President Donald Trump’s latest round of Europe-bashing has the U.S.’s allies across the Atlantic revisiting a perennial question: Why does Trump hate Europe so much? Trump’s disdain for America’s one-time partners has been on prominent display in the past week — first in Trump’s newly released national security strategy, which suggested that Europe was suffering from civilizational decline, and then in Trump’s exclusive interview with POLITICO, where he chided the “decaying” continent’s leaders as “weak.” In Europe, Trump’s criticisms were met with more familiar consternation — and calls to speed up plans for a future where the continent cannot rely on American security support. But where does Trump’s animosity for Europe actually come from? To find out, I reached out to a scholar who’d been recommended to me by sources in MAGA world as someone who actually understands their foreign policy thinking (even if he doesn’t agree with it). “He does seem to divide the world into strength and weakness, and he pays attention to strength, and he kind of ignores weakness,” said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on Trump’s strained relations with the continent. “And he has long characterized the Europeans as weak.” Shapiro explained that Trump has long blamed Europe’s weakness on its low levels of military spending and its dependence on American security might. But his critique seems to have taken on a new vehemence during his second term thanks to input from new advisers like Vice President JD Vance, who have successfully cast Europe as a liberal bulwark in a global culture war between MAGA-style “nationalists” and so-called globalists. Like many young conservatives, Shapiro explained, Vance has come to believe that “it was these bastions of liberal power in the culture and in the government that stymied the first Trump term, so you needed to attack the universities, the think tanks, the foundations, the finance industry, and, of course, the deep state.” In the eyes of MAGA, he said, “Europe is one of these liberal bastions.” This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Trump’s recent posture toward Europe brings to mind the old adage that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Do you think Trump hates Europe, or does he just think it’s irrelevant? My main impression is that he’s pretty indifferent toward it. There are moments when specific European countries or the EU really pisses him off and he expresses something that seems close to hatred, but mostly he doesn’t seem very focused on it. Why do you think that is? He does seem to divide the world into strength and weakness, and he pays attention to strength, and he kind of ignores weakness. And he has long characterized the Europeans as weak for a bunch of different reasons having to do with what seems to him to be a decadence in their society, their immigration, their social welfare states, their lack of apparent military vigor. All of those things seem to put them in the weak category, and in Trump’s world, if you’re in the weak category, he doesn’t pay much attention to you. What about more prosaic things like the trade imbalance and NATO spending? Do those contribute to his disdain, or does it originate from a more guttural place? I get the impression that it is more at a guttural level. It always seemed to me that the NATO spending debate was just a stick with which to beat the NATO allies. He has long understood that that’s something that they felt a little bit guilty about, and that’s something that American presidents had beat them about for a while, so he just sort of took it to an 11. The trade deficit is something that’s more serious for him. He’s paid quite a bit of attention to that in every country, so it’s in the trade area where he takes Europeans most seriously. But because they’re so weak and so dependent on the United States for security, he hasn’t had to deal with their trade problems in the same way. He’s able to threaten them on security, and they have folded pretty quickly. Does some of his animosity originate from his pre-presidency when he did business in Europe? He likes to blame Europeans for nixing some of his business transactions, like a golf course in Ireland. How serious do you think that is? I think that’s been important in forming his opinion of the EU rather than of Europe as a whole. He never seems to refer to the EU without referring to the fact that they blocked his golf course in Ireland. It wasn’t even the EU that blocked it, actually — it was an Irish local government authority — but it conforms to the general MAGA view of the EU as overly bureaucratic, anti-development and basically as an extension of the American liberal approach to development and regulation, which Trump certainly does hate. That’s part of what led Trump and his movement more generally to put the EU in the category of supporters of liberal America. In that sense, the fight against the EU in particular — but also against the other liberal regimes in Europe — became an extension of their domestic political battle with liberals in America. That effort to pull Europe as a whole into the American culture war by positioning it as a repository of all the liberal pieties that MAGA has come to hate — that seems kind of new. That is new for the second term, yeah. Where do you think that’s coming from? It definitely seems to be coming from [Vice President] JD Vance and the sort of philosophers who support him — the Patrick Deneens and Yoram Hazonys. Those types of people see liberal Europe as quite decadent and as part of the overall liberal problem in the world. You can also trace some of it back to Steve Bannon, who has definitely been talking about this stuff for a while. There does seem to be a real preoccupation with the idea that Europe is suffering from some sort of civilizational decline or civilization collapse. For instance, in both the new national security strategy and in his remarks to POLITICO this week, Trump has suggested that Europe is “decaying.” What do you make of that? This is a bit of a projection, right? If you look at the numbers in terms of immigration and diversity, the United States is further ahead in that decay — if you want to call it that — than Europe. There was this view that emerged among MAGA elites in the interregnum that it wasn’t enough to win the presidency in order to successfully change America. You had to attack all of the bastions of liberal power. It was these bastions of liberal power in the culture and in the government that stymied the first Trump term, so you needed to attack the universities, the think tanks, the foundations, the finance industry and, of course, the deep state, which is the first target. It was only through attacking these liberal bastions and conquering them to your cause that you could have a truly transformative effect. One of the things that they