Europe's Plan for Dealing With Trump Backfired. What Comes Next?

Political agreement is rare these days, so when it surfaces it is worth noticing. And in mid-2026, Europeans across the political spectrum appear to agree on one uncomfortable point: the continent is in serious trouble.

For the better part of seventy-five years, one assumption underwrote nearly everything about collective continental security — that whatever else happened, America would be there. That single certainty shaped everything downstream of defense policy: how Europe organized itself, what it chose to prioritize, and what it allowed itself to neglect. The assumption survived the Cold War, the War on Terror, and a long parade of political crises, including the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term.

So when Trump won re-election in 2024, European leaders convinced themselves they had learned enough to manage whatever came next. By the spring of 2026, that confidence looks badly misplaced. Trump’s demands over Greenland have left the bloc’s carefully laid plans in ruins, and after roughly a year of flattery and accommodation, the continent has little to show for it beyond the worst Transatlantic crisis in decades.

Europe now faces questions it spent decades avoiding — what real leverage does the continent actually hold, and if the United States is no longer the ally it was supposed to be, what comes after?

The Bargain That Was Too Good to Be True

The post-war era handed Europe an arrangement that, in hindsight, looked almost too good to be true. American military power would guarantee European security, and in exchange Europeans could turn their attention — and their budgets — toward building generous welfare states and deepening economic integration with one another.

After two world wars that had begun on the continent and killed tens of millions, disarmament carried genuine appeal at home and abroad. NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, captured the logic memorably when he said the alliance existed to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

That final clause has nearly slipped from public memory, but it explains a great deal. Having been blamed for starting two world wars, Berlin was not exactly trusted. Even in 1990, with German reunification approaching, several European leaders worked actively to prevent it — from Margaret Thatcher in Britain to Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who quipped that he loved Germany so much he preferred to see two of them.

How Europe Learned to Stop Worrying

In practice, the model assigned Washington the security burden while Europe focused on ensuring that the nationalism and militarism that had produced catastrophe twice in thirty years never returned. It is worth being clear that this was long regarded as a win for Washington as well. Europe received defense; the United States gained bases — Ramstein in Germany among them — that let it project power deep into the Middle East and North Africa, along with a vast market for American products.

But as the Cold War receded and the Russian threat appeared to fade under its new leader, Vladimir Putin, a dangerous assumption took hold across the continent: that lasting peace was now assured. Defense budgets and arsenals shrank, and by 2010 most Western European countries were spending only a fraction of their Cold War-era budgets on their militaries.

Not everyone disarmed at the same pace. Britain maintained a relatively robust military, particularly its Navy, and France fielded the largest active force in the EU for decades until it was recently surpassed by Poland. Eastern European nations such as Finland kept up their readiness throughout.

The Poster Child for Decline

Yet the overall direction of travel was unmistakable, and Germany became the poster child for it. The decline reached an almost absurd point in 2014, when German troops, short on equipment, mounted broomsticks on their vehicles during NATO exercises for lack of proper firearms.

Even so, the transatlantic relationship felt fundamentally sound. Americans rolled their eyes at what they saw as a continent of free-riders, and Europeans joked about American military adventurism in the Middle East, but the underlying understanding held: everyone was on the same team.

Trump’s first term tested that assumption directly. He questioned whether the United States would honor its NATO commitments, reportedly presented then-Chancellor Angela Merkel with a bill for $300 billion, and even campaigned on the possibility of withdrawing from the alliance altogether. But through what we might call Trump One, the system largely held. He complained and he threatened, yet American troops stayed, and European capitals reassured themselves that this was leverage rather than a genuine danger.

When Joe Biden took office and recommitted to the alliance, the relief across the continent was palpable. The old America, it seemed, was back.

Manage Trump: The Strategy and Its Flaw

That sentiment did not last. A series of events early in Biden’s presidency rattled the foreign-policy consensus that had long spanned Europe’s center-right and center-left. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took first place, but the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan also shook foreign leaders’ confidence in the still-new administration.

