The Trump Administration’s difficulties with the European and UK elite are only starting. Differences over the amount of military spending by members of NATO, and their work to sustain the war versus Trump’s labors to end it have received the most attention. Most European states are reluctantly increasing defense spending, and Trump’s efforts will bring an end to the war. Once it ends, there will be issue of re-building Ukraine. The costs will be gargantuan, and inevitable debates regarding how reconstruction will occur, who will do it, how will the costs be paid, as well as the right security measures for postwar Ukraine will stress the relationship between the UK and Europe on the one hand and the Trump administration on the other.

However contentious reconstructing Ukraine will be, by far the greatest trouble between Trump and the UK and European elite centers on immigration. The European and UK elite want the status quo, which is endless immigration of millions of mostly young men from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southwest Asia to Europe. This affects almost every European state from Ireland to Greece, only small number of states including Hungary and Poland have avoided this fate. In every sense that matters, Europe and the UK have an Open Borders policy that is rapidly changing the economic, political, and social life of Europe. This is a bit like Mark Twain’s remark about the weather, everyone notices it, but no one does anything about it. That suits the European elite just fine. Every hour, every day, every year, brings in more immigrants.

The UK once thought it was protected from invasion by the English Channel. While it protected the UK from Napoleon, today it does not save the UK from human traffickers using small boats to ferry people across. For the UK alone, 162,677 illegal migrants crossed since 2018. Over 11,000 have crossed the Channel from France to the UK so far in 2025, up 50% from last year. Net migration into the UK is estimated to be about 525,000 people a year, or the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh each year. The strength of the Reform Party in the local elections on May 1 was an indicator of public opinion and outrage at fecklessness of the Labour government or the Tory governments before it. The uniparty in the UK, Europe, and the U.S. want ceaseless immigration.

British citizens and Europeans know that the UK and Europe will be forever changed if those policies are not reversed, just as Americans knew that their country would be lost had Trump not won in 2024.

Of course, there is no indication that the UK and European elites want to do so. To the contrary, every indication is that they seek more immigration. There may be a policy or two that fiddles around the edges, or Keir Starmer will once again tout Labour’s empty promise to "smash the gangs” that human traffic people into the UK. But everyone knows they will do nothing to stop or even curtail immigration. The Duchess of Windsor said that you could never be too rich or too thin. If she were a Labour politician today, she would have added "or have too much immigration.”

The U.S. faced a similar problem due to the Biden’s administration’s open borders policy when 12 to 15 million entered the U.S.—in fact, no one really knows how many millions arrived. The Trump administration has closed the border, while starting the task of deportations. Trump shows what the UK and Europe also could accomplish if there were the will to do so.

But there is not, and that reveals much. The central question is: why is there endless mass immigration. The answer is: bad as it is, mass immigration is even worse than it seems.

The immigration issue is a stalking horse for two competing conceptions of the value of the West and its civilization. In essence, mass immigration is the weapon the UK, European, and U.S. elite have chosen to destroy Western civilization. For these elites, including those behind the Biden administration’s open borders strategy, that is the precisely the point. Mass immigration is the most effective weapon the elite employ to alter their countries fundamentally and forever with little fear of reversal due to their hold on power.

That is, before Trump. He has broken their headlock on political control and so provides the chance to save Western civilization. Some early skirmishing has already occurred. Vice President J.D. Vance’s February 14, 2025, speech to the 61st meeting of the Munich Security Conference was the start. Vice President Vance noted that immigration was Europe’s greatest security problem, and that the elite were ignoring this problem, thereby weakening democratic institutions and free speech. This was a critically important address, but its lessons were not heeded by European establishment. In fact, they were rejected.

The battlelines are drawn.

The European elite will reject any measure to stop immigration because this is the tool to end traditional European nation states and unhinge Western civilization. The UK and European elite will not accept populism or populist parties, despite what the people want through their voting and demonstrations.

In fact, what the European elite have done is caused their own legitimacy crisis. This is the source of tension between the Western European elite and their own people. It is also a source of tensions between the Trump administration and the Western European elite. In this unequal fight, the British and European peoples need help.

It falls to the Trump administration to work with allies in Europe to save Europeans from increasingly totalitarian governments. The U.S. finds itself arrayed against a tyrannical Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruling the People’s Republic of China, an authoritarian Russia, and an increasingly tyrannical governments in Western Europe. While trouble with the PRC is to be expected due to the actions of the CCP, there is possibility of improving relations with Russia once the Ukraine war is ended. The European elites also pose their own unique challenges and compel a response.

If there is no change in behavior, mass immigration will begin to evince greater political impact in Western countries. The political elite will steer a course that involves greater political suppression of native Europeans and political parties that seek to advance their interests. At the same time, they will reward rising sectarian groups that are flexing their political muscles. That is a recipe for sectarian violence in the UK and Western Europe and for profound trouble in the Atlantic relationship.

In the UK, the Starmer government all but tells the British people to drop dead. It seeks to avoid any serious investigation and accountability into the ongoing rape gang scandal which victimized over 40 years many hundreds of thousands of white, working class girls by adult men of overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim background. Many leftist politicians including serving Cabinet members Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are increasingly depended upon Muslim votes. Due to this dependence, the Labour government recently rejected a national inquiry into the rape gangs. In France on March 31, Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the National Rally Party, was found guilty by a Paris court and sentenced to four years in prison, two years of which was suspended. As a result, she was de facto prevented from running in the 2027 presidential election. In May, the German establishment employed its Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), its FBI or MI5, to surveil with the ultimate objective of banning what is—by some polls—the largest political party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which seeks to end mass immigration.