seem to have picked up while contemplating this theory is that Europe is one of these liberal bastions. Europe is a support for liberals in the United States, in part because Europe is the place where Americans get their sense of how the world views them. It’s ironic that that image of a decadent Europe coexists with the rise of far-right parties across the continent. Obviously, the Trump administration has supported those parties and allied with them, but at least in France and Germany, the momentum seems to be behind these parties at the moment. That presents them with an avenue to destroy liberal Europe’s support for liberal America by essentially transforming Europe into an illiberal regime. That is the vector of attack on liberal Europe. There has been this idea that’s developed amongst the populist parties in Europe since Brexit that they’re not really trying to leave the EU or destroy the EU; they’re trying to remake the EU in their nationalist and sovereigntist image. That’s perfect for what the Trump people are trying to do, which is not destroy the EU fully, but destroy the EU as a support for liberal ideas in the world and the United States. You mentioned the vice president, who has become a very prominent mouthpiece for this adversarial approach to Europe — most obviously in his speech at Munich earlier this year. Do you think he’s just following Trump’s guttural dislike of Europe or is he advancing his own independent anti-European agenda? A little of both. I think that Vance, like any good vice president, is very careful not to get crosswise with his boss and not contradict him in any way. So the fact that Trump isn’t opposed to this and that he can support it to a degree is very, very important. But I think that a lot of these ideas come from Vance independently, at least in detail. What he’s doing is nudging Trump along this road. He’s thinking about what will appeal to Trump, and he’s mostly been getting it right. But I think that especially when it comes to this sort of culture war stuff with Europe, he’s more of a source than a follower. During this latest round of Trump’s Euro-bashing, did anything stand out to you as new or novel? Or was it all of a piece with what you had heard before? It was novel relative to a year ago, but not relative to February and since then. But it’s a new mechanism of describing it — through a national security strategy document and through interviews with the president. The same arguments have achieved a sort of higher status, I would say, in the last week or so. You could sit around in Europe — as I did — and argue about the degree to which this really was what the Trump administration was doing, or whether this was just a faction — and you can still have that argument, because the Trump administration is generally quite inconsistent and incoherent when it comes to this kind of thing — but I think it’s undoubtedly achieved a greater status in the last week or two. How do you think Europe should deal with Trump’s recurring animosity towards the continent? It seems they’ve settled on a strategy of flattery, but do you think that’s effective in the long run? No, I think that’s the exact opposite of effective. If you recall what I said at the beginning, Trump abhors weakness, and flattery is the sort of ultimate manifestation of weakness. Every time the Europeans show up and flatter Trump, it enables them to have a good meeting with him, but it conveys the impression to him that they are weak, and so it increases his policy demands against them. We’ve seen that over and over again. The Europeans showed up and thought they had changed his Ukraine position, they had a great meeting, he said good things about them, they went home and a few weeks later, he had a totally different Ukraine position that they’re now having to deal with. The flattery has achieved the sense in the Trump administration that they can do anything they want to the Europeans, and they’ll basically swallow it. They haven’t done what some other countries have done, like the Chinese or the Brazilians, or even the Canadians to some degree, which is to stand up to Trump and show him that he has to deal with them as strong actors. And that’s a shame, because the Europeans — while they obviously have an asymmetric dependence on the United States, and they have some weaknesses — are a lot stronger than a lot of other countries, especially if they were working together. I think they have some capacity to do that, but they haven’t really managed it as of yet. Maybe this will be a wake-up call to do that.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission will ask the Donald Trump administration to exempt a list of sensitive EU goods ranging from whiskies through to medical equipment from U.S. tariffs, according to a 27-page list seen by POLITICO. Pasta, cheese, wines and spirits, as well as olive oil and sunglasses, are among the priority sectors that Brussels wants Washington to shield from higher tariffs, along with diamonds, tools, metal pipes, ship engine parts, industrial equipment, fabrics, shoes, hats, ceramics and industrial robots.  The wish list was finalized Friday by EU countries and will be presented to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer at a meeting with the bloc’s trade ministers on Monday, POLITICO previously reported.  These sensitive export sectors were not covered under the trade deal struck in July by Trump and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.  The deal, detailed in a joint statement the following month, exempted some items, such as aircraft and generic drugs, but imposed a 15 percent tariff on most other European exports, while the EU committed to scrap its tariffs on U.S. industrial goods entirely. The EU’s pitch for tariff relief comes just as Trump is pivoting away from the across-the-board tariffs he imposed on U.S. trading partners earlier this year, following a string of off-year election defeats for Republican candidates in which the rising cost of living swayed voters.  A week ago, he struck down “reciprocal tariffs” on more than 200 goods worldwide, including products used in fertilizer, tropical fruits like bananas and pineapples, coffee and several spices like cocoa, cinnamon and coriander. In his latest move, Trump on Thursday eliminated tariffs on a large swath of Brazilian agricultural goods, including beef and coffee, dropping the additional, punitive tariffs he imposed this summer as he feuded with Brazil’s government and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The EU’s ask to lift tariffs on pasta is particularly sensitive in Italy, where the industry is reeling from the Trump administration’s threat to impose 92 percent tariffs from January in an anti-dumping case, on top of the 15 percent already in force — a level so high as to prohibit exports to the United States. This story has been updated.