By the time Trump won re-election in the autumn of 2024, Europe knew it was in a bind — pressed by populist insurgencies, especially on the right, and increasingly feeling abandoned internationally. Lacking better options, European leaders chose pragmatism: manage Trump.

The theory was straightforward. Trump was known for loving flattery, valuing personal relationships, and being talkable-down from his more extreme positions when he respected the people urging restraint. Various leaders tried it, with mixed results. Keir Starmer appeared to score early success when he invited the president to a royal state visit. Others were less measured: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte leaned into the approach to the point of awkwardness, at one summit reportedly addressing Trump as “daddy.”

When Flattery Met Ideology

The second track of the strategy was a genuine commitment to rearm, intended to defuse the accusation that Europe was “freeloading” off the United States. By this point the picture was more complicated than the caricature suggested. Poland was spending more on defense as a share of GDP than America itself. The Baltic States and Greece were each above three percent. Only a small group of long-term laggards — Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Portugal among them — were still falling short of the two-percent benchmark.

Yet Europe’s strategy misread the underlying problem. The conflict was less about tone, personal chemistry, or even actual military spending, and more about ideology. Vice President JD Vance made this explicit at Munich in February 2025, when he declared that the greatest threat to Europe was not Russia but Europe’s own policies on speech and migration.

One can debate whether the accusation was fair. Some European countries do maintain censorship policies that strike American ears as excessive. But the same administration has been accused of pressuring comedians off the air and deporting students for speech it dislikes, which complicates the charge considerably.

The Question NATO’s Founders Never Asked

The deeper significance of the Munich speech was what it revealed: the administration arrived in power with a fixed and unflattering view of Europe — decadent, depraved, and in its harshest framing perhaps deserving of being broken apart — and that view was not going to change no matter how much European leaders flattered it.

By the weekend that Trump escalated his Greenland demands into tariffs on eight NATO allies, the flattery strategy had all but collapsed. In the aftermath, European leaders found themselves confronting a question the alliance’s founders never imagined possible: what happens when the threat comes not from within the alliance in the ordinary sense, but from the continent’s own longtime security guarantor?

Europe’s Hidden Cards

Despite an uninspiring performance so far, Europe actually holds more leverage than it might appear. The very fact that NATO countries are now repositioning troops to guard against the possibility of an American move on Greenland underscores how far things have shifted — but Europe does not need total military superiority to mount a credible deterrent.

Much may have changed in recent years, yet the chance of the United States outright bombing or firing on NATO soldiers remains highly unlikely. Even if Trump wanted Greenland badly enough to kill European troops, the domestic political blowback would be severe enough to put him at risk within his own party. As Senator Rand Paul told the press, “Around militarily invading Greenland, I’ve heard of no Republican support for that.” That prospect of backlash genuinely buys Europe time.

Europe also commands considerable economic leverage and appears poised to use it. Brussels has already prepared retaliatory tariffs on up to €108 billion in American goods. France is pushing further, urging activation of the Anti-Coercion Instrument — a legal tool approved in 2022 that allows broad, across-the-board restrictions on countries engaging in economic blackmail.

The Loaded Gun

The Anti-Coercion Instrument would represent a significant escalation, opening options that range from export controls to investment restrictions to outright blocking American firms from European markets. It has never been used, and some fear it could provoke unpredictable retaliation from Washington. Others argue that unpredictability is precisely the point: if you carry a weapon, you must be prepared to use it — and Trump has long bet that Europe would not know how to fight back even if handed a loaded gun.

Were such an instrument deployed, it could spell trouble for the president. Trump has been losing support from his base since taking office, largely over his handling of the economy, and a continued slowdown in stateside hiring has deepened the vulnerability. Inflation has stayed relatively contained, but a trade war with one of America’s largest partners would almost certainly send prices climbing.

It bears emphasizing that all of this would be over Greenland — a place that until recently sat nowhere near the top of most Americans’ concerns. A majority of Americans oppose buying the island under any circumstances, and support for actual military intervention there falls into single digits.

