With no phones or aides, EU leaders held secret ‘therapy night’ to discuss Trump: Report

Earlier this year, around 30 European leaders gathered at the EU headquarters to candidly discuss US President Donald Trump’s coercive campaign against Europe, and their discussions continued for several hours past midnight, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The heads of government and state met with no phones, no recordings, and no aides present to maintain absolute secrecy. Their talks —at times slipping into venting about Trump— were so candid that some leaders described the meeting as a ‘therapy night’.

The meeting took place in the third week of January when an American attack on Greenland appeared likely and French soldiers had joined the Danish military in securing the island against a potential American invasion. Denmark had deployed demolition teams to blow up the island’s airstrips to deny comfortable landing sites to an invading force, and blood and medical supplies had been stockpiled to sustain any armed conflict.

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For the first time, Europe was preparing for a war with the United States.

Eventually, whether because of logistical challenges, financial constraints, or the distractions to which he is prone, Trump did not invade Greenland and instead shifted his attention to Iran.

But Trump had fundamentally broken his relationship with Europe, and that break-up defined the discussions at the January meeting — and the subsequent trajectory of European politics.

‘We are drawing a line here’: Europe firms up the break-up with US

French President Emmanuel Macron summed up the mood at the meeting by saying “we are drawing a line here”, according to the Journal.

Macron was referring to Trump’s repeated threats to invade, occupy, and annex Denmark’s island of Greenland.

Macron warned his fellow European leaders that over-reliance on the United States for security was a risk they could no longer afford — he had been issuing the warning for years under the French commitment to strategic autonomy.

“There is no going back,” said Macron.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said that Europe risked becoming “a miserable slave” to the United States. Some leaders complained that Trump was interested in extractive energy deals rather than traditional security arrangements.

At the January ‘therapy summit’, European leaders also concluded that the flattery-laden approach mastered by Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte could work only in the short term. British intelligence agency MI6 concluded that the strategy was “subject to the law of diminishing returns”.

That meant the main takeaway from the meeting was that Europe had to become the guarantor of its own security and operate on the assumption that American support might not be available.

For the past two years, Europe had already been on a rearmament drive, equipping its militaries, reviving defence industrial bases, improving joint operations, and reducing its dependence on the United States. In recent months, that effort has extended beyond the defence sector as European leaders realised that integration with American technology and financial companies created dependencies that could be weaponised against them.

As a result, governments from France to the Netherlands have been removing American technology from their systems and moving to European open-source software. The transition has advanced to the point where authorities are mandating the use of European alternatives to everyday services such as Microsoft's Office and Teams, and Zoom.

European leaders have also doubled down on investments in the space sector and artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce dependence on the United States.