The U.S. needs to push ahead with a new round of sanctions to cripple Russian industry and finally bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, Finnish leader Alexander Stubb told POLITICO in an interview. Stubb, who previously used a golf trip with U.S. president Donald Trump to press him to take a harder line on the Russian leader, said it’s time for Washington to turn up the economic heat on Moscow. Trump “either goes for carrot or for stick,” the Nordic leader said. “He tried the carrot in Alaska and in his phone conversation with Putin. And when he realized that the Russians are not going to move and they’re not interested in peace, he [Trump] went for stick.” “Right now we’re in stick mode,” said Stubb. “The next step should be sanctions — the sanctions package in the [U.S.] Senate.” He was referring to a sweeping Russia sanctions bill that has wide bipartisan support in the Senate and has stalled pending presidential approval. On Sunday night, Trump said the proposed legislation would be “OK with [him],” emboldening the the Senate to move forward on Monday. Last month, Trump placed new sanctions on two of Russia’s largest oil companies — Rosneft and Lukoil — a move the Finnish president applauded. Stubb said the U.S. is right to move ahead with the bill given Putin’s unwillingness to embrace a ceasefire. “The only person Putin listens to is an oligarch,” Finland’s leader said. “In that sense, if the oligarchs come to the conclusion in Russia that economically this is too complicated, then things might start to happen.” Asked if Europe should try to engage directly with Putin as proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Stubb said: “Whenever that moment [for direct talks] comes, which it will at some stage … it’ll have to be coordinated.” For now, Stubb said he was happy with Washington’s taking a leading role. “If we can contribute … if we can mediate, if we can have conversations with the Ukrainians, with the Americans, with the Europeans, I think that’s good enough,” he said, adding that a just and lasting peace is more important that Europe getting a photo op. CEASEFIRE ‘NOT IN THE CARDS’ On the prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine, Stubb was downbeat, noting he had pressed for a ceasefire deadline around Easter, ahead of the Aug. 15 Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, and again ahead of the upcoming Nov. 22-23 G20 gathering in Johannesburg. “Failing all this and reading the room right now, having had conversations with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy on Friday, with my American friends and European friends over the past few weeks, I just don’t see that [a ceasefire] in the cards,” he added. The best way to bring a ceasefire closer is to maintain pressure on Russia and keep backing Ukraine, he said. Stubb’s visit to Brussels comes as the EU scrambles to keep Ukraine financially afloat beyond the first quarter of 2026. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed tapping a trove of Russian frozen assets held in Belgium, but the country’s prime minister has so far resisted, citing concerns about Russian retaliation. The Finnish leader, who met with Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever earlier on Monday, said he didn’t want to put  “public pressure” on de Wever but predicted with “high confidence” that Europe would ultimately come up with a funding solution. One way is to combine various options spelled out in a Commission paper, he said, rather than take the entire amount needed to cover Ukraine’s funding shortfall from the Russian assets. The Commission has proposed increasing the EU budget or having capitals raise debt for Ukraine in addition to seizing the assets. “It could also be a combination of these three options, but that’s for the European Council to decide. And of course for Belgium itself,” said Stubb, who also met with von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Monday. Earlier Monday, Polish leader Donald Tusk denounced an explosion on a Polish rail line used to deliver aid to Ukraine as an “act of sabotage.” “This is the new normal,” Stubb said. “My recommendation is to stay calm. Have a little bit more sisu [grit]. Don’t get too flustered.”

The president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, said a ceasefire in Ukraine is unlikely before the end of the year, pointing to the spring as a more plausible time for progress in ending the war. His remarks, in an interview with the Associated Press, come as Europe scrambles to unlock financing for Kyiv’s war effort and the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tries to limit the damage from a major corruption scandal in the country. “I’m not very optimistic about achieving a ceasefire or the beginning of peace negotiations, at least this year,” Stubb told the AP. He said it would be good to “get something going” on a ceasefire by March, when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion will have entered a fifth year. As Ukraine and the EU try to maintain American support for Kyiv, Stubb is one of the European leaders with the best relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump. The two have played golf together and Stubb has participated in group meetings with Trump and Zelenskyy. The Finnish president said he can “explain to President Trump what Finland went through [in its wars with Russia] or how I see the situation on the battlefield, or how do you deal with Putin.” If Trump “accepts one out of 10 ideas, that’s good,” Stubb added. The U.S. has pivoted in its stance on Ukraine, moving last month to sanction Russian energy giants Lukoil and Rosneft. Stubb said Trump did “an excellent job,” but he also called for Russia’s “military or defense industry” to be hit. Stubb said the reason Washington canceled a planned Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest was because the U.S. realized “the Russians haven’t moved an inch.” There was “no point in taking President Trump into a situation whereby he doesn’t get a deal or anything,” he said. The failed Budapest summit is “another example of a strategic mistake by the Russians. They had an opportunity and they blew it,” Stubb said. Ukraine’s goodwill with Western governments has taken a hit over an alleged $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector which implicated current and former top officials and some of Zelenskyy’s allies.   The corruption scandal has rocked Kyiv as Ukraine is urging EU partners to take a huge risk and agree on a €140 billion reparation loan taken from frozen Russian state assets. The country needs financial assistance to shore up its budget and continue the war effort ahead of a financing cliff-edge in 2026.

