Brussels in February is a landscape of persistent drizzle and even more persistent mediocrity. It is the perfect stage for the latest installment of the European Union’s favorite long-running tragicomedy: ‘The Waiting for Donald.’ As our esteemed leaders prepare for Thursday’s emergency meeting, the air in the Berlaymont is thick not with the scent of decisive action, but with the stale aroma of lukewarm espresso and collective existential dread. The narrative currently being peddled by the journalistic class is that Donald Trump’s rhetorical grenades are ‘wearing thin.’ One must admire the linguistic gymnastics required to frame utter paralysis as a form of sophisticated fatigue.

To suggest that Trump’s jibes are merely ‘wearing thin’ is like saying a repetitive guillotine is starting to become a bit of a nuisance for the neck. The reality, which our continental technocrats are loath to admit, is that the theater of the absurd has simply moved into its third act. For years, the European elite have treated the American security umbrella as a permanent fixture of the cosmos, much like gravity or the bloated pensions of the French civil service. Now that the umbrella is being used as a rhetorical club by a man who views international diplomacy as a high-stakes episode of a Florida property dispute, the panic is palpable. Yet, in true European fashion, this panic is being carefully sublimated into the only thing Brussels knows how to produce: meetings.

Thursday’s ‘emergency’ gathering is a masterpiece of bureaucratic performance art. One can already envision the choreographed arrival of the motorcades, the somber faces practiced in the mirror to convey a blend of ‘Deep Concern’ and ‘Resilient Unity.’ They will sit in rooms designed to suppress any flicker of human spontaneity and discuss 'strategic autonomy'—that delightful euphemism for ‘we should have started building a real army twenty years ago, but we spent the money on subsidies for artisanal goat cheese instead.’ It is a term used by people who want the prestige of a superpower with the defense budget of a neighborhood watch program.

Trump’s particular brand of transactional thuggery is, of course, vulgar. It lacks the refined, indirect cruelty that we Europeans prefer. But his genius—if we must use such a terrifying word—lies in his ability to expose the fundamental hollowness of the European project’s military pretensions. He has pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes, and rather than reaching for a pair of trousers, the European leaders are forming a committee to debate the thread count of a hypothetical robe. They find his comments ‘unacceptable,’ a word that in diplomatic circles has come to mean ‘entirely accurate but deeply impolite.’

There is a weary irony in watching the French and Germans attempt to lead this rudderless ship. Paris dreams of a European army led, naturally, by France, while Berlin remains trapped in its perpetual state of post-war penance, terrified that any tank built with German steel might accidentally start following a map from 1941. Meanwhile, the smaller nations huddle in the corners, praying that the American electorate finds something more interesting to focus on in November than the cost-benefit analysis of defending Estonia. It is a cacophony of competing interests disguised as a chorus of solidarity.

Nick Beake suggests the ball is in Europe’s court. One wonders if Europe even remembers what a ball looks like, or if it would require a three-year feasibility study to determine the aerodynamic properties of a sphere. The truth is that ‘wearing thin’ is a defense mechanism. It is easier for Macron, Scholz, and the rest of the Brussels menagerie to claim they are ‘over’ Trump’s antics than to admit they are utterly dependent on a country that is currently debating its own participation in the 21st century.

We are witnessing the final gasps of the post-Cold War delusion. The emergency meeting will conclude with a communiqué—a document so carefully scrubbed of meaning that it could be used as a sedative. They will promise to ‘strengthen the European pillar of NATO,’ a phrase that has been uttered so many times it has lost all connection to the physical world. They will return to their capitals, the rain will continue to fall over the Grand Place, and everyone will go back to pretending that the world is a stable, sensible place governed by rules and precedents.

But the mask is slipping. The sophistication they project is merely a veneer for a profound, intellectual exhaustion. They are not annoyed by Trump because he is wrong; they are annoyed because he is the ghost of Christmas Future, showing them a world where Europe is no longer a protagonist, but a quaint museum of former greatness, desperately checking its phone to see if its increasingly erratic landlord is about to change the locks. Until Thursday, then—bring on the canapés, for the ship is sinking and the orchestra is playing a very expensive, very dull waltz.