[Politico] EUCO-What is the US President Doing at the European Council?

The President of the United States is not typically on the guest list for European Council meetings. Technically, he wasn’t invited this time, either. But Donald Trump had some burning information he insisted on sharing with EU leaders currently gathering in Maastricht for a four-day summit on EU-China relations. 

From inside his palace in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, the US president crashed the council session this morning. “I know you’re all meeting to talk about your relationship with China,” Trump greets the room via a video address. “So I figured I’d save you some time and tell you the truth – because nobody else will.” He then continued to warn European heads of state about cooperation with China by pointing to human rights abuses concerning the Uyghurs. 

“Let’s get one thing straight: China is playing you,” Trump reads in a weirdly robotic tone. He warned that if the EU were to expand economic partnership with China, the US would not “clean up the mess when it blows up in your face,” as the US President so diplomatically put it.

There is one in the room who specifically welcomes the US President’s words of wisdom – despite clear differences in their stance towards China. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán expressed support for Trump in an official press statement. “Me and him, we have disagreements on certain topics such as China. For us, China is a friend. They promised to help the Hungarian people, and I promised to help the Hungarian people,” he told POLITICO. When asked his opinion about the fact that Donald Trump invited himself to a European Council meeting, the Hungarian President applauded Trump’s initiative: “Brussels, they are always at places that they are not supposed to be in, for example pushing their ideology on China. Who can blame Trump if he does it to Brussels?”

For others, the US President’s words of wisdom are not so welcome. “As the EU, we have our arrangements on this issue,” French President Emanuel Macron told POLITICO. “And the U.S should focus on their own.”

What exactly those EU arrangements are, however, remains vague. The Global Gateways Initiative – promoting partnerships “in line with the EU’s values and standards”  – keeps being thrown around in the room, while others call for a focus on intra-European relations. “We have to rely on ourselves,” Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro maintains. “China and the US have shown that they are not reliable partners”.

The European Council’s goal is to agree on a resolution on how to balance China-EU relations at the end of the four days. However, Trump’s intervention clearly disrupted the discussions. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged to refocus the conversation, but so far, the EU leaders have not managed to reach any agreement – neither on common definitions of human rights violations, nor on practical issues such as funding. The coming days will show if the summit yields any tangible results – and whether other global leaders will follow suit by taking a virtual trip to Europe.