When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, European countries at first chose appeasement as their preferred U.S. strategy. Faced with a belligerent Washington that threatened to withdraw the American security umbrella, back Russian President Vladimir Putin by brokering an unjust peace in Ukraine, impose punitive tariffs on their exports, and help far-right parties, European leaders convinced themselves that flattery and restraint were the best response. They avoided confrontation, absorbed humiliation, and hoped that by giving Trump enough of what he wanted they could preserve the essentials of the transatlantic partnership.
For a time, that strategy seemed to have a logic. Europe still depended on the United States for its security. Ukraine, still at war with Russia, continued to need U.S. weapons and intelligence. European economies seemed too fragile, and European domestic politics too fractured, to risk an outright trade war with Washington. And as far-right parties continued to gain ground on the continent, many EU leaders feared that direct confrontation with Trump would only strengthen his European admirers. But as we argued in these pages earlier this year, appeasement came at a substantial cost.
To give Trump a “win,” last June, European countries in NATO agreed to a five percent defense and security spending target that not all of their own military analyses fully warranted, opening space for opposition parties to mount damaging critiques that incumbents had traded their citizens’ butter for guns. Europe also continued to rely on U.S. technological and defense industrial supply chains and dampened its efforts to combat online disinformation to mollify the Trump administration. And the EU left a great deal of economic leverage on the table: in July, in Scotland, a fearful Brussels swallowed a profoundly unfavorable trade deal with Washington. Last year, Europe did not merely lose leverage over Trump’s America. In constant reactive mode, it lost confidence in itself.
Since the beginning of 2026, however, Trump’s own excesses have helped European leaders recover some of that confidence. In the second year of his second term, the U.S. president has become even more radical than many Europeans ever expected. He authorized a surgical military strike on Venezuela, threatened to invade Greenland (which is European territory), amped up his threats to withdraw the United States from NATO, sought new legal means to keep higher tariffs after the Supreme Court rejected them, insulted the pope, meddled in European elections, and launched a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran that plunged Europe and the rest of the world into an unprecedented energy crisis.
This overreach has made Trump politically toxic among most European voters. And it has jolted European leaders into working more effectively as a bloc and taking stronger action to shore up their own defense, trade, energy security, and democratic resilience. In truth, European leaders are now doing things they ought to have done many years ago. And although the change is uneven, incomplete, politically contested, and therefore reversible, for now, Europe’s trajectory has materially altered. After a year in which Europe tried to placate Trump, 2026 may become the year in which Europeans finally begin to act on the strategic autonomy they have long claimed to pursue.
A BRIDGE TOO FAR
The watershed moment came in January, when Trump doubled down on his threat to take Greenland, by force if necessary, to secure U.S. interests in the Arctic. This was not merely another transatlantic irritant. It was a direct, unprecedented assault on the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark, which is a member of both the EU and NATO. And it was completely unprovoked: both Copenhagen and Nuuk had already welcomed stronger cooperation with Washington on security, defense, and critical minerals.
The European response was firm. In mid-January this year, seven countries—Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—joined Denmark in conducting a joint military exercise in Greenland. After Trump threatened that gang of eight with new tariffs, Brussels suspended its planned ratification of the U.S.-EU trade deal, which is meant to govern roughly $1.6 trillion in annual transatlantic trade in goods and services. The EU discussed deploying its anticoercion instrument, a powerful tool adopted in 2023 that lets the bloc retaliate against economic bullying from third countries by imposing tariffs, restricting market access, or limiting their participation in EU procurement. European leaders began to speak more openly about the need to defend the continent not only from Russia or China but also, when necessary, from the United States. At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Trump of pursuing policies that “openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe,” while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for “permanent” European independence from Washington, framing Trump’s hostility toward allies as a rupture as shocking as U.S. President Richard Nixon’s 1971 abolishment of the Bretton Woods system.
Although Trump backed off his Greenland gambit, the unexpected threat made Europeans realize that their broader dependence on the United States may no longer be a manageable risk but an imminent danger. That same realization has been reshaping Europe’s approach to the war in Ukraine. Since Trump began his second term, he has withdrawn U.S. support from Ukraine, both materially and rhetorically, and Europe has had to assume primary responsibility for Ukraine’s survival. U.S. military aid to Ukraine has fallen from above $19 billion in 2024 to just $400 million authorized for 2026, a cut of close to 98 percent. And after Iran closed off the Strait of Hormuz in March, the United States also temporarily unsanctioned Russian oil, giving Moscow a financial lifeline.
Europeans are learning to move collectively when the United States acts erratically.
More concerted European support for Ukraine has been slow to arrive, in part because far-right voices have argued against deeper European entanglement in the war. Between February and April 2026, for instance, a $105 billion EU loan to Ukraine was held up by far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s veto. That blockage was overcome when Orban was defeated by a landslide in Hungary’s April elections. The loan will not solve all of Ukraine’s problems. But it gives Kyiv a more predictable financial base and signals to Moscow and Washington that European countries will continue to stand by Ukraine because they have finally accepted that defending Ukraine is at the heart of European security.
