The White House No Longer Counts on Europe
The highest-ranking officials in the US administration - the vice president, the national security adviser, the ministers of defence and foreign affairs, and the director of the CIA - used the Signal app to coordinate the US attack on the Yemeni Houthis in March. This is reminiscent of the schoolboy mistake of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who nine years ago, as the State Department, kept her secret information on a private server.
But the current problem is more serious. President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Michael Waltz, did not notice that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, who has also been critical of the White House chief for a long time, was also in the chat group. It is no wonder that Trump was "furious" about the case, according to sources at Politico. The Atlantic, of course, provided a transcript of the communication between the security chiefs.
American allies have reason to wonder about the security of their communications with the current US presidential administration at a time of a series of security crises and strained US-European relations. Waltz has now dusted himself off and accepted personal responsibility for his mistakes. Despite his anger, Trump has not dismissed him. He clearly does not want to be a part of a team that is currently conducting complex negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, Europeans can confirm from the leaked communications what the current members of the presidential administration think of them. In short, the eavesdropping is accompanied by the idea of "transactional security" – allies should pay the bills for US military actions taken on their behalf.
Vice President J.D. Vance bluntly questioned the US intervention against Yemen's Houthis, who have been threatening shipping in the Red Sea, a maritime link between Asia and Europe, with missile strikes for 16 months. According to Vance, Europe should be the main concern here, because forty percent of European trade "passes" through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and only three percent of American trade. However, the latter is seen as "incompetent", as we learned this week from Trump's man for peace negotiations in Ukraine, Steve Witkoff, in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Can't the latest case be taken as another warning that Europeans can no longer rely on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty on mutual assistance? The West is falling apart in two before our eyes, and it seems that there is no way back.
In connection with the information leak, the statement of the well-known political scientist Ivan Krastev in the Financial Times may also sound like a memento: "In recent years, the old continent has been trying to defend the status quo, which in reality has long ceased to exist. Moreover, it is wasting energy and money trying to restore a world that will never return."
Miloš Balabán, Právo Daily