The Rest of the World Sees the Risk. Why Doesn’t Congress?

As allies brace for escalation, a handful of Republicans could still prevent disaster.

What the rest of the world is seeing now, clearly and without illusion, is something the United States is still refusing to confront: Donald Trump is no longer merely reckless or incompetent. He is being assessed, quietly, urgently, behind closed doors, as “dangerous.”

That word was not uttered by a political opponent, a protester, or a cable news panelist. It was reportedly used by Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, a pro-Trump leader, a CPAC speaker, a man who publicly flatters Trump and boasts of his access to Mar-a-Lago. After a private meeting with the U.S. president earlier this month, Fico returned to Europe so shaken that he told fellow leaders Trump appeared “out of his mind,” that he was concerned about his “psychological state,” and that the encounter left him alarmed by the risk Trump poses.

This did not happen in public. It happened in an informal huddle on the sidelines of an emergency EU summit convened after Trump threatened tariffs and territorial seizure over Greenland, a threat so destabilizing that it triggered what one diplomat later described as a “rupture” in transatlantic relations. According to multiple diplomats from different countries and a senior EU official, Fico was not venting, he was warning.

The reporting, published by POLITICO and then reinforced in an on-the-record interview with one of its authors, is careful and restrained. The journalists do not speculate about diagnoses. They do not claim firsthand witnesses. They waited days, corroborated the account across multiple independent sources, and ran it through editorial standards knowing full well the backlash that would follow. Of course, the backlash came, reflexive denials from Fico, boilerplate “fake news” from the White House, denials that conspicuously avoided addressing the substance of what was said privately.

It isn’t relevant whether or not Trump is medically impaired. What matters is that U.S. allies are now treating his state of mind as a strategic risk factor.

That shift is visible everywhere if you know how to look. European leaders have stopped telling themselves to “take Trump seriously, not literally.” That illusion collapsed the moment threats turned into dates, tariffs, and military implications. The Greenland episode was the breaking point, not because it was unprecedented rhetoric, but because it was a tangible, time-bound threat that revealed how quickly impulse could become policy.

Since then, the response has been quiet but unmistakable: contingency planning, diversification away from U.S. dependence, renewed outreach to other global partners, and an emerging political consensus that firmness, not flattery, is the only viable response. Even leaders who once championed Washington as Europe’s indispensable protector are recalibrating. In Denmark, that recalibration has come with a rally-around-the-flag effect born of genuine fear.

In Washington, Congress remains paralyzed by denial. This is the most dangerous asymmetry of all: America’s allies are adjusting to the reality of Trump’s behavior, while America’s legislature is still pretending it can be managed by inertia. There is no backup plan for a president with unilateral strike authority, grievance-driven instincts, and a shrinking circle of internal restraint. There is only Congress, and Congress, so far, has chosen silence.

Nowhere is that silence more perilous than on Iran. Trump has already escalated his rhetoric again, openly threatening military action. European officials are blunt about what would follow: they would not be able to stop it. They would likely sit it out, apply sanctions where they can, and absorb the fallout. Once a strike happens, every other debate becomes secondary, markets, alliances, elections, oversight. War does not wait for clarification.

The tragedy is that it would not take a mass revolt to stop this. It would take a handful of Republicans willing to do the bare minimum their oath requires: reassert Congress’s constitutional authority over war, slow the machinery of escalation, refuse to let impulse substitute for deliberation. History shows that foreign policy crises are often where cracks in party discipline appear first, not out of virtue, but out of fear, donor pressure, and self-preservation.

The rest of the world is already operating on the assumption that Trump cannot be trusted to self-regulate. That assessment is no longer ideological; it is operational. And every day Congress refuses to acknowledge it, the risk compounds, not just abroad, but at home, where democratic guardrails are already under strain.

This is not about scoring points or diagnosing personalities. It is about preventing irreversible harm. The warning signs are there. Allies are whispering what they cannot yet say aloud, and journalists are documenting what diplomats fear. The question is whether anyone in Congress will decide that loyalty to country outweighs loyalty to party before catastrophe forces the issue.

Pressure matters. Right now, pressure, public, relentless, unapologetic, may be the only thing standing between instability and outright disaster.