BELÉM, Brazil — Thousands of Indigenous people and environmental activists marched through the streets Saturday carrying flags, banners and one unflattering statue of U.S. President Donald Trump in the first major protest outside an annual United Nations climate conference in four years. Traffic around the COP30 summit venue in Belém, Brazil, halted as protesters from across the world, including Indigenous activists from the Amazon region, braved the tropical heat to demand governments step up efforts to combat climate change and protect nature. “For the first time, at a COP event, we, the indigenous peoples, are occupying this space and speaking for ourselves,” said Takak Xikrin, a member of the local Xikrin people. Members of his community carried banners decrying water contamination in their territory, while other Indigenous activists protested logging and plans for oil drilling in the Amazon. “It is a historic moment for us to be part of this march … and show the world that we are the answer,” he added. “Indigenous knowledge is fundamental to protecting the Amazon. … If Indigenous people do not protect the Amazon, the world will suffer a collapse.” Local media quoted police as saying 20,000 people attended the protest. The march came after two protests centered on Indigenous rights disrupted the entrance to the conference earlier this week. On Tuesday, youth activists and indigenous protesters forced their way into the venue, clashing with United Nations security, followed by another peaceful demonstration Friday that saw one Indigenous group block access to the entrance for several hours. The protests set apart this conference, hosted in democratic Brazil, from the past three years of summits held in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan — autocratic states with little tolerance for demonstrations. Many protesters relished being back in the streets, noting this was the first such march since the 2021 conference in Glasgow, Scotland — a youth-led protest that took place under pandemic restrictions — and the 2019 Madrid summit. “Past COPs have restricted people’s voices. It’s important that the COP has open streets for demonstration so that when the polluters are here, we can raise our voices to them a little stronger,” said Pema Wangmo Lama, a 26-year-old activist from Nepal. “At this COP, people can be upfront, and Indigenous people have been very upfront about the things they and their community have faced” as a result of climate change and environmental degradation, said Wangmo Lama, herself a member of Nepal’s Mugum Indigenous group. At COP30, Brazil’s government has highlighted the role of Indigenous peoples in fighting global warming and protecting the Amazon, which plays a key role in regulating the world’s climate but is under threat from logging, mining, agriculture and infrastructure projects. But many Indigenous groups say their concerns are not addressed in the negotiating rooms. “The meaningful representation of Indigenous people has never been a reality” at climate summits, Wangmo Lama said. “Our voices are not heard.” Climate activists were also part of the march, calling for action rather than more “blah, blah, blah,” a catchphrase coined by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who founded the global movement Fridays for Future. “It’s so motivating to see people who are on the front line, who are seriously affected by the climate crisis, coming together across the world,” said Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan, an activist from Gambia working with Climate Action Network. “I hope leaders are going to see this power and listen to the power and do the right thing.” And at least one marcher shared his thoughts about Trump, who has worked to undermine climate action and chosen not to send a U.S. delegation to this year’s talks. The internationally known Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, whose past works include a series of 26-foot-tall statues commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, created an 8.5-foot copper sculpture of Trump that his son, Lasse, pulled along throughout the march. Lasse Galschiøt had 6,000 3D-printed figurines he was handing out along the way. The statue depicts the U.S. president naked, holding a golf club in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. He sits on the back of a thin man who stands on a pedestal that reads, “The Orange Plague.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Trump is the big guy here, and the small guy represents you and me, Denmark, Brazil and the climate that he’s trying to control,” said Lasse Galschiøt, adding: “He shouldn’t be on our shoulders.” At a press conference Friday night, COP30 CEO Ana Toni said the summit has more than 900 Indigenous participants, much higher than the 300 registered at last year’s gathering in Azerbaijan, and promised to listen to them. Brazil came under pressure from the U.N. earlier this week over the protests disrupting access. The Brazilian government has also faced months of complaints about its decision to host the summit in Belém, a port city near the mouth of the Amazon River where a shortage of hotel rooms has sent lodging costs soaring and prompted some countries and even the U.N. to consider limiting the number of people they sent. “We have a COP in the Amazon. We could have chosen to have a COP in São Paulo, Rio or Brasília, but we would not be seeing so many Indigenous peoples,” Toni said. “They wouldn’t have had their voice heard.”

When President Donald Trump touched down at Al Udeid Air Base last weekend, two of the most powerful men in Qatar were already waiting. Qatar’s leaders had been ambivalent about such a show of deference on their own soil ever since U.S. officials had quietly suggested a month earlier that they might meet with the president as Air Force One refueled en route to Asia, according to two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to share details about private discussions. The emir and prime minister’s ultimate decision to go and greet Trump was in keeping with the tiny but wealthy Gulf nation’s yearslong campaign to transform itself from first-term foe to one of Trump’s most trusted diplomatic partners. “The emir broke all the protocols for President Trump because he understands the value of the relationship,” one of the people said. Like others quoted in this article, the person was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. After getting caught off guard early in Trump’s first term, with Trump briefly siding with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a blockade against Doha, the country has spent several years building its relationship with Trump — including hiring Trump allies, investing in projects and positioning themselves as indispensable fixers in a volatile region. In addition, the Qataris gave America a $200 million jet that could eventually be used as Air Force One. Now, 10 months into Trump’s second term, that strategy is paying off, turning the country into a behind-the-scenes architect for some of Trump’s biggest diplomatic wins and enabling it to wield influence that even its own leaders once considered unimaginable. The Qataris, the second person familiar with the matter said, “like dealing with transactional business people. [Special envoy Steve] Witkoff and Trump are transactional guys and the Qataris are at their heart business people, so they get each other.” When Trump summoned the reporters aboard the plane to the conference room where he sat between two powerful Qatari leaders, he praised Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani as “one of the great rulers of the world” and said that Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani “has been my friend to the world.” Trump, who boasts often about having “ended eight wars,” recognized that Qatar was “a very big factor” in cementing his biggest foreign policy accomplishment to date: the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. But Qatar’s quiet work