Both Sides Are Bleeding

Europe, however, is in no comfortable position either. The continent’s economy has been limping along for years. Growth across the eurozone — the twenty-one countries that use the euro — barely cracked one percent in 2025, with projections for 2026 looking no better. Germany, long the engine of European prosperity, has been essentially stagnant, posting growth of just 0.2 percent.

Other major economies are not faring much better. France and, outside the EU, the United Kingdom have been stuck well below the one-percent growth threshold, and both face surging populist insurgencies. There are some brighter spots on the continent, but lately they are the exception, and a full-blown trade war with the United States would hammer the European economy.

Both sides, in other words, carry genuine vulnerabilities — which means both also hold genuine leverage. Increasingly the contest looks like it will come down to who blinks first, and to whether Europe can maintain the unity required to make its threats credible.

The Dilemma That Has No Good Answer

A great deal remains unsettled, but one conclusion seems clear: NATO will never be quite the same again. The open question is whether this marks the end of the Transatlantic alliance or merely a deep fracture.

This is where the situation turns genuinely grim for Europe. If the continent responds forcefully to Trump and his threats over Greenland, it risks the president pulling out of NATO in a fury. But if it sits back and does nothing while one NATO nation moves to seize the territory of another, that would kill the alliance just as definitively as an American withdrawal.

Shashank Joshi, a visiting fellow in war studies at King’s College London, framed the trap on X. Trump, he noted, cannot credibly promise that handing over Greenland will guarantee he defends the rest of NATO. He can only threaten that refusing will lead him to abandon Article 5 — which depends on Europeans believing that compliance would secure his commitment, a belief that was already eroding. An annexation at gunpoint, Joshi argued, would erode it further still.

The Limits of Leverage

Europe does have leverage, but much of it threatens to impose unacceptable costs on member states themselves. Revoking US access to military bases would cripple Washington’s ability to project power globally — yet those same bases are exactly what many eastern European nations view as their security guarantee against Russia. And despite a genuine rearmament drive, the continent still cannot defend itself without American help.

The numbers are sobering. Germany’s military systems hover around fifty percent operational readiness on good days. Twelve EU member states do not possess a single main battle tank. Ammunition production lags so far behind Russia’s that European stockpiles could be exhausted within days of a serious conflict — and that is merely the starting point.

The industrial base that would need to scale up is a shell of its former self. Europe has only one major TNT producer across the entire continent, creating an enormous need for military imports. The catch: two-thirds of those imports come from the United States itself.

The encouraging news is that nobody seriously expects all-out war with the United States. Europe therefore does not need parity, or anything close to it, with Washington’s military readiness. Its realistic goal is narrower — credible deterrence against Russia. But reaching even that point will take time, perhaps a decade.

A New Plan, and the Risk of None

Until that readiness arrives, Europe needs a new plan for dealing with Trump. A full year of leaders fawning at the president’s feet, from Keir Starmer to Mark Rutte, has produced little but tariff threats, humiliation, and recurring crises. A year of MAGA-aligned figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni trying to play the bridge between Trump and Europe has yielded only military threats against a NATO ally.

Polling has shown for months that the European public resents its leaders’ deference to Trump; so long as the deference appeared to work, elites could tell themselves the cost was worth it. That justification has now evaporated, with leaders extracting nothing in return for their accommodation.

What new tactics might work is anyone’s guess. Some argue Trump respects strength and that the answer is to call his bluff. Writing in The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, suggested that if European countries permanently deployed, say, 5,000 soldiers armed with surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles to Greenland — under orders to fight invading American forces to the last round of ammunition — “Trump would not order the paratroops and the Marines to assault that frozen wasteland — too many body bags.”

But for a continent worried it cannot fend for itself, that is an enormous gamble. And those very anxieties are why Trump may keep escalating against nations that have been American allies for decades, that have sent their citizens to die in Washington’s Middle East campaigns. In this president’s worldview, there is no greater sin than weakness.

