The American Friend

Thanks to Donald Trump, the United States is now Europe’s Enemy

Feb 19, 2025

German poster for The American Friend, 1977

At the Movies

For the past week or so, as the Trump administration has blown up the post-WWII American alliance with Europe that all of us took for granted our whole lives, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Wim Wenders’ 1977 movie The American Friend. I remember watching it in Paris shortly after it came out. I was nineteen years old and having my first solo experience as an American abroad. It was the first time I’d seen an American character in a European movie. I’ll never forget the uncomfortable fascination I felt watching Dennis Hopper slouch around in a cowboy hat, a pack of Marlboros at hand, taking selfies with a Polaroid camera. Hopper played Tom Ripley, an American of absolute amorality and self-absorption, inspired by novelist Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous high-living conman. The casual menace Hopper exudes as Ripley befriends and cajols a German picture framer ill with cancer, Jonathan Zimmerman, played by the German actor Bruno Gantz, into committing a hit job for cash is downright creepy. Yet, to the surprise of both men, a genuine bromance blooms. By casting Hollywood director Samuel Fuller as a character nicknamed “der Amerikaner” and director Nicolas Ray as Ripley’s partner in crime, Wenders turns The American Friend into a meditation on the fatal attraction for Europeans of a particular American brand of cinematic macho masculinity, where men bond through the shared thrill of lawlessness and the lure of easy money, much like the incels and oligarchs thrilling today to Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s blunt use of power to inflict cruelty, smash things that took decades or even centuries to create, and revel in pillaging what is left.

On February 11, Vice President J.D. Vance came swaggering into town to give the keynote address at the Paris summit on artificial intelligence. He wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat, but his demeanor exuded menace dripping with disdain that was just barely constrained by protocol. He minced no words letting Europeans know that their pitiful efforts grow their own artificial intelligence industry would never succeed, that America’s tech giants would crush them, that they’d better stop attempting to regulate America’s tech industry and, oh, don’t even think about turning to China for help.

That the Paris A.I. summit was co-sponsored by India, the ancestral homeland of Vance’s wife, did not merit a mention. As it turned out, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi headed from Paris to Washington where he astoundingly met first with Elon Musk (accompanied by some of his children and two of their mothers), then gave Trump a big hug, told him he had no problem with undocumented Indians being deported in chains, and offered to be an enthusiastic buyer of American fossil fuels. (Drill, baba, drill. We’ll buy whatever you want to sell to us. Just please don’t impose tariffs on our exports, ji.)

The Paris A.I. summit was followed by three days of American verbal firepower trained pitilessly against Europe. Those days felt to me like a scene from another movie, Chinatown; the one where Jack Nicholson keeps slapping Faye Dunaway until she divulges the shocking truth about a girl whose identity Nicholson doesn’t understand: “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter,” Dunaway says between slaps. “She’s my sister and my daughter!” Dunaway finally reveals. With each slap upside the European head, I felt like I could hear the United States saying: “We’re your friend. We’re your enemy. We’re your friend and your enemy!” As Faye Dunaway tells Jack Nicholson when he’s finished slapping her around: “Understand? Or is it too tough for you?”

On February 12, Donald Trump talked to Vladimir Putin for ninety minutes and hung up elated at the prospect of a new era of Russian-dictator-to-American-dictator bonhomie and spoils for oligarchs all around, just as soon as the war in Ukraine was over, which Trump said he would end very soon on Putin’s terms. On February 13, America’s new defense chief, Pete Hegseth, told Europeans in Brussels that Europe was no longer among the United States’ security concerns, that Russia would keep territory seized from Ukraine and that Ukraine would not join NATO. This, before negotiations to end the war had even begun.

A New Sheriff at the O.K. Corral

Then, at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Europeans were treated to a shocking return appearance by shoot ‘em up Vance, who behaved as if he were staging a verbal version of the famous gunfight scene in Gunfight at The O.K. Corral. “There’s a new sheriff in town under Donald Trump’s leadership,” Vance announced in full John Wayne mode. Vance’s Valentine’s Day message from America? A declaration of war on European democracies and the European Union. Vance railed as a true fascist, telling the stunned European audience that the United States considered muzzling far-right hate speech and attempting to fight far-right and Russian disinformation to be the biggest threat to Europe. He then made time to meet with German neo-Nazi party AfD leader Alice Weidel while spurning a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, this with German federal elections less than ten days away.

Vance did not talk about what everyone thought they were there to talk about: Russia’s war against Ukraine.