to advance Trump’s agenda around the world, including its role in achieving the breakthrough in Gaza, goes much further than even his praise suggested. Qatari officials helped draft the 21-point framework that was branded the “Trump peace plan,” according to two people familiar with the effort. A senior Qatari envoy also arranged and attended the meeting between Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya that paved the way for the phase one agreement. “President Trump has a great relationship with Qatar, which was deepened by his historic trip to the Middle East that generated trillions of dollars in economic deals for our country,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. Kelly acknowledged that Qatar was “integral to the success” of Israel-Hamas negotiations, “including by providing feedback on the President’s historic 20-point plan for peace.” The Gaza ceasefire is just one example of Qatar’s growing reach. Located across the Persian Gulf from Iran, Qatar has also become a key U.S. partner in intelligence sharing and conflict mediation, including assisting with American bombing campaigns against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, coordinating with Israel’s Mossad during the 12-day war with Iran, and pursuing peace talks in Africa and the Caucasus, according to the two people familiar with the matter. Qatar’s diplomatic efforts, while underway during the first Trump term, slowed under President Joe Biden, whose administration asked Doha to pause its mediation in the Rwanda-Congo conflict in favor of a French-led process. (That mediation was ultimately unsuccessful.) When Trump returned to the White House, he formally deputized Qatar to resume the work and dangled the promise of White House signing ceremonies if they were successful. That paved the way for an eventual Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal — an agreement that Trump later trumpeted as proof that he was ending wars across the globe. SOME REPUBLICAN PUSHBACK Not everyone in Trump’s orbit has supported Doha’s rise including MAGA heavyweights Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who have criticized Qatar for maintaining relations with terror groups like Hamas and questioned whether deputizing them and collaborating to such a degree is truly “America First.” Loomer in particular denounced the Pentagon’s plan to allow Qatar to build an air base in Idaho as “an abomination.” Qatari and U.S. officials both dismissed Loomer’s characterization, noting that Doha has hosted offices for Hamas and Hezbollah for decades at Washington’s request. Trump’s eagerness to meet the emir and prime minister aboard Air Force One last weekend, another White House official said, “tells you all you need to know” about how much credence he gives this specific Loomer critique. “They’re doing a lot to help,” the official said of Qatar. Qatar, for its part, sees global mediation as central to its identity. “Mediation is something actually enshrined in our constitution,” Al Thani said on Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Today we are defined as global moderators not only for the region … our mediation is becoming more global … from Latin America to Africa to Asia.” Al Thani also acknowledged the importance of Qatar’s relationship with the U.S., stating that his “whole focus” was protecting and strengthening his partnerships around trade, defense and energy. Qatar was one of three Gulf countries Trump visited in May on the first major foreign trip of his term, during which he focused largely on investment deals and lavished praise on his hosts, promising the days of American presidents centering foreign policy around — and “lecturing” other countries about — shared democratic values were a thing of the past. It was on that trip that Trump accepted Qatar’s offer of a 13-year-old Boeing 747-8 jet, valued by industry analysts at roughly $200 million, as a “free gift” to be refurbished by the Air Force for future use as a presidential aircraft. The lavish gift, which raised ethical and security concerns, has become a symbol of Qatar’s approach to Trump and the degree to which monied public and private entities have gained influence over the president and his foreign policy. HOW QATAR GOT HERE Qatar’s determination to be a key player and partner in Trump’s second term arose largely out of a row during his first term,in which Trump sided with the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia after they had accused their regional rival of supporting Islamist movements, and organized a blockade designed to starve the country. Trump’s initial alignment with the other nations over Qatar, a key ally and host to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, went against the recommendations of his own secretaries of State and Defense. And while the spat was quickly smoothed over, it prompted Qatari officials to hire additional U.S. lobbyists with close Trump ties — including current Attorney General Pam Bondi — to set about making inroads. Trump hosted Al Thani at the White House in 2018 and again a year later. And Doha’s role in hosting talks between the U.S. and the Taliban helped solidify not just an eventual agreement for America’s exit from Afghanistan but a new level of trust between Trump’s administration and Qatari leaders. “They know how close [Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman] is to Trump and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of where the Gulf is going,” said Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a global risk-assessment firm based in New York. “And they are unique in that they have these relationships with a lot of these rogue players that Trump wants to resolve problems with.” Soon after Trump’s defeat in 2020, Qatar’s emir invited him back to conferences in Doha and remained in close touch during Trump’s years in political exile, according to a person familiar with the matter. In late 2024, Al Thani traveled to Florida to see the president-elect in person ahead of his inauguration. At the same time, a firm backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund has gotten behind the Trump Organization’s project to build a Trump-branded golf resort in Doha. Qatar’s decadeslong willingness to host offices for Hamas and Hezbollah in Doha, at the request of the U.S. and other Arab countries, and to host America’s largest military installation in the Middle East, have also allowed it to play a bigger diplomatic role. When Israel fired missiles at Hamas officials who were in Doha for ceasefire negotiations, Qatar’s leaders were shocked to have their country’s sovereignty violated by an ally of their own close ally. The lack of warning from the U.S., which the White House blamed on Israel failing to notify them in advance of the strikes, also tested Qatar’s relationship with the administration. According to the two people familiar with the situation, Qatari officials made it clear to Trump’s team that they would no longer serve as the main interlocutor with Hamas in Gaza peace talks unless two conditions were met: a public apology from Israel’s leader and some sort of U.S. security guarantee in the event of another attack. The White House got the message. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Trump at the White House in October, the president had him call Qatar’s emir to read an apology — crafted by the U.S. and Qatar — over the phone. As POLITICO previously reported, a senior Qatari official close to the emir was in the Oval Office for the call so that Netanyahu couldn’t misrepresent his apology to Israeli media afterward. And when Trump published an executive order pledging that the U.S. would defend Qatar against any future attack, a security guarantee similar to Article V of the NATO charter, Qatari officials were pleasantly surprised at just how far the president had gone. “It exceeded our expectations by a lot,” one Qatari official said. “We didn’t expect [the White House] to make it public. But we were very happy.”

