President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb 7. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
BRUSSELS — The disclosure of a Trump team group chat left Europeans baffled at the way sensitive military planning was handled and the dramatic way it was revealed. As for the mentions of Europe? Many here took the screenshots as confirmation in private of what this administration has signaled in public all along: disdain for America’s longtime allies.
The White House acknowledged that top officials discussed military plans on an unclassified chat application, after the Atlantic reported Monday that its top editor was accidentally added to a Signal chat where Trump’s national security team plotted an attack on Houthi militants in Yemen.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 24 denied reports that top White House officials inadvertently shared sensitive military plans via the Signal app. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Allison Robbert/The Washington Post)
The unfiltered glimpse into conversations in President Donald Trump’s inner circle — with Europeans cast as “pathetic” beneficiaries of U.S. strikes on Yemen — exposed the extent of resentment and the dismissal of Washington’s closest military and diplomatic partners, European officials and analysts said Tuesday.
“In the amazing story of the Signal group coordinating Yemen air strikes, Vice President JD Vance once again comes out as driven by deep anti-European resentment,” former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt posted on social media.
“US Vice President and Secretary of Defense loathe Europe (as they try to extort money out of it),” wrote Mike Martin, a member of the British Parliament who sits on the Defense Select Committee.
Reactions from the top echelons of European capitals were relatively muted on Tuesday. In response to questions from The Post, the German government only said it had “acknowledged the reports” on the Signal chat.
But European lawmakers, media commentators and former officials were more outspoken.
Germany’s Der Spiegel described the leak as “an airstrike planned like a teenage party,” while in France, it drew a mix of bewilderment and ridicule in defense circles.
Retired French Army Lt. Gen. Michel Yakovleff, who served at NATO headquarters, described the officials involved as “a bunch of incompetent, arrogant idiots” who have “no clue” about operational security.
“When you have that level of incompetence, anything is possible,” he told French channel LCI.
In the Signal chat, a person identified as Vance questions whether the United States expending military assets on securing nearby shipping lanes would be just another example of “bailing Europe out again.”
“VP: I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” a user identified as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responds. “It’s PATHETIC.”
The administration’s impression of Europe as a continent of freeloaders living off American largesse will not exactly come as a shock to many. U.S. officials have indicated similar sentiments in recent weeks, including Vance who scolded Europeans at the Munich Security Conference, pressing them to embrace the far right. Bad allies and “dysfunctional” are some of the ways officials in the Trump team have described European powers since entering the White House.
Yet the stark insight into their private messages showed this was not a negotiating tactic, analysts said. It has added to European calls to limit reliance on Washington, and could stoke fears here that their most powerful ally might one day undermine them.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, the and real estate investor Steve Witkoff, said Europe was “dysfunctional today.” Witkoff also dismissed British-French proposals for a European-led force to back a Ukraine ceasefire as “a posture and a pose,” and dismissed European concerns of future threats from Russia.
European officials are navigating the line between trying to keep Trump on board and preparing for the worst, as they seek talks to avert a spiraling trade war and adjust to his bid for rapprochement with Russia. The continent’s leaders have vowed to embark on a military buildup, facing a reckoning over the future of U.S. commitments to European security.
“JD Vance and his mates clearly aren’t fit to run a group chat, let alone the world’s strongest military force,” British lawmaker Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote on Tuesday. “It has to make our security services nervous about the intelligence we’re sharing with them.”
Brando Benifei, a member of the European Parliament from Italy and head of the legislative body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said in an interview that rather than shocking, the disclosures merely confirmed a disdainful view of Europe that administration officials have already spelled out — particularly when they first landed in Europe in February, for an AI summit in Paris and the annual security conference in Munich.
Now, though, it was clear the messaging “is not a stance for negotiations,” Benifei said. “They are saying this in a private context, and we need to take seriously what they’ve said, and we need to be continuing down two directions.”
One is an attempt to engage with Washington — an effort he and other European parliamentarians will make during a scheduled visit to the District in April. The other, he said, was for Europe to forge ahead quickly with efforts to “build more autonomy,” including for its security.
What worried him most, he said, was a breakdown in trust not only between politicians, but between Europeans and Americans. “This message exchange shows what we have been saying many times, that we need to change the narrative, because the narrative on Europe in the U.S. is becoming nasty, but to be frank, the narrative on the U.S. in Europe is also becoming like that,” he added.
“The trust of our people on the utility and strength of our transatlantic bond is falling quickly, and not in fringe groups, but in large areas of public opinion.”
For German conservative CDU lawmaker Kerstin Vieregge, a senior member of the outgoing parliamentary defense committee, the private comments on European allies “come hardly as a surprise” after the recent attitudes expressed.
As the United States was “no longer a reliable” partner, it was time for Europeans to “finally act decisively” to be able to defend themselves “in the worst case scenario, even without the help of our American friends,” she said in emailed comments. “We must not waste any more time by continuing to get bogged down in debates about the reliability of the United States as a guarantor of Europe’s security policy.”
Faiola reported from Rome, Timsit from London and Brady from Berlin. William Booth in London contributed to this report.