But the publication of further messages by The Atlantic quickly proved that, either Trump and his administration had told lies that would have made Richard Nixon blush, or that the US government no longer knows how to classify extremely sensitive information — information that if leaked could cost the lives of US military personnel. 

It is difficult to know which of these explanations is worse.

The exchanges on the Signal chat also offer a number of worrying insights into the Trump administration. 

The first is Washington’s contempt for Europe. The public scolding of Europe for not spending enough on defence is nothing new. 

But here was US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, on a Trump administration chat group venting about Europe’s “freeloading” to other members of Trump’s cabinet.

European militaries are, according to Hegseth, unable to strike Houthi insurgents in Yemen and protect the Straits of Hormuz, a critical Red Sea squeeze point on the route to and from the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. 

Europe, he wrote, was “PATHETIC”.

Vice president JD Vance agreed. 

Putting aside that nobody in Washington checked to see if European militaries, such as France and Britain, were willing to carry out strikes in Yemen, what is clear is that Vance and Hegseth are being sincere in their visceral dislike of Europe. 

This is not performative criticism.

A goal of successive United States administrations, from presidents Eisenhower to Biden, was for the US to remain as the preeminent military power in the Middle East. 

Strategically this made sense; basing US forces in the Arabian Peninsula allowed the US to thwart Soviet interests during the Cold War; more recently the US presence, such as the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, has served to deter Iranian aggression in the region.

Regimes, like those of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, quickly came to rely upon US military assistance for their survival. 

Large-scale purchases of US military equipment, and related, paid-for assistance from US military advisers, was a price governments were willing to pay for an acknowledged reliance upon US security support. 

When Britain complained in the 1950s and 1960s that the Saudi government was funding insurgents in British-controlled South Arabia, Washington was unmoved. London’s claims to control the Suez Canal were squashed. 

The message from America was clear: Britain’s day in the Middle East was done.

Hegseth’s aspiration to reduce the US military’s presence in the region and for European navies to take on more of the burden of policing the Red Sea may seem like an excellent way to deliver on Trump’s commitment to cut the US government’s defence bill. 

But such a move would also weaken US influence in the region, and likely lead to a realignment of relations by Gulf states towards Europe but also, as is increasingly the case, towards China.

A relationship based on a complete lack of respect is a short path to abuse. 

The Trump administration has made no secret of its loathing for the EU, including on trade and Brussels’ insistence on setting high standard for American imports.

The question is whether an administration so cavalier in its approach to passing on highly sensitive communications — and with such a deep resentment of Europe — could be tempted to leverage the use of America’s vastly superior intelligence capabilities to gain an advantage over Europe.

Intelligence sharing between European states and the US has been critical during the last decade in pushing back against espionage, sabotage, and assassinations perpetrated by state actors such as Russia and China, as well as preventing terrorist attacks by Islamist terror organisations and those from the far-right.

But the US has a well-known history of accessing the communications of European leaders and governments — including most infamously the mobile phone of the former German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

What might the Trump administration be willing to do to gain access to the communications of French president Emmanuel Macron or German chancellor Friedrich Merz? 

And what about sensitive European research on AI or satellite technologies? 

Would an increasingly belligerent US administration be willing to steal intellectual property if they felt that an EU-funded defence project had gained an exceptional edge in an area of interest?

Europe cannot take the risk of trusting a Trump administration that threatens economic war and wants to seize the sovereign territory — Greenland — of EU member state Denmark.

A European Commission taskforce recently recommended establishing a new EU intelligence service. 

The chair of the task force, former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, urged EU member states “to trust each other” when it came to intelligence. 

That will not be possible with governments like those of Hungary and Slovakia — both sympathetic to the Russian government — in the room. 

Instead, intelligence capabilities will have to be built up between European states that share common values and interests, including outside of EU structures.

It is difficult to see how a coalition of European intelligence services could become a highly-capable global intelligence alliance, one much less dependent on US assistance, without the support of Britain which remains the best resourced state in Europe when it comes to intelligence.

Alex Younger, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), recently warned that Europe was now in “a new era” and that, “international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules or multilateral institutions, they’re going to be determined by strongmen.”

The required response is obvious — Europe needs to grow its own teeth if its democracies are going to survive the onslaught from Washington and Moscow.

Edward Burke is a lecturer in War Studies at University College Dublin