BRUSSELS — Donald Trump should allow Ukraine to use America’s long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said.  In an interview with POLITICO, Orpo warned that Russia represents a “permanent threat” to European security and urged the U.S. president to grant Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend itself and bring Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. Orpo’s comments came as Trump announced sweeping sanctions on Russian state-owned oil firms, in the most significant step he has taken as president to put pressure on Putin over the Ukraine war. “Putin believes only in power,” Orpo said as he arrived in Brussels for a summit of European Union leaders at a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s more than three-year war against Russian invaders. “If we want to stop the war we have to be on the same level or even stronger” than Russia, Orpo said. After failing to persuade Putin to meet Trump for ceasefire talks in Hungary, the U.S. seems to be running out of patience with the Kremlin. On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury announced sanctions against Moscow’s biggest oil firms, Rosneft and Lukoil, citing Russia’s “lack of serious commitment to a peace process.” “Today is a very big day in terms of what we are doing. These are tremendous sanctions,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “We hope that they won’t be on for long. We hope that the war will be settled.” Trump displayed frustration with Putin’s foot-dragging in negotiations to end the invasion. “Every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere. They just don’t go anywhere,” he said. But Trump added that he did not want to let Ukraine use American Tomahawks. It takes “a year of intense training” to learn how to fire the “highly complex” missiles, Trump said, and that’s too long to wait. Finland is one of the EU’s most influential countries with Trump after its president, Alexander Stubb, bonded with the American leader on the golf course. The Finns are among the most hawkish in Europe on security as they share a 1,300 kilometer border with Russia.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy argues Putin only showed an interest in peace with Trump when he suggested he would let Ukraine use Tomahawks — and as soon as Trump took the cruise missiles off the table, Russia backtracked on peace.  “Putin believes only in power,” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said. | Radek Pietruszka/EPA So should Trump give Zelenskyy the missiles he wants? “I really hope that they can get the capabilities that they need to [counter]strike Russia and defend themselves,” Orpo said. “We know that this is a question between Zelenskyy and the United States and I really hope they can find a solution.”  On Thursday, EU leaders in Brussels aim to make progress on a plan to raid Russia’s frozen financial assets for a “reparations loan” to Ukraine. One question is what sort of conditions the EU should attach to the loan, which could be worth as much as €140 billion, enough to keep Ukraine in the fight for two or three years. France is reportedly leading the push to make Ukraine spend the money on weapons manufactured in Europe. Some other countries, including Sweden, are said to want Ukraine to be able to choose how to use the loan.  Orpo argues Europe must have a say. “I don’t think that whole freedom is the best way,” he said. “We give loans and so we need to do it in good cooperation with them … we need to know that they will use this huge amount of money in a responsible way.”  That means, where possible, buying European. “I hope that they can buy more and more weapons from Europe,” Orpo said. “But we know that we don’t have all those capabilities and weapons in Europe that they need. So it’s reality that they also must be allowed to buy from the U.S., if needed.” He added: “This is not only a question of Tomahawks. If we can find a solution on how we can finance Ukraine strongly and find a long-term solution using frozen assets it will be so strong a message to Putin that he understands that he cannot win this war. This can be a game changer.”

LONDON — The Scottish government doesn’t want to pay the bill for Donald Trump and JD Vance’s summer trips — and London doesn’t want to stump up the cash either. Scotland’s Finance Secretary Shona Robison, who represents the independence-supporting Scottish National Party, wants to recoup around £20 million in policing and security costs from the London-based Treasury for the U.S. president’s trip to his Scottish golf courses in July, according to the BBC. Robison also wants Whitehall to pay £6 million for policing Vance’s holiday in Ayrshire in August. However, the British government insists Scotland must pick up the tab as they were private visits rather than official government business. In a letter to Chief Secretary to the Treasury James Murray, Robison said: “There is a clear previous precedent, where the U.K. government has supported policing costs for visits to devolved nations by foreign dignitaries.” The Treasury says it will only foot the bill when it has issued a formal invitation to the visiting leaders. Yet Robison insisted Trump’s trip was “diplomatically significant” and not covering the cost would “strain devolved budgets [and] set a troubling precedent for future high-profile visits.” During his July visit, Trump met Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Scottish First Minister John Swinney. A U.K. government spokesperson said: “These were private visits by the president and vice president to Scotland, not official U.K. government business. The Scottish government are responsible for policing costs in Scotland as per agreed devolved funding arrangements.” Officials in Edinburgh disagree. “The visits imposed substantial operational and financial burdens on Scottish public services,” Scottish Public Finance Minister Ivan McKee said. “These visits were significant in terms of U.K. government international relations, with the prime minister formally meeting the president during his visit in two separate locations in Scotland. The costs cannot be deemed solely a matter for the Scottish government.”

