The Latin Mass is back in fashion among America’s practicing Catholics, but will the Gesta Francorum sanctify Fox News host and Grenade Soap Company pitchman Pete Hegseth’s chances of becoming U.S. Secretary of Defense?
“Armed pilgrimages never end well,” says Byzantine historian Henry Hopwood-Phillips, director of the Daotong Strategy Group political consultancy in London.
“A barbaric fury has deplorably afflicted and laid waste the regions of the Orient,” was Pope Urban II’s justification for his 1095 dictum that launched the first of Europe’s seven major crusades, which in great part inspired Hegseth to ink his skin with the crusaders’ Jerusalem cross and the Vatican battle cry “Deus Vult” (God Wills It).
“The jury is still out on the question of which nation will face barbaric fury during the second Trump administration,” Hopwood-Phillips cautions. “Remember, the only fruit of the crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.”
For most democracies, the regions that tormented Urban II are mockingly known today as the Axis of Weasels: Russia’s Vladimir Putin; China’s Xi Jinping; the Iranian mullatory, and North Korea’s tiny totalitarian Kim Jong Un.
At the same time, the manner which Hegseth, Matt Gaetz at Justice, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and all the other of President Donald Trump’s MAGA kinfolk in the past have danced with the terror quartet scares the bejesus out of Europe.
Decoding what happens next has given European leaders a week of walloping hangovers. Yes, I know: Too bad. Trump won, and he won bigly. You want America’s protection? Pay your NATO dues and, in that, Trump is on the money.
Yet there’s no cash payment that can erase the yin-yang difference that percolates between the U.S. and Europe, a contrast as blunt and welcome as an outhouse breeze. To be sure, finding a clearheaded European analysis of how Trump intends to broker any sort of deal between the Axis and the democracies is harder than putting socks on a rooster.
“A new alignment is emerging in Europe under the threat of a Russian-Ukrainian settlement from which Europe would be excluded,” is the French newspaper Le Monde’s attempt at sober soothsaying. “Poland is maneuvering to form a pro-Ukrainian front, along with the more motivated countries. France has resumed its quest for European strategic awakening. In the background, preoccupied with its own political crisis and early elections, Germany is trying to imagine a life without the U.S., on which is has always relied.”
The assessment woefully fails to comfort the wide selection of French politicians, E.U. ambassadors, Ukrainian diplomats and plainclothes NATO officials three drinks into autopsying the 2024 election inside a tapas bar behind the Gare St. Lazare in Paris.
In the hours and days leading up to their post-mortem, Russian state television had re-aired nude photos of America’s future First Lady Melania Trump, described Gabbard as Russia’s “girlfriend,” and broadcast a primetime simulation of a nuclear strike slaughtering 850,000 people in London. Former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, also appeared on camera with threats to turn Kyiv into “a giant melted spot.”
Europeans know that Trump disposed of his challenger because a majority of Americans decided the GOP machine was more domestically reliable than Kamala Harris and the Democrats. MAGA’s misfortune, however, is that there’s not a soul on their team who has anything more than surface understanding of the ghoulish separate reality in which the Axis lives and thrives.
I’m certain — or at least claim to be damn sure — because like many of those at the tapas bar, I’ve spent five decades living and reporting on the barbaric fury inside Russia, China, and their satraps. This is why they’re numb. That’s why they’re hissing and sissing, snuffling and fizzing, and remain terrified to speak on-the-record about Trump 2.0. They fret about intimidation, bullying, and coercion — from both the White House and the Kremlin.
The equal distribution of their fear and loathing is not manufactured.
“I’d describe the global situation as ominous,” a French legislator says. “Trump and Putin both scare me,” an American diplomat adds. “It’s not supposed to be that way.”
A. Craig Copetas is an award-winning reporter, writer and author who has more than a half century covering news and politics for publications including Rolling Stone, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Paris.
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