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If he appoints Ted Malloch it would leave little doubt that Donald Trump is willing to use his presidency to destroy the EU
Ted Malloch, the man currently running an expensive media campaign to persuade Donald Trump to nominate him as the US ambassador to the European Union, knows that if he succeeds, it will be taken as a signal that Trump is willing to use his presidency to destroy the EU.
Leaders of the bloc are in no doubt, looking at Malloch’s record, that this would be the only way to interpret such an appointment. Sigmar Gabriel, the new German foreign minister, travelled to Washington this week to probe the state department in private on whether a turning point in 70 years of transatlantic relations had indeed arrived.
There remains a hope that much of what emerges from the Trump twitter feed is bluster, not policy, and that Malloch is not as close to nomination as his relentless self-publicity suggests. He may have been close to the president in the campaign, and has a soul brother in Nigel Farage , but his diplomatic credentials – a posting in Geneva – are hardly stellar. Nevertheless, a senior EU official said leaders were formally studying the process by which an ambassador can be rejected.
In a bid to keep his name in the frame, Malloch half-apologised on Friday for likening the EU to the Soviet Union and for claiming he would see it as his role to tame the EU in the same way as he tamed the Soviet Union – a claim that seems to come from his time as a diplomat at the UN in Geneva during the late 1980s and a brief stint in the state department. At the same time he could not stop himself from condemning the EU as an outdated concept.
Malloch has a predilection for apocalyptic interpretations of Trumpism, saying, for instance, that “the post-Berlin Wall globalisation consensus is over” or “read the obituary – Davos-man is dead” or “the only supranational organisation in which the president believes is God”.
In European eyes, figures like Malloch and Steve Bannon, the Trump’s chief strategist, do not really want to end the American leadership role in Europe. They want, in the view of the European council president, Donald Tusk, to destroy the EU, and are as intent as doing so as jihadist extremists or Vladimir Putin. This is not a policy of non-interference. The policy is to help oversee the break-up of the EU, using the bully pulpit of the presidency and the Breitbart website to do all they can to cheer on the populist forces across Europe. Victories for nationalists parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy this year would ensure the EU’s implosion, and as such are to be encouraged.
It is hard to discern how much of this thinking has been exported to the US by Farage and Thatcherite thinktanks, or how much is an extension of an anti-elitist, nationalist strain in Trump.
Either way, they both see their chief target as Germany, unsurprisingly, the single greatest challenge to US economic power in Europe.
Trump in his campaign used Angela Merkel’s name to smear Hillary Clinton in the eyes of his far-right supporters. He said Clinton wanted to be “America’s Angela Merkel”, a reference to the chancellor’s liberal refugee policy. He accused her of dominating Europe and then threatened to impose tariffs on German cars imported from Mexico, raising deep concern in Germany’s automobile industry, a key pillar of Europe’s largest economy.
Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused Berlin of manipulating the European Central Bank and using a “grossly undervalued” euro to exploit the United States and EU member states.
The broadsides are not all good news for Theresa May. There is a danger that they will galvanise European leaders into an unprecedented unity against Trump and his allies, so making the Brexit talks more difficult, and rendering the UK role as bridge to the US less relevant.
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