LONDON — A growing number of Americans have applied to become British citizens since Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year. Home Office figures showed a 50 percent increase in citizenship applications from the U.S., with a record 2,194 applications between April and June, compared to 1,465 in the same period the year before. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, a staunch critic of the U.S. president, said the figures reflected the capital city’s “liberal values.” “Prominent figures in the U.S. and U.K. deliberately talk down our country, and in particular our capital city,” Khan told the Guardian newspaper Monday evening, stressing that the latest statistics proved them wrong. Since the start of 2025, the Home Office has received citizenship applications from 4,125 U.S. citizens, a 40 percent rise on 2024. “For many Americans I speak with, it’s because of our values,” the London mayor added ahead of Trump’s historic second state visit, which begins Tuesday. “As well as being the U.K.’s financial, legal and governmental center, in London we offer an ecosystem that is unparalleled around the world, from our brilliant universities to our culture and our creative industries.” And Khan suggested it was London’s “liberal values that make us stand out — celebrating our diversity in London as a strength, not as a threat to society.” Khan and Trump have frequently clashed. During a visit to his Scottish golf courses in July, the U.S. president called Khan “a nasty person” who’s “done a terrible job” in office. Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended Khan as “a friend of mine, actually.”

LONDON — It was June 2019, and the president of the United States was taking tea with the future British king.  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half.   Trump could barely get a word in edgeways. Charles did “most of the talking,” the president told a TV interviewer the day after they met.   One topic dominated. “He is …” Trump said, hesitating momentarily, “… he is really into climate change.”  Without global action on the climate, Charles wrote back in 2010, the world is on “the brink of potential disaster.” At the London royal residence Clarence House during Trump’s first U.K. state visit, face-to-face with its most powerful inhabitant, Charles decided to speak on behalf of the planet.  It was tea with a side of climate catastrophe.   Six years on, the stage is set for Charles — now king — to try to sway the president again. A second term Trump — bolder, brasher, and no less destructive to global efforts to tackle climate change — is heading back to the U.K. for an unprecedented second state visit and to another meeting with the king. They meet at Windsor Castle on Wednesday.  In the years between the two visits — with extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding increasingly attributed to a changing climate — Charles’ convictions have only strengthened, say those who know him well.  “His views have not changed and will not change. If anything I think he feels it, probably, more strongly than ever,” said the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, a friend and biographer of the king. “It seems self-evident to me, therefore, that he would regard President Trump’s attitude towards climate change and the environment as potentially calamitous.”   But stakes are higher for the king in 2025 than in 2019. The meeting represents an extraordinary influencing opportunity for a monarch who has spent his life deploying “soft power” in the service of cherished environmental causes. But now he is head of state, any overtly political conversation about climate change risks stress-testing the U.K.’s constitutional settlement between government and monarch.  Charles has a duty, says constitutional expert Craig Prescott, to “support the [elected] government of the day in what they want to achieve in foreign relations.”  And “in a broad sense,” he added, “that means ‘getting on the good side of Trump.’”  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half. | Pool Photo by Toby Melville via Getty Images Labour’s focus on an ambitious green transition, though, gives the king some leeway to speak in favor of international climate action.  Both Dimbleby and Ian Skelly, a former speechwriter for Charles who co-wrote his 2010 book Harmony, expect him to do exactly that.  “I would be astonished if in this meeting, as at the last meeting , he does not raise the issue of climate change and biodiversity in any chance he has to speak privately to Trump,” said Dimbleby.   The king will be “diplomatic,” Dimbleby added, and would heed his “constitutional duty,” avoiding “saying anything that will allow Trump to think there is a bus ticket between him and the British government. … But he won’t avoid the issue. He cares about it too much.”  “He knows exactly where the limits are,” said Skelly. “He’s not going to start banging the table or anything. … He will outline his concerns in general terms, I have no doubt about that — and perhaps warn the most powerful person in the world about the dangers of doing nothing.”  Buckingham Palace and Downing Street declined to comment when asked whether the king would raise climate with Trump, or whether this has been discussed in preparations for the state visit.  HAVE YOU READ MY BOOK, MR. PRESIDENT?  In the time since that tea at Clarence House, the President has shown no sign that Charles’ entreaties on the part of the planet had any impact. (And they didn’t have much effect at the time, by one insider’s account. Trump complained the conversation “had been terrible,” wrote former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham in her memoir.  “‘Nothing but climate change,’ he groused, rolling his eyes.”)  The U.S. has once again withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. Trump’s Department of Energy has rejected established climate science. America’s fossil fuel firms and investors — some of whom helped Trump get elected — have been invited to “Drill, baby, drill.”  With America out of the fight, the world’s chances of avoiding the direst consequences of climate change have taken a serious blow.  Charles, on the other hand, has only grown more convinced that climate change, unchecked, will cause “inevitable catastrophes,” as he put it in Harmony, his cri-de-coeur on saving the planet.  Dimbleby predicted that, this time around, one subtle way allowing the king to make his point would be to gift Trump a copy of that book — a treatise on environmentalism, traditional wisdom and sustainability that diagnoses “a spiritual void” in modern societies, a void which has “opened the way for what many people see as an excessive personal focus.”  “I’m sure [the king] won’t let [Trump] out of his sight before giving him a copy,” said Dimbleby. Chinese Premier (and Trump’s main geopolitical rival) Xi Jinping already has a copy, said Skelly.  But the meeting comes at a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer — boxed in politically by the need to keep the U.S. on side for the sake of trade, Ukraine and European security — has avoided openly criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science or its embrace of fossil fuels.  