Equally important is the emergence of European “coalitions of the willing.” The first—for Ukraine and anchored by France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the Nordic and Baltic states—emerged in February 2025 but has gained momentum since then, developing plans to deploy a reassurance force if a cease-fire is reached and offering a venue to discuss European military support for Kyiv. When Trump threatened Greenland, a similar coalition convened in Paris on January 6; European leaders drew an explicit link between defending Ukrainian and Danish sovereignty. More recently, France and the United Kingdom have helmed a collective European effort to sustainably reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Although the plan has been overshadowed by the chaotic U.S. efforts at a cease-fire, it has advanced: on April 17, Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened 51 countries in Paris to announce an “independent and strictly defensive multinational mission” to protect merchant shipping and conduct mine clearance once a sustainable cease-fire is in place. The coalition also includes Asian partners and Australia alongside Gulf states and shipping-industry stakeholders coordinated through the International Maritime Organization.
Although these coalitions are still ad hoc and embryonic, they point toward the right model: neither an abstract EU army nor an Atlantic Alliance relying on U.S. power but a practical European security core able to act and react when necessary. The EU has also gained its own institutional momentum. In early 2026, the EU began disbursing the first tranches of a $175 billion defense financing program that lets member states borrow at the bloc’s preferential credit rating to jointly procure equipment from European arms manufacturers. It is the first time the EU has borrowed collectively to rearm itself; the program’s “made in Europe” requirements are designed to rebuild a defense industrial base that atrophied over the course of decades of dependence on U.S. suppliers. These developments are modest but meaningful: Europe is learning to move collectively and in cooperation with others when the United States acts erratically.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Europe is also shifting tack on trade. In 2025, the EU squandered its leverage. It had the market size, legal instruments, and retaliatory options to bargain hard with Trump from a position of strength, but member states fragmented and allowed private companies to freelance. In July, the EU capitulated to Trump by accepting a lopsided deal in which, to avoid 30 percent tariffs, it accepted 15 percent tariffs on most of its exports to the United States and eliminated its tariffs on U.S. industrial goods. It also committed to purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy exports and directed $600 billion in additional European investment into the United States by 2028—figures that the European Commission itself acknowledged were aspirational, because Brussels has no authority to compel private firms to invest.
Since late 2025, Brussels has sought to correct for this mistake and better defend its own markets by chasing trade deals with other countries and economic blocs at remarkable speed. Over the course of only a few months, the EU has concluded agreements with Australia, India, Indonesia, and the South American trading bloc Mercosur—deals that together govern more than $470 billion in annual trade in goods and services and cover close to three billion people. (Over the same time frame a year earlier, Brussels concluded only one major trade agreement, an update to its existing deal with Mexico.) The pace alone signals a material change in posture: Europe is no longer waiting for the rules-based order to come to its rescue. It is constructing a parallel trading system of its own, one bilateral deal at a time.
The deal with India, struck after many years of stalemate, is the most important. To break the deadlock, both sides chose to conclude on the roughly 20 areas on which they had reached agreement and defer the four hardest issues. The EU also protected key sensitive agricultural industries, refusing concessions on beef, dairy, rice, and sugar, making the politics of ratification manageable at home. The agreement itself was unprecedented in scope: the EU opened 144 services subsectors to Indian firms (its best-ever services offer to any partner), and India reciprocated by opening 102 subsectors to European companies, a major concession. What truly distinguished the deal from other trade agreements, however, was its explicit geopolitical dimension. A parallel EU-India security and defense partnership signed on the same day included provisions on critical raw materials and supply chain resilience designed to reduce both parties’ exposure to China, forming part of a new European effort to build a trading order that is simultaneously less dependent on U.S. markets and less vulnerable to Chinese coercion.
Europe is constructing a parallel trading system.
Still, Europe is not abandoning the transatlantic economy. In April, the EU and the United States established an important strategic partnership to defend critical minerals supply chains, a reminder that cooperation with Washington remains possible when interests closely align. But the future of transatlantic economic relations will be narrower in scope, more conditional, and less sentimental. Europe will cooperate with America where it can, hedge as much as possible, and say no when it must.
Trump has unintentionally strengthened Europe’s drive to achieve energy autonomy, too. After the EU unveiled the European Green Deal in 2019, an ambitious project to cut the continent’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030, right-wing and center-right parties portrayed the effort as an ideological indulgence that was costly, elitist, and detached from reality. The pushback worked: after green parties lost roughly a quarter of their European Parliament seats in June 2024, the commission began rolling back its own signature project, dramatically shrinking its sustainability reporting requirements, narrowing its supply chain due diligence rules, and delaying implementation timelines.
Europe was already facing an energy crisis because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even before Trump launched the Iran war, his administration was deepening Europe’s energy dependence on the United States by locking the EU into U.S. energy purchases and pressuring Brussels to accelerate its phasing-out of Russian gas. But the Iran war left Europe especially exposed. The continent still imports 93 percent of its oil and 88 percent of its gas, with the Gulf supplying roughly a fifth of Europe’s oil. European gas prices have more than doubled since the war began, and the European Commission has estimated that EU countries could pay up to $45 billion in additional energy costs throughout 2026.
