More states should make like the U.K. and consider an EU exit, says Malloch | Jack Taylor/Getty Images Other EU states should hold In-Out votes, says potential Trump envoy Ally says US president has ‘animus against supranational organizations.’

LONDON — The man mentioned as Donald Trump’s possible pick for ambassador to the European Union wants other EU countries to follow Britain's example and hold votes on their membership of the bloc.

Ted Malloch, an economist and former diplomat with ties to the U.S. president’s inner circle, said that while Trump did not have a “formal policy” of speeding the EU’s demise, he wanted to see EU countries to “come to a decision themselves” about their continued membership of the single market, the single currency and the political union.

In comments to POLITICO, Malloch voiced his own support for any EU member state that wanted to hold an In-Out referendum modeled on the U.K.’s Brexit vote.

“I would like to see referenda put to European people so that they could make their own determination,” he said.

“It seems to be that some of the elections that are forthcoming in the next short period of time could lead to that kind of voice in different European countries,” he added, noting the coming elections in France and the Netherlands.

"Europe is a collection of different European cultural identities, languages, cuisines, cultures and the European Union has not been able to snuff those out. Last time I checked very few people were speaking Esperanto” — Ted Malloch

Although he has not been nominated, Malloch is seen as a candidate to be Trump’s pick for ambassador to the EU. He was interviewed by the president’s team in New York earlier this month. Should he be nominated, he would need Senate confirmation.

In recent days Malloch has launched a salvo against the EU’s leaders, telling the BBC he would “short the euro” and predicting that the single currency “could collapse” in the next 18 months. On Thursday, in another BBC appearance, he compared the EU to the Soviet Union, adding that the bloc needed “taming,” and said Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, had been “a very adequate mayor, I think, of some city in Luxembourg and maybe he should go back and do that again.”

Malloch, a professor at Henley Business School in the U.K., said Trump wanted to deal with countries on bilateral terms, adding that the president had an “animus against supranational organizations” because they “lead to the demise of sovereign nation states.”

Cold War comparison

He said the election of Trump, the Brexit vote and changes taking place in other Western democracies represented a “pendulum swing” in world politics on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“In our generation this is the significant pendulum swing, toward a more state-centric, bilateral world,” he said.

“Look at Europe,” he added. “It is really a collection of different European cultural identities, languages, cuisines, cultures and the European Union has not been able to snuff those out. Last time I checked very few people were speaking Esperanto.”

Trump is “more and more persuaded that NATO is not so obsolete” — Ted Malloch

He said that post-war international institutions — with the exception of NATO — needed to be “reinvented.”

“Some of them will continue to exist and should, but they need to be reinvented because, frankly, they’re 70 years old and things that are old are like cars that are antiques. They are interesting to look at but not particularly drivable,” he said.

The Trump administration is preparing executive orders to reduce the U.S. role at — and funding for — the United Nations, and leading to a review of American participation in multilateral treaties, according to a report in the New York Times earlier this week .

“The criticism of those [multilateral] organizations, particularly in Western democracies, has been pronounced for some years,” Malloch said.

“Occasionally you have to do what companies do, which is radically restructure,” he added. “Or occasionally you actually go out of business and start a new business. Likewise, in parallel here what you have to do is start some new organizations with a different function, different purpose, fit for the future and not the past.”

However, he said he believes Trump was being “more and more persuaded that NATO is not so obsolete”, and that it could be “revived” with a greater focus on counter-terror operations and cybersecurity — a departure from its historic role as a counterbalance to Russia.

He said he expected U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May to raise the importance of NATO’s continued role during her visit to Washington.