Europe must act fast in Trump’s more brutal new world order: Luuk van Middelaar

Luuk van Middelaar is the director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, a think tank he co-founded in 2022. A political theorist and historian by trade, he has written several books and was in the cabinet of the first European Council president Herman Van Rompuy.

Van Middelaar is widely read and cited across Europe for his analysis of the EU’s political evolution, with his books translated into many languages and awarded major European literary prizes.

He writes regularly for leading newspapers including Le Monde, The Guardian, Die Zeit and others, shaping debate on European strategy and geopolitics beyond academia and Brussels policy circles.

This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

What has the start of 2026 told you about the state of geopolitics in Europe?

We have seen an incredible acceleration in these first few weeks of the new year on the side of US President Donald Trump and Washington to start executing his offensive, almost imperial and ideological agenda.

It has been laid out ever since his inauguration a year ago, all the way up to the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December, but it’s like now he’s going into execution mode, with Venezuela and Greenland being the two most visible signs of that.

South China Morning Post