This succession of bam-bam-bam body blows to the transatlantic alliance has been followed by more and worse. Europe and Ukraine have been shut out of negotiations to end Russia’s war. Trump, incredibly, has blamed Ukraine, for starting the war with Russia, and called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an unelected dictator, parroting Russian talking points like some kind of automaton Putin marionette. Meanwhile, democratic government in the United States continues to crumble under the unrelenting onslaught of Project 2025 and Elon Musk’s demolition derby as he turns the government of the United States of America into another one of his companies. The U.S.A. may soon be, I don’t know, “XYZ.”

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At Least We Have Canada, For Now

In response to the American volley of attacks, French president Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting of European leaders on Monday, February 17, then called a second meeting on Wednesday, February 19, which included European countries that had not attended the first meeting as well as participation by another former American ally under attack, Canada. This gives hope that NATO, the North American Treaty Organization, can survive without the United States with Canada holding up the “North American” bit. O Canada! Thank you, et merci!

Turkey, another NATO member, has now weighed in on Ukraine’s side. This is helpful, and it throws a little sand into the gears of Trump’s rush to do Putin’s bidding. But Canada and Turkey can’t replace the United States having Europe’s back.

Within a span of just a few days, we Europeans find ourselves in a situation where we must not only defend ourselves against Russia but also, now, the United States. The clear goal in Europe of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and the tech broligarchy that is staging a coup against every institution of American government at home in real time as I write this, is to gain unfettered access to Europe’s 400 million citizens’ data and time, reduce Europe to vassalage, destroy European democracies, and break up the European Union. It’s everything the Russians want plus triumphant techno-capitalism. It is terrifying.

Detail, poster designed by the city of Fontainebleau to commemorate the American liberation of the city in August, 1944.

D-Day

Less than a year ago but already of another, far more innocent era, the little village where I have a house an hour south of Paris celebrated the liberation of France from Nazi occupation by the Allied Forces. General Patton liberated the nearby town of Milly-la-Forêt on August 22, 1944. The next day, on August 23, the American 5th regiment, also under the command of General Patton, routed German forces in Fontainebleau. There are still people alive, children at the time, who remember that day. The Americans left some of their hardware behind, and last summer, anyone who owned a WWII-era American jeep, ambulance or other vehicle took them out for a spin. American flags flew over the village soccer field. Across the region, there were parties, fireworks and picnics. The city of Fontainebleau designed a kitschy poster it put up all over town featuring a young American soldier happy to be kissed enthusiastically by a rather hot welcoming French woman as an American flag flies over Fontainebleau. Despite the kitsch, it was profoundly moving, as an American resident who is also a French citizen, to be a part of the historic commemoration. None of us, neither my local French neighbors nor myself, had any reason to suspect, even if Donald Trump was reelected that November, that the United States – France’s oldest ally dating back to the Revolutionary War days when General Lafayette sailed to help George Washington’s troops beat back the British – would turn against France and against Europe so suddenly, so completely, and so ruthlessly.

Commemorative site of French-American friendship in Soulac-sur-Mer, France near the mouth of the Gironde river where General Lafayette passed on the ship Hermione on his second voyage to America in 1780.

At the end of The American Friend, the German picture framer, Zimmerman, dies. It turns out the leukemia he had that was in remission wasn’t any longer. The money he made by assassinating people for Ripley will, after all, be of help to his wife, now widow, and their young son. The American friend, in a warped and twisted way, was a friend after all.

Will America after Donald Trump be a friend, at some future point, to Europe again? Only time will tell. Right now, there is an opportunity for Europe to assert its sovereignty and take control over its own destiny, but we don’t know how we will achieve that or what sacrifices we will have to make, or even if we will be able to unite, in this hour of great need.

We do know this: Nothing can ever be the same after a new sheriff comes to town who calls his old friends his enemies and their mutual enemies his new friends. Trump seems bent on dividing the world into spheres of influence where the biggest bully on the block can seize territory at will and impose whatever kind of extractive regime he likes simply because he can. Russia wants Ukraine? Fine. Trump will take Greenland. Russia wants another piece of Europe? Fine. Trump will take Canada. The European Union? Trump and Putin will make sure its democratic institutions are destroyed, its citizens divided and cowed, turned into mere consumers that are easy prey for predatory capitalists.

The 2024 80th anniversary commemoration of the American liberation of my small French village from Nazi occupation.

As the American in my little French village, I want to apologize to all my neighbors. I’ve seen the United States treat other countries in the world the way it is now treating Europe. I was ashamed then, and I am ashamed now. I am also outraged. As a proud European citizen, I pledge to do all I can to defend the values we once had in common with the United States of America. Vive la France. Vive la République.

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The American Friend

Thanks to Donald Trump, the United States is now Europe’s Enemy

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