These examples illustrate that the European elite have all but declared war on their people and populist parties and continue to ignore them while employing the levers of state power to against them. If they continue on their path, the UK and European states will continue devolve into increasingly open sectarian conflict and jeopardize what it is not theirs to endanger, the continuation of the West and its civilization. They will not change their path of their own volition and are certain that they can outlast the Trump administration. They will do their utmost to ensure a Democrat wins in 2028.

In 1593, when the Huguenot King of France Henry IV converted to Catholicism to unite his kingdom, he purportedly told a friend that "Paris is worth a mass.” And saving Western civilization is worth a fight. The Trump administration needs to develop a menu of strategies to prevent UK and Western European elites from destroying it through the weapon of mass immigration.

To pressure these governments for change President Trump, Vice President Vance, and senior officials have to raise the big issue of the negative consequences of immigration at every meeting and in speeches. The bully pulpit can go some way to call attention consistently the UK and Western European elite’s actions and to keep these issues front and center when President Trump meets with these leaders. Trump might ask Starmer directly about the rape gangs and what is being done to stop them or Chancellor Merz about the suppression of the AfD. Other steps include travel advisories and cautions to let Americans know that their right to free speech on social media platforms will be violated by the UK, France, and Germany when Americans are in these countries. Trump administration officials can also raise the profile of groups like "Blue Labour” in the UK and of political parties like Reform, National Assembly, and Alternative for Germany will ensure immigration remains a center of attention precisely as their populations want.

In addition to steps that the Trump administration already is taking in education, another useful measure would be for the Trump administration to create a Commission on Western civilization, with UK and Western, Central, and Eastern European members, to identify actions that should be adopted.

Tough love is also needed. Senator Tom Cotton has proposed to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that the U.S. Intelligence Community refrain from sharing intelligence with Germany’s BfV and deny requests for surveilling AfD until the German government treats the AfD as a legitimate opposition party. Curtailing cooperation in intelligence sharing and a U.S. refusal to surveil political parties like Reform, National Rally, or AfD, is important but the Trump administration should evaluate the next step of warning these political parties if they are surveilled by domestic intelligence services. In 2016 and 2017, Trump, his campaign, and members of his campaign, and then his administration know what it is like to be under government surveillance. Aiding these parties with lessons learned and other means will help them avoid and thwart their governments’ race to totalitarianism.

Trump’s greatest contribution is to state that he will support UK and Western European political parties and political movements that support Western civilization and oppose those that do not. In truth, there are both pro-Western civilization and anti-Western civilization movements in the political life of the U.S., UK, and Western Europe.

Social media might be useful in some instances. Unfortunately, the fact that the Panopticon that is the EU and UK government mean that is circumspect or even dangerous as one may receive a police visit or be incarcerated for free expression. The number of Europeans who have been persecuted are numerous and include journalist and Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. In November 2024, she received a visit from Essex police for a tweet she had posted which was classified by the police as "a non-crime hate incident.” Totalitarians do love their neologisms. In the history of totalitarian thought, one has to return to Dzerzhinsky, Beria, or Pol Pot, to find another equally chilling synonym. As frightening as Pearson’s experience was, there are many other, far worse examples of British citizens, once known as the freest people in the world, now persecuted by their government. The need for Western Europeans to be able to communicate with a low possibility of government interception, not needed since World War II, has now returned.

Despite the obstacles and the urgency of the hour, there is reason for optimism and courage. Both of which have returned to Western civilization in no small measure due to Trump’s election and the energy of his administration. Political change is possible. Populist movements are on the rise because Western populations see the damage to Western civilization and want it repaired. This spirit was evinced the renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. It revealed the startlingly beautiful architecture and sublime features of an archetype of Western civilization. At its reopening in December, French President Macron called it a "shock of hope.” It was but more than just the narrow sense Macron meant. It was a "shock of hope” for Western civilization. It shows that the skills needed for the restoration were not lost but remain and were linked by their great trades and abilities to the men who built it over 800 years ago. The restoration also united people, demonstrating that the nation, indeed, the civilization and people of good will around the world, were behind it.

The restoration is also a metaphor for the return of the West. Like Notre-Dame, the West may be restored too. Trump’s visit there was fitting because he is a leader who is the champion of the West and so should be at one of its iconic, impressive, and most beautiful locations as its restoration was shown to all.

Both went through fire. Both now have a renaissance. However horrific, damage done can be repaired.

The repair of that damage requires the accurate identification of how bad it is so that the laborious repair work can commence. Immigration is the barometer. The UK and European elite need an intervention to recognize the damage and how the destruction to their societies may be repaired, as the populist parties demand.

The legitimacy crisis of UK and European elite must be resolved in favor of the European people. The Western European elite must once again truly heed their populations. Of course, the elite will not and so the legitimacy crisis will continue to worsen and the problem for the Atlantic relationship will become acute.

There is trouble ahead in relationship between the U.S. and the elite in the UK and Europe. It has little to do with defense spending and Ukraine. It has everything to do with valuing the West and saving it from those who are destroying it. Trump and the populist movement in the U.S., UK, and Europe and their many allies elsewhere in Europe and around the world, value Western civilization. The Western elites do not. It is a stark choice. The West should have never been brought to this point, but here it is, and the damage must be repaired. Confidence in Western civilization must return. Everything depends upon Trump and the populist movements success to save the West from its elites.

Bradley A. Thayer is a Contributing Columnist for Warroom and is the coauthor of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure. Find him on Gettr and Truth as @bradleythayer and as @bradthayer on X. His opinions are his own.