Transatlantic Discords in the Second Trump Presidency

By Hajnalka Vincze

JUSTIN TALLIS/ REUTERS

Tensions are rising across the Atlantic, and the rhetoric is heating up. For months, Europe has been bracing for the worst, which is how most European leaders and opinion makers view Donald Trump’s second presidency. This time, they swear they are ready to stand up to the US president’s “bullying.” More than that, they claim they will turn it to their advantage and forge ahead with their strategic autonomy project. Will they? And to what extent? What exactly is new in the transatlantic relationship, what is a mere excuse, and what are the underlying motives?

Same Old Complaints

While it may be comforting to believe that the current disagreements between allies come as a shock to an otherwise largely harmonious transatlantic relationship, this is far from the case. The grievances about the Trump administration’s seemingly disruptive approach to Europe have, in reality, been a consistent feature. Take, for example, the so-called transactionalism—the blunt reminder that nothing comes for free. In exchange for the defense it provides, the United States expects proportionate participation from partner countries. The Clinton administration’s 1993 Bottom-Up Review stated in no uncertain terms: “Our allies must be sensitive to the linkages between a sustained US commitment to their security on the one hand, and their actions in such areas as trade policy, technology transfer, and participation in multinational security operations on the other.”

Neither was American unilateralism, as perceived in Europe, much different under the Clinton, Obama, or Biden administrations. To cite a recent example, allies strongly resented the Biden administration’s failure to consult and coordinate with them over the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan; although, Europeans—at the urging of the US—made up the majority of the NATO troops stationed there. Similarly, European allies were most unhappy about what they saw as the Biden administration’s unfair approach, at their expense, to gas prices and weapons sales amid the Ukraine conflict. To add insult to injury, the Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022 sparked concerns across Europe due to its potential to drain the already struggling domestic industries, with French President Macron calling it “super aggressive.” To top it off, the CHIPS and Science Act of October 2022, setting strict technology export control rules toward China, was accompanied by heavy-handed US pressure to comply, as shown by the Dutch ASML case.

Even the threat to end US participation in NATO has been heard before. Back in 2000, US Secretary of State William Cohen warned that if the EU’s newly launched European Security and Defense Policy was aimed at autonomy, NATO could become “a relic of the past.” President Obama’s Secretary of State, Robert Gates, stirred panic among European allies when, in his farewell address in June 2011, he put them on guard: “Future US political leaders may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” Gates noted the “dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”

Finally, European rebuke that the US seems tempted to apply the “divide and rule” adage is nothing new. During the George W. Bush administration, amid the transatlantic clash over the Iraq War, senior voices advocated the “disaggregation” of Europe. The EU’s foreign policy chief, former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana publicly called out this approach as “profoundly misguided.” It was not, however, an one-time error. The Obama administration’s point man for Europe, and former Vice President Harris’s National Security Advisor, Phil Gordon, once put it bluntly: “We want to see a strong and united Europe, speaking with one voice. In the best of all possible worlds, that one voice will be saying what we want to hear….If it is not saying what we want to hear, then we would rather that voice was less united.”

European Handicaps

Under the Trump presidency, all this is now lambasted as unacceptable across the Atlantic. Why, then, have Europeans put up with it for all these years? The obvious answer is free riding: having the US as protector allows them to enjoy defense on the cheap and redirect the funds normally needed for defense elsewhere. However, this is not the full story. Traumatized by the two devastating wars of their own making in the first half of the twentieth century, Europeans sought to ban the concept of power from their strategic thinking. The United States, as a European power through NATO, dwarfs all the others by its sheer size and thereby acts as an equalizer among their countries. The protective presence of the US also made it possible for Europe to shield themselves from the harsh realities of the world, reveling in self-gratifying, post-national, post-historical fantasies. This attitude led Hubert Védrine, former French foreign minister, to compare Europe to a “teddy bear in the middle of Jurassic Park,” and his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, to describe it as a “vegetarian in a world full of carnivores.”

Over the decades, Europe’s quest for the easy way resulted in an overly dependent position vis-à-vis the United States. Just days before the 2020 US presidential election, the German defense minister stated, unabashed: “We have to acknowledge that, for the foreseeable future, we will remain dependent. . . . Illusions of European strategic autonomy must come to an end: Europeans will not be able to replace America’s crucial role as a security provider.” Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Europe’s dependency has grown multifold. As Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations noted, the pre-2022 situation where Germany (and Europe) was seen as dependent on the US for its defense, on Russia for energy, and on China for markets has changed dramatically: “Increasingly, Europe is dependent on the United States for all three.”

