Officials in Brussels often joke about Canada joining the EU.
Some European leaders, including Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, have even started to entertain the idea.
It remains a pipe dream for now – but Mark Carney will at least get to play the part of a European leader in Yerevan on Monday.
The Canadian prime minister will become the first leader of a non-European state to join a summit of the European Political Community.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s assertion that the US is being “humiliated” in its war against Iran has triggered a new confrontation between Europe and President Trump. Four days after the comments were made, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from its bases in Germany.
Many experts see it as a waypoint in the American military’s continuing uncoupling from the Continent. There are more than 38,000 active US troops in the Federal Republic and on Saturday the defence minister, Boris Pistorius, implied the move was expected, saying: “We Europeans must take on more responsibility for our own security.”
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump says the US will be withdrawing "A LOT" more troops from Germany than the 5,000 announced yesterday
FINALLY.
Bring our troops home! We don't need NATO — NATO needs US!
"We're going to cut WAY down and we're cutting a lot further than 5,000" 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/I4RBJnb3qL
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 2, 2026
Payback to the base for the Iran conflict?
BERLIN—German officials shrugged off President Trump’s decision to withdraw 5,000 U.S. troops from the country as symbolic, but analysts warned the broader trans-Atlantic rift risks leaving Europe’s economy and security dangerously exposed.
Trump’s latest increase in tariffs on European cars, his apparent U-turn on plans to station long-range missiles in Germany and the economic and military fallout from the war in Iran will have a bigger impact on the region, they warned.
“All of these are a bigger deal than a symbolic 5K-troop reduction,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a Berlin security think tank. “So is the rapid depletion of U.S. arsenals due to wasting enormous amounts of precious assets in the Iran war.”
Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw US troops from Italy and Spain a day after saying he was looking at reducing the number deployed in Germany.
The US president’s threat to Germany came after the country’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said America was being “humiliated” by Iran.
Trump has severely criticised Nato allies for not sending their navies to help to open the strait of Hormuz, a crucial commercial shipping corridor.
New figures from Eurostat show that sexual violence offences across Europe continued to rise in 2024, with sharp differences between Western and Eastern countries likely to intensify debate over the link between crime and migration.
Police recorded 256,302 sexual violence offences in 2024, including 98,190 cases of rape. This represents a 5% increase in sexual violence overall and a 7% rise in rape compared with 2023.
Some ideas refuse to die. One of these is the notion of a European “reversal of alliances” into the arms of Russia. The phrase refers to the unexpected decoupling from former allies, accompanied by an unexpected alliance with former enemies. In 1756, Austria, which had always been an ally of Great Britain, instead allied with its longtime foe, France. Meanwhile, Great Britain and its old enemy, Prussia, became allies — resulting in the Seven Years’ War.
You hear it in Europe from the “new right” and the far left — at conferences where people swoon over “multipolarity” and in the corridors of Germany’s Bundestag, where desperate industrialists plead for Russia’s Gazprom to reopen its taps.
If this reversal of alliances was possible in 1756, why not in 2026?
I’m sure Carney has bought in.
Nuclear weapons are treated by the governments that have them as a useful tool. Obtaining a nuclear weapon enters you into a rare club where you are Taken Seriously. It also allows you to credibly defend yourself against countries much more powerful, larger, and more militarised than oneself.
The four frogmen in black wetsuits emerged almost noiselessly from the murky depths. No tell-tale stream of bubbles betrayed their approach.
Assault rifles at the ready, they surfaced in enemy-held territory, using “rebreather” scuba gear developed for special forces that recycles each exhaled breath.
Minutes earlier, they had checked the lake for mines; now they began probing the surrounding woodland for snipers. Their water-resistant weapons were ready to fire.
Canadians have long looked away from their often gruesome southern neighbor, tempted instead to embrace a chicer European identity. They could point to a more civil public culture, greater bilingualism and a more generous welfare state, compared to the dog-eat-dog reality of the United States. Prime Minister Mark Carney has called Canada “the most European of non-European countries,” and some policy wonks now advocate joining the EU.
It is well known that socialism is an ideology that ignores the individual and focuses all its attention on the collective. Marx, the preeminent socialist economic theoretician, divided individuals into classes based on the function they have in producing economic value; Lenin, Mao, and others have iterated their own versions of Marxist class theory.
Wherever socialists have carried their ideology to its completion, the result has been the same in terms of the people: in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet, tens of millions of people were starved to death or otherwise killed by the regime; in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, one-quarter of the country’s 8 million people were annihilated in the name of the state’s ideology.
The meeting between Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte this Thursday in Brussels was not just another appointment about Ukraine. It was, in fact, a discussion about how to transform the European economy for a new stage of rearmament.
The President of the European Commission and the Secretary General of NATO met at Rutte’s private residence to prepare for the Atlantic summit in Ankara in July. But the focus of the conversation was how to increase industrial defence production in Europe and how to do it quickly. Very quickly.
The European Commission, the unelected executive arm of the European Union, assured Europeans in 2019 that it was not spending their hard-earned taxpayer money on supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). In response to a question by Charlie Weimers, a Swedish Member of European Parliament, about the Commission’s funding of the MB, European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas said:
“[T]he European Commission does not finance extremists. On the contrary, we have very strong oversight and audit of our financing… and if you have evidence to the contrary, I would be very interested to have it.”
As an American living in Europe, I am frequently asked if my compatriots understand the extent of the damage being done to all facets of transatlantic relations by the Trump administration’s bullying policies. My answer is, sadly, no.
More and more Europeans no longer view the United States as a reliable ally. The reasons are not hard to find. The president has threatened to leave NATO, sidelined allies in negotiations over Ukraine’s future, imposed steep tariffs on the European Union and threatened to seize Greenland by force — prompting Europeans to prepare for the real prospect of military conflict with their oldest ally. One recent survey found that one-quarter or more of respondents in some countries — including France, Germany and Spain — see the United States as a rival or adversary. Another found that an absolute majority view Trump as an “enemy” of Europe and U.S. foreign policy as “recolonization.” Polls also reflect a growing belief that China is a more dependable partner.
We pay to defend them and absorb $200 billion in annual trade deficits
“… Their argument is the shepherd needs the sheep.
So why are we getting shorn?”
As world leaders grapple with Donald Trump’s second term, his war with Iran has accelerated European multipolarism, with leaders on the continent searching for alternative solutions to American isolationism. How far should Europe pool security and defence? Should there be a European version of the Anglo ‘Five Eyes’ alliance, as the Netherlands’s coalition government, led by their new prime minister Rob Jetten, has suggested? Is the proposal from Renew Europe – the European Parliament’s centrist grouping – for a Nato-like trade alliance between European countries and their democratic allies – like Canada, Japan and South Korea – realistic?
