With U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Europeans had a choice: Either recalibrate their relationship with Washington or kowtow to America because they don’t want to suffer the short-term pain for the long-term gain.
It is now clear they have mostly chosen genuflection wrapped in sycophancy and reverence.
Since his inauguration in January, the Europeans have bought unlimited passes for the Trump roller-coaster ride. They have climbed on, strapped themselves in, and regularly screamed out in terror but failed to get off. Instead, they keep topping up for more. Their highest collective ambition seems to be to avoid or postpone worst-case scenarios—a U.S. withdrawal from NATO or a Trump-Putin lovefest—instead of working on shaping, with Trump, a new relationship with the United States.
As a result, the regular calls and proclamations of greater European geopolitical power are increasingly disconnected from reality. They are out of pace with the speed and intensity of the security challenge Europe is facing from Russia and others. Most European leaders also seem addicted to the transatlantic status quo, despite clear persistent U.S. bipartisan signals that it cannot endure.
Trump keeps blindsiding Europeans—with months of aggressive statements against Ukraine, and an escalating trade war—and yet, they keep thinking they can bite down through the whiplash and buy their way out.
The past few days have perfectly encapsulated this.
Trump arbitrarily announced a trade-breaking 30 percent tariff on the EU despite weeks of negotiations, in which the EU was willing to accept some harmful tariffs against more predictability. Once again, the EU postponed retaliatory measures that would have exacted a cost for the U.S. president’s volatility on his own economy and electorate.
The calculus was partly a continued hope that there was still time to save transatlantic trade through negotiations without exacting pain on Trump, but also partly a fear of derailing the U.S. president’s announcement of more support for Ukraine on Monday.
Brussels is discussing more favorable terms for American car exports and more U.S. LNG imports to stave off the trade war. The EU is also considering buying much more U.S. weapons in exchange for the bare minimum support for Ukraine. Based on the public announcements so far, it provides delayed Patriot air defense systems and other weapons the Ukrainians should have already received, and a fifty-day new timeline for a ceasefire—that could allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to finish his summer offensive.
The glaring problem with this approach is twofold: It encourages Trump’s tariff instincts and the advantage he believes he gets through his unpredictability, and it ignores the absence of a Trump commitment to a strategy to defeat Putin in Ukraine.
As a result, Europe is not only encouraging the biggest threat to its economy since the Second World War, but also setting itself up for double jeopardy: to bear the cost of America’s trade war and its weak seesawing on Russia.
Despite its progress on defense and on the albeit slow-moving coalition of the willing for Ukraine, the collective European leadership remains captive to the U.S. security guarantee and not ready to step into strategic adulthood.
There are a few lonesome dissenting voices like French President Emmanuel Macron or Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, but their wins are at best incremental within the European fold. On Ukraine and on trade, they have advocated for a more muscular response, only to be met with shuffling and having to constantly settle for the least offensive position to maintain European unity.
Despite the headline-grabbing statements Friedrich Merz made as candidate and then chancellor-elect in Germany regarding the need to “achieve independence from the USA,” and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni defending Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pressing Trump on the way his trade policies are weakening the West vis-a-vis China, both have resisted a harder line.
Merz and Meloni have not been supportive of more independent, unilateral, European strategic military action in Ukraine through the coalition of the willing. And neither of them has supported using the EU’s considerable trade leverage with the United States to reach a sustainable agreement.
The result is that, six years after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared the commission would be “geopolitical,” and eight years after Macron pleaded for strategic autonomy, EU countries are instead doubling down on their dependence on the United States.
This is happening even as the EU made noteworthy strides, with the European Commission’s white paper on defense or the SAFE instrument pumping €150 billion ($175 billion) into the European defense industry.
Nevertheless, these developments have not girded their loins. Spooked by Trump’s brutality, unpredictability, and volatility, Europeans have sought to placate him with promises to spend vast amounts of their scarce euros on American products. This will come at the expense of building more European security of supply and more industrial capacity—and hence more sovereignty and autonomy—while Washington regularly proves it is no longer as reliable as it once was.
There are no signs these trends will radically change any time soon. The result is that, as they did during Trump’s first term, and even more so during Biden’s term, Europeans will keep finding excuses not to swallow the bitter pill of the cost and pain of the radical changes needed, while reassuring themselves that the changes they are making are enough.
But passing up on the current golden opportunity to build a new multipolarity in light of Trump’s arbitrariness and China’s increasing assertion will be the final nail in Europe’s coffin.
Many significant economic players around the world, in Asia, in Latin America, and in the Gulf, value that Europeans’ word is still their bond, as the recent deal with Indonesia and others are proving. These partners also appreciate the EU’s trade muscle and preference for diplomacy over erratic military interventions. Those now set them starkly apart from the United States, at a time when America’s premium-free advantage is fast dwindling.
