There is a certain tension in the way that American conservatism looks at Europe. On the one hand, Donald Trump and his allies insist that European countries need to step up, behave like serious world powers and take on much more military responsibility.
On the other hand, many American right-wingers display contempt for a continent they regard as impotent, decadent and basically doomed. And they have a special contempt for the current structure through which Europeans act in concert, the bureaucratized pseudo-confederacy (see, I’m expressing contempt myself) of the European Union.
As a consequence, American conservatives tend to sympathize with European parties of the further right, because they’re ranged against the Eurocrat consensus. But these parties are often more inclined to retreat into nationalist self-preservation than to embrace concerted European action. So Europeans who recall that America has often been complicit in Europe’s strategic emasculation (starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s "friendly” push to take over from the British Empire) might reasonably suspect that when figures like Elon Musk boost parties like the Alternative for Germany, they are tacitly encouraging Europe to turn ever more inward and leave the global field to the USA.
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