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European Council President Donald Tusk Photograph: Marko Mumm/AFP/Getty Images

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels has more on Tusk’s concerns about Trump.

One of the EU’s top leaders has criticised Donald Trump for his “worrying declarations” and said the new administration in Washington is contributing to the dangers facing Europe.

Donald Tusk, the head of the European council, said the “worrying declarations by the new American administration... make our future highly unpredictable”.

In a letter to EU leaders [pdf], he included the new man in the White House with a threatening geopolitical outlook that also includes an “assertive China”, “aggressive Russia”, radical Islam and “wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and Africa”.

The former Polish president said Europe had never faced such threats since six countries embarked on the integration project sixty years ago, by signing a declaration in the Italian capital. “The challenges currently facing the European Union are more dangerous than ever before in the time since the signature of the Treaty of Rome.”

As well as a new and unpredictable world order, Tusk listed two other challenges: a rise in anti-EU sentiment and the “state of mind of the pro-European elites”. In a striking passage he blamed elites for “a decline of faith in political integration, submission to populist arguments as well as doubt in the fundamental values of liberal democracy”.

Tusk was writing to 27 EU leaders - excluding Britain’s Theresa May - ahead of a summit in Valletta on Friday to debate the future, as the EU prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding in Rome at the end of March. The British prime minister will be in the Maltese capital to take part in discussions on the migration crisis on Friday, but is not invited to a second session on the future of the EU.

Tusk urged the EU to show it was united at the Rome anniversary summit, which falls just days before the deadline May has imposed on herself for triggering Britain’s EU exit process.

The letter from Tusk appeared to be a response to Trump rather than Brexit, but arguably he had a message for both US critics of EU integration and Brexiters dreaming of taking back control. “It must be made crystal clear that the disintegration of the European Union will not lead to the restoration of some mythical, full sovereignty of its member states, but to their real and factual dependence on the great superpowers: the United States, Russia and China,” he wrote. “Only together can we be fully independent”.