Indeed, as Europe moves to significantly reduce its reliance on Russian energy, the United States has stepped in as a key supplier of both liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil. By 2023, the US had become the EU’s largest LNG provider, accounting for nearly 50 percent of total LNG imports —almost tripling its exports compared to 2021. In the first quarter of 2024, the US also became the EU’s leading source of oil imports, representing 17 percent of all petroleum oil brought into the bloc. Regarding trade with Beijing, political and geopolitical concerns, de-risking efforts, and US sanctions on advanced technologies have strained the strong EU-China relationship. At the same time, both imports from and exports to the United States have grown considerably. Moreover, since the start of the war in Ukraine, Europe’s original dependence on the US for defense has deepened even further. The conflict replaced nuclear arsenals in the center of the geopolitical rapports de force, reinforcing the critical role of the US nuclear umbrella for Europe. In addition, 63 percent of the amped-up defense acquisitions by EU came from the other side of the Atlantic

Old-New Push for Autonomy

There is no doubt that Europeans taking their defense into their own hands is long overdue. Europe’s overreliance on the United States has always been a geopolitical anomaly that kept transatlantic relations fundamentally unhealthy. Ever since General de Gaulle in the 1960’s, France has relentlessly urged other European nations to “emancipate” themselves from the US so they would no longer be “vassals” but genuine partners. As the post-Cold War unipolar moment faded and it became apparent that the United States’ attention and resources had limits, the underlying logic behind the French approach was hard to contradict. Even the Brits wondered quietly. In 2014, an expert commission of former high officials raised the crucial question: “can we rely upon the United States to possess the capability and the will to provide [protection] indefinitely, at least out to the mid-21st century?” and concluded that this “is ultimately unanswerable.”

Donald Trump’s reelection was seen by many as (yet another) opportunity to advance toward the EU’s much-touted goal of strategic autonomy. In 2016, Trump’s victory was discreetly welcomed by those—particularly in Paris—who viewed it as a wake-up call for more hesitant European nations wary of taking any kind of independent steps that might strain the transatlantic bond. For a while, this seemed to be the case. The EU launched new defense-related initiatives, and Chancellor Angela Merkel famously declared: “It is no longer such that the United States of America will simply protect us. Instead, Europe must take its destiny in its own hands.” Moreover, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier put this idea into a broader context: “We must guard against the illusion that the United States’ dwindling interest in Europe is solely down to the current Administration. For we know that this shift began a while ago, and it will continue even after this Administration.” Then Russia invaded Ukraine. And the immediate reflex of every European nation was to rush under the US protective umbrella and call for NATO’s reinforcement.

Under the new Trump administration, European leaders shifted, again, toward a more assertive stance. In an interview with The Financial Times, Emmanuel Macron described Donald Trump’s return to the White House as an “electroshock” that should prompt Europe to “muscle up.” Following Vice President Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference—where he highlighted the erosion of shared values like democracy and free speech in Europe—German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected these remarks as “foreign interference,” while his Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, warned of “an existential moment where Europe must stand up.” To avoid being sidelined in the negotiations to end the Ukraine war, Europeans convened emergency meetings in various formats. At one of these gatherings, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared, “European security is at a turning point.” Maybe so. Yet Member States could not even agree on the list of participants, let alone the more thorny issues such as troop deployment and security guarantees.

Reality Check

Donald Trump or not, the usual handicaps remain. European countries are divided along multiple fault lines, particularly when it comes to the strength and nature of their relationship with the United States. While they do occasionally assert their common interests in specific areas—even in opposition to US policies, especially on trade—achieving fully-fledged, EU-wide autonomy remains highly unlikely. The traditional obstacles have not disappeared: the internal divisions, the comfort of US protection, and the way American power conveniently blurs hierarchical disparities among European countries. Moreover, as we have seen, the entrenched dependence on the US for defense has further deepened and even expanded into other domains in recent years.

Given all this, why have European leaders chosen this moment to double down on their autonomy discourse? Part of the answer is that the Trump administration’s gloves-off style serves as a pretext to advance particular intra-European agendas. President Trump is invoked as a bogeyman by the autonomist and federalist camps—long-standing currents tied to internal rivalry among EU members. The new US administration also poses a fundamental ideological challenge to Europe. For decades, Europeans have been working to adopt—often against their own judgement—the US narrative on global market deregulation and the so-called value-based diplomacy. Now, as America overtly shifts course, Europe finds itself trapped, championing a framework their main ally disavowed. The domestic dimension is an added complicating factor: the Trump presidency is seen as legitimizing routinely ostracized—yet increasingly popular—themes in Europe.

Most significantly, the threat of (partial) US disengagement is now taken seriously. Granted, Europeans have seen and heard it before. Both the global war on terrorism (GWOT) launched by George W. Bush after 9/11 and the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia in 2010-2012 came with the same message to Europe: America expects its allies to take care of their own backyard, while the US is busy in other parts of the world. This time is different, though. Partly because of President Trump’s proverbial unpredictability, but primarily due to the decade-long evolution of global power balances, which has led the US to shift from a two-war to a one-war standard in its strategic planning. Europeans are aware that whoever sits in the White House will press them to shoulder their fair share of the burden and live up to their autonomy rhetoric.

But herein lies the crux of the matter: what kind of autonomy? The constraints and dependencies outlined earlier suggest that, once the initial stage of posturing is over, European “autonomy” is unlikely to seriously encroach on areas crucial to maintaining American primacy—such as ultimate authority over NATO command structures, nuclear deterrence, and US arms sales. As long as “autonomy” amounts to increased defense spending, more troop deployments and deeper European cooperation that eases the United States’ security burden on the Old Continent while leaving those key domains untouched, Washington will welcome it wholeheartedly. Paradoxically, though the idea of "autonomy" is now being pitched to the European public through thinly veiled anti-Trump, anti-American rhetoric, the United States could still end up as a net beneficiary.

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Hajnalka Vincze is a Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.