership threatens US interests by destabilising the continent. The solution, in their eyes, is to make Europe align more closely with the Trump administration’s political values, extending the culture war that has pervaded US society for political gain.
PROFOUND IRONY OF US INTERFERENCE
Yet the NSS goes beyond just launching diplomatic efforts to convince European leaders to change their policies. It includes a call for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
The innocuous language hides an alarming prescription: supporting “patriotic” parties in the European political landscape that have more in common with US conservatism, aiming to reshape Europe’s politics in their own image and dominate it.
There is a profound irony that the NSS calls for an end to America “hectoring [Gulf monarchies] into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government,” but sees no issue in doing so to Europe instead.
The stern reaction to the US$141 million fine on X and the appointment of the special envoy to Greenland are early signs of this approach. Sanctions are being used to pressure Europe to adjust its digital regulations without igniting another trade war, giving far-right parties more political space to promote themselves.
In a similar fashion, talk of taking Greenland is more about asserting dominance over a party that Washington does not trust. It’s not so much about expanding US territory when it already has a military base in Greenland and the current Danish government is not opposed to an expanded US presence there.
Assertions of Greenland’s strategic value must instead consider the enmity that the US feels towards Western European governments, believing that demographic changes in those countries might produce governments that are less aligned with US interests. Whether or not Washington eventually makes a move on Greenland, it is clearly being used as another point of pressure against Europe’s liberal governments.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO ASIA
Asian governments can take comfort that these political-cultural tensions do not exist in Washington’s approach to this region.
Mr Trump is not talking about taking Subic Bay from the Philippines or the island of Okinawa from Japan over disagreements with their political direction. Nor is he concerned about influencing politics in countries such as Cambodia. But his desire for leverage is no less prominent.
The case in point here is not just Mr Trump’s use of tariffs, which have become his catch-all foreign policy tool. Rather, the uproar over “poison pill” clauses in recent trade deals with Malaysia and Cambodia points to a longer-term plan on how he intends to control Asian partners.
Termination clauses are not a new feature in trade deals, but targeted clauses that end agreements when “essential US interests” are jeopardised certainly are.
If these “poison pill” clauses are reproduced at scale, they could form a trade network that sidelines US adversaries such as China – and chains countries to the US with its economic power as leverage.
Governments must get used to the notion that economic interdependence carries risks by allowing a bigger economy to use that dependence as leverage against a smaller partner.
While different in nature and subject, the threat facing Asian countries from the US is no less serious than that facing Europe. Regardless of whether the US seeks dominance or leverage, governments must take pains to protect their own interests while dealing with Washington.
Kevin Chen is an Associate Research Fellow with the US Programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He writes a monthly column for CNA, published every first Friday.
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