His government will not want the king to say or do anything that upsets transatlantic relations. Even when the president, sitting next to Starmer, trashed wind energy ­— the main pillar of U.K. decarbonization plans — on a July visit to his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, the prime minister mustered no defense beyond quietly insisting the U.K. was pursuing a “mix” of energy sources.  If Trump starts railing against windmills again in his chat to the king, he might get a (slightly) more robust response, predicted Skelly. “The response to that will be: ‘What else are we going to do without destroying the Earth?’ That’s the question he’ll come back with, I’d imagine.”  HOW TO TALK TO TRUMP ABOUT CLIMATE  Some who have worked with Trump think that, because of the unique place Britain and the royals occupy in his worldview, Charles stands a better chance than most in getting the president to listen.  “President Trump isn’t going to become an environmentalist over a cup of tea with the king. But I think he’ll definitely hear him out — in a way that maybe he wouldn’t with other folks,” said Michael Martins, founder of the firm Overton Advisory, who was a political and economic specialist at the U.S. embassy in London during the last state visit.  “He likes the pageantry. He likes the optics of it. … Engaging with a king, Trump will feel he’s on the same footing. He will give him more of a hearing than if it was, I don’t know … Ed Miliband.”  Trump has even declared his “love” for Charles.  The royal admiration comes from Trump’s mother. Scottish-born Mary Anne Trump “loved the Queen,” Trump said in July. The ratings-obsessed president appears to consider the late monarch the ultimate TV star. “Whenever the queen was on television, [my mother] wanted to watch,” he said during July’s Turnberry visit.    The king could benefit from an emotional link to First Lady Melania Trump, too. She was present at the 2019 meeting and sat next to Charles at the state banquet that year. In her 2024 memoir, Melania says they “engaged in an interesting conversation about his deep-rooted commitment to environmental conservation.”  She and Trump “exchange letters with King Charles to this day,” Melania wrote. TAKING TEA AT THE END OF THE WORLD  The king will have plenty of chances to make his case.   A state visit provides “quite a lot of time to talk” for monarch and president, said one former senior British government official, granted anonymity to discuss the royals and their relationship with government.  There will be a state banquet plus at least one private meeting in between, they said. Charles may also be able to sneak some choice phrases into any speech he gives at the banquet. Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. | John Keeble/Getty Images The king receives regular briefing papers from the Foreign Office. As the meeting looms, the same person suggested, he may be preparing thoughts on how to combine a lifetime’s campaigning and reading with those briefings, to shape the opportunity to lobby a president.  “He will be reading his foreign policy material with even more interest than normal. He will probably be thinking about whether there is any way in which he can pitch his arguments to Trump that will shift him — a little bit — toward putting his shoulder to the climate change wheel,” the former senior official said.    “He won’t say: ‘You, America, should be doing stuff.’ He will say, ‘Internationally I think it is important we make progress on this and we need to be more ambitious.’ Or he might express concern about some of the impacts of climate change on global weather and all these extreme weather events.”  However he approaches it, 2019 showed how tough it is to move the dial.  After that conversation, Trump told broadcaster Piers Morgan that he thought Charles’ views were “great” and that he had “totally listened to him.” But then he demonstrated that — on the crucial points of how fossil fuels, carbon emissions and climate change are affecting the planet — he totally hadn’t.    “He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster,” Trump said. “And I agree,” he added, before promptly pivoting to an apparent non-sequitur about the U.S. having “crystal clean” water. It was a typically Trumpian obfuscation. Asked about the king’s views during the Turnberry visit, Trump said: “Every time I met with him, he talked about the environment, how important it is. I’m all for it. I think that’s great.”  In nearly the same breath, he ranted about wind energy being “a disaster.”  GOOD LUCK, CHARLIE  “It is difficult, if not impossible, to see [Trump] change his views on climate change, because they’re not informed by his understanding of the science or consequences, but rather by naked politics,” said leading U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann in emailed remarks.   And Trump will come to the meeting prepared, said Martins, the former U.S. Embassy official. “Trump will receive the full briefing on the king’s views on environment. He won’t be going into that blind. He’ll know exactly what the king has said over his career and what his views are on it and how it affects American interests. I don’t anticipate him being surprised by anything the king says.”   He added: “Bashing net zero and President Biden … gets [Trump] political wins.”    To Charles’ long-standing domestic critics, it all highlights the pointlessness of his position.  Donald Trump has even declared his “love” for King Charles III. | Pool Photo by Richard Pohle via Getty Images “He is bound by these constitutional expectations that he does nothing that will upset the apple cart [in U.K./U.S. relations],” said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic, which calls for the abolition of the monarchy. “If he was elected, he’d have a lot more freedom to say what he actually wants.”  “Soft power is a highly questionable concept,” added Smith. It’s only useful, he argued, when backed by something Charles lacks and Trump has by the bucket-load: “Hard power.”  And time may be running out for Charles to deploy even soft power in the climate fight.   Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. If British voters pick Reform at the next election, Charles’ potential advocacy would be restrained by a government opposed to action on climate change.  So how far will Charles go to seize his moment?  He wrote in Harmony: “If we continue to be deluded by the increasingly irresponsible clamour of sceptical voices that doubt man-made climate change, it will soon be too late to reverse the chaos we have helped to unleash.” He feared “failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself” if he did not speak up.   Skelly, the former speechwriter who co-wrote the book, predicted that Charles would walk a fine diplomatic line — but was “not someone to sit on his hands or to remain silent.”   “He was warning about these things 30 years ago and nobody was listening. … He feels increasingly frustrated that time is running out.   “I’d love to be a fly on the wall — because it will be a fascinating conversation.”