Europeans have had to swallow a number of bitter pills from the United States since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

They haven’t done so out of deference, respect, or even fear. They’ve done it thinking it would help them buy time and preserve their security while they built better capabilities independently of the United States.

But the delusion that they have the agency to change a fundamental pillar of Trump’s worldview—that Europeans are free riders and alliances are dead weight—is crashing against a reality that is exceeding the most pessimistic scenarios imagined by policy planners.

What Trump is now doing is more pernicious and dangerous for Europe than full U.S. withdrawal from, or dormant participation, in NATO. Both scenarios would at the very least have had the advantage of clarity. Instead, Trump has transformed the alliance from an instrument of deterrence against Russia into an instrument of coercion against Europe.

The Trump administration has become masterful at using Europeans’s need to keep the United States within NATO against them, while espousing a milder approach with Moscow. At a time when the United States and its transatlantic allies no longer share the same view of Russia’s threat, and when there are increasing reasons to doubt the bedrock of values that previously bound them together, this extractive transactionalism is dangerously fraying a tenet of international security that managed to survive eight decades of ups and downs.

To make matters worse, by neither withdrawing nor suspending its participation in the alliance, Washington is enabling immobilism by those Europeans who still refuse to accept the changing nature of American commitment to the continent’s security.

This dynamic was immediately posited by the Trump administration. A month after the November 2024 presidential election, as president-elect, Trump threatened the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Canada, a NATO ally.

Two months into his second term, in February 2025, the president and his Vice President JD Vance blew up at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.  The incident triggered months of high-stakes walking on eggshells by the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, and Italy, in addition to the NATO secretary general. All to preserve whatever they could of the military aid the United States was providing for Ukraine, which had already started diminishing in the last year of Joe Biden’s administration.

Barely two months later, along came Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, announcing sweeping tariffs and opening another chapter of the whatever-it-takes playbook. That culminated in the July 2025 Turnberry trade deal between the EU and United States, in which Brussels deliberately underplayed its hand in the one field where it could stand up to Washington.

Meanwhile, the June 2025 NATO summit in Prague had only one purpose: making the president feel like he extracted historic commitments from his allies.

But it is 2026 that has been the most deleterious.

In January, in a push to annex Greenland, the autonomous territory of steadfast ally Denmark, the White House said Trump was discussing a range of options “to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.”

And by May, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Trump announced they would be withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany—which was immediately translated into cancelling the deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland on a pre-planned rotation that had already started. This wasn’t part of a long-expected force posture review, in concert with European allies. It was a knee-jerk reaction to ill-advised disparaging comments by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Since his return to the White House, Trump has routinely derided NATO as an unfair organization. He has severely undermined the credibility of the alliance’s collective defense promise by stating countries shouldn’t own land they can’t defend, and, latterly, has threatened it outright, warning in an interview to the Financial Times that NATO faces a “very bad” future if U.S. allies fail to assist in opening up the Strait of Hormuz.

It is a worst-case scenario for all involved. With every new round of pressure, disparagement, and lashing out, the United States further weakens its ability to project power and incentivizes its allies to turn away from its industries. The harm Trump has done to hardcore pro-American countries like Canada, Denmark, Romania, Germany, or Poland has had a chilling effect.

Meanwhile, Europe is losing its most important partner, while not yet fully capable of handling matters on its own. As a result, its security hasn’t been this vulnerable since the Second World War.

Europeans are not alone in this conundrum. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has upended the security fundamentals of America’s Arab Gulf partners, too.

All these allies and partners are now torn between needing the United States for their security and worrying whether they can still count on its support while having to protect their security from America’s destabilization.

The persistent U.S. threat of military invasion against Greenland has been a turning point for even the most reluctant of allies. It has pushed Europeans to increasingly quiet quit the United States in the fields where that is possible.

These adjustments are now no longer merely nice to have. They are vital. The burden-shifting Trump had initially requested of his allies was essential for the long-term health of the alliance. But Washington may now have adopted such a punitive approach against important pillars of its power that it is becoming its own biggest threat.