The Story Europe Told Itself

Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, did not mince words when he warned that “No-one will take seriously a weak and divided Europe: neither enemy nor ally. We must finally believe in our own strength, we must continue to arm ourselves, we must stay united like never before. Otherwise, we are finished.” The operative word there, increasingly, is “ally” rather than “enemy.”

For decades, European leaders assumed that America might be frustrated with the continent and might gripe about free-riding, but would never actually abandon it. The alliance was too important, the shared values too deep. NATO was, after all, an American project, and had become the most successful military alliance in history. Beneath the surface, though, the cracks had been spreading for years.

It was Barack Obama who initiated the “pivot to Asia,” refocusing the United States away from Europe. The winding-down of NATO would have been far more gradual under almost any other conceivable president — but the divergence of America’s and Europe’s long-shared path may have been inevitable.

The deeper truth is that Europe spent decades telling itself a story about how the world worked: that institutions held genuine binding power, and that through ever-deeper integration, the Americans would be there when it mattered. If that story is not entirely over, it has faded considerably — and the window for building a replacement is not infinite. The military independence Europe would need to shrug off Trump’s pressure will take years to construct. The continent has time, but not much.

There are French soldiers in Greenland right now, scanning the Arctic landscape for a threat they almost certainly never imagined monitoring when they enlisted: hostile US forces, ordered to seize NATO territory at the whim of a president exacting revenge over a perceived slight, forces these same troops once trained alongside. Whether that image marks the beginning of a genuine transformation of European defense, or just another moment that fades once the immediate pressure lifts, is the question that will define the continent’s security for generations to come.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the original bargain underpinning European security after World War II? American military power would guarantee European security, freeing Europeans to direct their budgets toward generous welfare states and economic integration. As NATO’s first secretary general put it, the alliance was meant to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” — the last clause reflecting deep distrust of a Germany blamed for starting two world wars.

What was Europe’s strategy for handling Trump’s second term, and why did it fail? The strategy was to “manage” Trump through flattery and a commitment to rearm, on the theory that he valued personal relationships and could be talked down from extreme positions. It failed because the conflict was driven less by tone or even defense spending than by ideology — an administration that, as JD Vance signaled at Munich, arrived with a fixed and hostile view of Europe that flattery could not soften.

What is the Anti-Coercion Instrument? It is a legal tool the EU approved in 2022 that allows broad restrictions on countries engaging in economic blackmail. Options range from export controls and investment restrictions to blocking foreign firms from European markets entirely. It has never been used, and France is pushing to activate it against the United States, though some fear it could trigger unpredictable retaliation from Washington.

How much economic leverage does Europe actually have? Considerable. Brussels has prepared retaliatory tariffs on up to €108 billion in American goods, and a trade war could send US prices climbing at a moment when Trump is already losing support over the economy. The flashpoint, Greenland, is also one most Americans care little about — a majority oppose buying the island, and support for military intervention there is in single digits.

Why can’t Europe simply defend itself without the United States? Because its military readiness remains badly degraded. Germany’s systems sit near fifty percent operational readiness, twelve EU states have no main battle tank at all, and ammunition stockpiles could run out within days of a serious conflict. Europe has just one major TNT producer, and two-thirds of its military imports come from the United States — the very partner it would need to confront.

Why is responding to Trump such a dilemma for Europe? Because both options risk destroying NATO. Pushing back hard could prompt Trump to quit the alliance in anger, but doing nothing while one NATO member moves on another’s territory would discredit the alliance just as completely. Europe’s strongest forms of leverage, such as revoking US base access, would also strip away the security guarantee eastern members rely on against Russia.

How long would it take Europe to achieve credible self-defense? Estimates point to roughly a decade. Europe does not need parity with the United States — only credible deterrence against Russia — but even that narrower goal requires rebuilding an industrial base and military readiness that have withered since the Cold War. In the meantime, the continent needs an interim approach to Washington that flattery has shown cannot work.