The biggest threat facing Europe is not a Trump invasion. It’s his global political revolution | Mark Leonard

I am convinced that Europe's new right' is a radically contemporary movement. Defeating it means understanding its critique of liberalism

European governments are terrified of Donald Trump's threats on trade, Greenland and the future of Nato. But the biggest threat is not that Trump invades an ally or leaves Europe at the mercy of Russia. It is that his ideological movement could transform Europe from the inside.

A year after Trump's return to the White House, his second American revolution" is radiating outward into Europe. The Epstein files reveal how this began clumsily in 2018 with Steve Bannon; but it has become a much more sophisticated partnership with the second coming of Trump and the rise to power of JD Vance. The US National Security Strategy published by the White House in November called for strengthening the growing influence of patriotic" European parties such as Reform UK, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), Fidesz in Hungary and Vox in Spain. As with the communist movements of the cold war, these nationalist, populist and in some cases far-right parties are best understood not as isolated national phenomena but as expressions of a shared intellectual project - a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power.

Mark Leonard is the author of the report The new right: anatomy of a global political revolution. He is director of the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations