Trump and the Domesticated European Elites

Astandard talking point of the American MAGA right is that European nations have become free riders on U.S. taxpayers. The complaint is not baseless: since the end of the Cold War, many European states have allowed their militaries to atrophy while relying on the United States to underwrite global security. Yet this argument misses the less visible benefits of the international system America constructed. The United States benefits not only materially from NATO and other transatlantic institutions, but politically and socially: European elites have been integrated into an American-centered order that shapes their incentives, ambitions, and sense of possibility.

In other words, America’s real advantages derive from shaping the behavior of allied elites and embedding entire regions within a favorable institutional architecture. We are referring to a global order in which the ultimate horizon of vertical mobility is no longer the nation-state, but American institutions, global organizations headquartered in the United States, and American corporations. To understand this dynamic, one need only look across Europe.

For elites in the post-communist member states of the European Union, a career in European institutions represents the pinnacle of advancement. The trajectory is rather familiar: national leadership becomes a stepping stone to Brussels. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, for example, went on to serve as president of the European Council. Numerous Eastern European leaders signal their competence and virtue through their “acceptance” in European circles, and speculation about their eventual transition to EU institutions is routine. Cadres from ruling parties are steadily absorbed into the bureaucratic structures of the Union.

For Western Europeans, whose standards are considerably higher, careers in EU institutions carry less prestige. It is no accident that the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, rose to that position after an underwhelming tenure in German domestic politics, nor that the office has been held by figures from relatively minor states such as Luxembourg. Instead, Western European elites often proceed to what is effectively the final destination of global mobility: the United States. Politics within Western European states, even at the highest levels, increasingly functions not as a terminal destination, but as a platform for even greater transatlantic prestige.

The young Austrian political star Sebastian Kurz, after his chancellorship, quickly became a global strategist for Thiel Capital. Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak transitioned into an advisory role at Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Anthropic. Germany’s former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock serves as president of the United Nations General Assembly, headquartered in New York. Former British prime minister Tony Blair entered into advisory roles with JPMorgan following his time in office, while former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg served as secretary general of NATO for a decade, a position now held by former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, before returning to Norway as finance minister. Former Italian prime Minister Mario Draghi likewise spent part of his career at Goldman Sachs before assuming the highest offices in European governance. The specific positions may differ, but the underlying logic of elite circulation remains remarkably consistent.

The significance of such trajectories becomes clearer when contrasted with cases that fall outside the accepted sphere. When former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder began working for Russian energy giants after leaving office, the reaction in the West was one of immediate and sustained outrage. The response was, in a sense, entirely logical: it implicitly acknowledged that the post-political engagements of national leaders carry significant geopolitical weight. Engagements with Western corporations, institutions, or alliances are treated as neutral or even commendable, whereas analogous ties to rival powers are deeply problematic. This double standard reveals the underlying structure of the transatlantic system established, and now perhaps to be dismantled, by the U.S.

To the MAGA-minded observer, such developments may appear irrelevant as mere careerism with no bearing on American interests, yet this could not be further from the truth. European elites are disincentivized from confronting the United States because they are, in a very real sense, bought, not through crude corruption, but through the promise of status, influence, and post-political careers at the very center of global power under American hegemony.

That political leaders from important nation-states would conclude their careers by relocating to another country is a revealing indicator of American power, but not historically unprecedented. This phenomenon can be understood as a contemporary form of the “domestication of the nobility” that took place in the early modern period—a concept explored by the historian Peter Wilson in Absolutism in Central Europe, drawing on the work of Norbert Elias and Jürgen Freiherr von Krüdener. Wilson describes how, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the lavish courts of Europe were not just beautiful, but also functioned as instruments of political control by pacifying and domesticating the nobility, thereby enabling the consolidation of absolutist states.

Wilson explains this phenomenon:

“The monarch gained a degree of freedom from aristocratic restraint but was only able to become absolute through the development of a court to consolidate his power. Absolutism becomes a process of manipulation and socialisation, rather than one of direct coercion. The ruler’s stronger position permitted the ‘domestication of the nobility’ by offering them the temptations of the court society. These inducements were social, rather than economic or material, reflecting the influence of Weber rather than Marx on these arguments.”

Through the prestige of court life, rulers centralized power by manipulating and socializing the nobility, stripping it of its traditional martial function that had once enabled it to resist the centralization of royal authority. Court ceremony, what Elias termed the “civilizing process,” dulled the nobility’s inherent bellicosity. The grandees, the high aristocracy, were transformed into allies of the ruler in the project of state-building, often serving as heads of proto-ministries.

In the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, the great Hungarian magnates chose to enter the imperial service, staffing the ruler’s chancelleries, while resistance to centralization increasingly shifted to the lower nobility. The parallels to contemporary U.S.-European relations are profound. With the rise of the U.S. as the world’s uncontested superpower, European elites have been similarly “domesticated” by their incorporation into a broader imperial “court,” where participation confers status, security, and opportunity in exchange for relinquishing a large measure of autonomy.

The reactions of European elites to Trump’s often abrasive treatment reveal the persistence of this dynamic. They are, by and large, reluctant to engage in open confrontation. They remain “civilized” in the Eliasian sense, holding out hope for a return to the pre-Trump world. What distinguishes Trump from his predecessors is his apparent indifference (if not hostility) to the entire system of transatlantic elite integration. Where previous administrations maintained the “court” and its attendant rewards, Trump has often treated allied elites with open disdain, undermining the very mechanisms through which they were incorporated into the American-led order. In that sense, he disrupts the logic that has underpinned transatlantic relations for decades.

If access to the court is restricted, or its rewards diminished, European elites may be forced to rediscover a more traditional form of sovereignty. In doing so, they could revert to something resembling the original aristocratic condition—a class once again defined not by domestication, but by its capacity and willingness for conflict. Would this be in America’s interests? Would it be in the interests of the Europeans? Time will soon tell.

*Tomislav Kardum is a Croatian historian and the author of several books. His writing in English has appeared in Quillette, The European Conservative, The Critic, The American Spectator, and Areo.

Source: https://providencemag.com/2026/05/trump-and-the-domesticated-european-elites/