And so it has become clearer than ever that pursuing a clean energy transition is at the heart of European security. Although the Ukraine war revealed the dangers of Europe’s gas dependence on Russia, the Iran war’s weaponization of energy markets has demonstrated the security risks of depending on hydrocarbons altogether. In April, the European Commission proposed binding changes to EU taxation rules to make electricity cheaper than oil and gas—a measure framed explicitly as a response to the Iran war. Brussels is also preparing a binding EU-wide electrification target, due before the summer, alongside national electrification action plans in France, Germany, and other EU member states.
BLUSTER AND BACKLASH
The most politically significant change Trump’s second-term extremism has driven in Europe may be in the realm of domestic politics. For years, Trump looked like an example for European far-right leaders to follow. He offered a model of nationalist defiance, contempt for liberal institutions, and cultural backlash that European far-right leaders openly emulated—not only Orban in Hungary but also Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Alice Weidel in Germany, and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom.
In 2025, Trump and his U.S. political allies began an effort to intervene more directly in European elections. In a dramatic speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vice President JD Vance attacked what he called the “firewalls” that mainstream European parties had built around their far-right counterparts, identifying Brussels, not Moscow, as the principal threat to European democracy. He met privately with Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), days before the country’s federal election, while Elon Musk (who, at the time, was a U.S. government employee) used his platform on X to boost the party. Vance and Musk subsequently attacked Romania’s annulment of its 2024 presidential first round. And this April, on the eve of Hungary’s election, Vance traveled to Budapest to stump for Orban’s reelection and Trump promised to commit the United States’ “full economic might” to ensure his victory.
Even popular right-wing European leaders now have a Trump problem.
But these interventions have mostly been failures. In Germany’s February 2025 federal election, the AfD doubled its vote share but remained in the opposition as mainstream parties formed a grand coalition. In the May 2025 redo of Romania’s presidential race, the far-right candidate lost to the pro-EU Nicusor Dan after the campaign became a referendum on Romania’s place in Europe and Trump-style nationalism. And in Hungary, Orban lost in a landslide to Peter Magyar’s Tisza party. JD Vance’s visit to Budapest proved to be the kiss of death.
Even relatively popular right-wing leaders such as Meloni, Le Pen, Farage, and Weidel now have a Trump problem. In March, Meloni lost a major referendum on adjusting the Italian constitution in ways that could have curbed judicial independence. Opinion polling after the vote revealed that her closeness to Trump heavily influenced her defeat. She has since sought to distance herself from Trump, standing with the pope after Trump attacked him. When Trump then lashed out against Meloni, this was considered a boon to her political prospects. Other far-right leaders have also stepped back from Trump. In January, Farage condemned the Greenland gambit as a “very hostile act,” and both Le Pen and her deputy, Jordan Bardella, have denounced Trump’s foreign interventionism.
Ultimately, these figures’ inability to fully abandon Trumpism is giving liberal democratic forces a fresh opening. But the picture is more mixed than Orban’s resounding defeat suggests, and the opening may not last. In Germany, the AfD has overtaken the mainstream Christian Democratic Union in national polling and Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right government’s approval ratings have collapsed. In Romania, meanwhile, the pro-EU governing coalition fell apart on May 5, and the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians—which now boasts nearly double the public support of its nearest rivals in recent polls—could take power if snap elections are called.
GIVE HIM A MEDAL
Trump’s toxicity alone will not save European democracy. If mainstream parties merely celebrate Orban’s defeat and fail to deliver security and prosperity for their voters, the far right will not be tamed. Mainstream European leaders’ task is to turn the anti-Trump backlash into a sustained positive agenda. They must strengthen the rule of law, protect European borders while remaining open to regular immigration, continue to boost the continent’s defense, pursue greater energy security by transitioning from fossil fuels and diversifying their energy sources, and seek economic renewal through significantly higher investment and deeper single-market integration.
That is where Europe’s 2026 turn will face its most crucial political test. Strategic autonomy cannot simply be a slogan. It must become a coherent governing project. Europeans do not need autonomy because they dislike Trump, but because it has become clear that dependence on the United States comes at an impossibly high cost. If Europe cannot defend Ukraine without Washington, cannot trade without fearing U.S. retaliation, cannot secure its energy supply chains without importing fossil fuels, and cannot defend democracy from external interference, it loses the ability to govern itself.
The irony is that Trump may have done what decades of European speeches, white papers, and declarations could not. By pushing too hard, he has made the costs of dependence visible. By embracing Europe’s far right, he has made it easier for democrats to draw a line. By treating allies as vassals and clients, he has reminded Europeans that alliances are healthy only when they rest on equality and mutual respect. Indeed, rather than giving him the Nobel Peace Prize he so openly craves, the Europeans should consider giving Trump the Charlemagne Prize, a prestigious award presented annually by the German city of Aachen to individuals or organizations who make outstanding contributions to European unity, peace, and integration. He has earned it.
Loading…
Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly.
