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Less than a fortnight after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J. D. Vance read Europe the riot act at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, Donald Trump followed up with a performance that would not have been out of place on an episode of The Apprentice. In front of cameras, America’s president berated his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky — who has held a deeply fractured nation together through three years of war against a more powerful adversary — for ungratefulness, reaffirming the might-is-right worldview that has been consistent throughout his presidencies.
These two episodes, which have perhaps done more than any others in recent years to disgrace the idea of statesmanship, did succeed in bringing to the fore one point: Europe’s geostrategic position is dangerously precarious. For decades, the continent’s leaders have fostered a relation of willing dependence on the United States, which has in exchange exercised an only limited influence over Europe’s domestic and international politics. This led many to assume, wrongly, that geopolitics could not, in a post-historical world, get in the way of trade. But over the past decade, Europe’s economic ties to China, which is both a market for and a source of advanced manufactured goods, and Russia, whose cheap energy aided the competitiveness of German heavy industry, have butted against America’s commitment to hegemony.
The continent, despite the desires of leaders like Emmanuel Macron, has not become an independent “third pole” on the global stage. Instead, it is now, in its Franco-German core, increasingly reliant on America for the underwriting of its energy and defense capabilities. On the Western periphery, the UK and Ireland have been pursuing a fire sale of their assets to US private equity while also becoming heavily dependent on California’s FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) for foreign direct investment (FDI). Just last year, Amazon committed to investing $10 billion over the next five years in British data centers, and Google pledged $1 billion for the same purpose.
To the east, the United States and China are battling for influence across the former Soviet states. Poland has a massive US military presence but was also an early participant in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with a large bilateral trade value of US $42 billion with China. Meanwhile, Hungary, a member of US-led NATO, has recently taken €16 billion in Chinese FDI and has integrated Chinese EV manufacturer BYD and tech giant Huawei into its economy. These split allegiances, alongside a notable downturn in economic prosperity and divergence from American growth and Chinese innovation, puts Europe at a profound disadvantage in the emerging multipolar world.
The continent’s economic ties to both Russia and China make it an unreliable political partner to the United States, and its economic laggardness make it a weak one — the average growth rate within the Eurozone currently sits at an abysmal 0.9 percent, less than a third of America’s. This is ultimately a product of the bloc’s chronic underinvestment, caused by self-imposed fiscal constraints that even centrists figures like Mario Draghi have taken issue with. It is this state of political and economic weakness that Hegseth, Vance, and Trump have sensed and sought to capitalize on by clarifying to their European partners that in their dealings with America, they are expected to be both pliant and submissive, all the while pretending to be “independent.”
It is this context, defined by European economic slowdown and Russian and Chinese strength, that informs Trump’s decisions, which may otherwise appear erratic. In fact, rather than being simply a chaotic outburst, the position that America’s current president has taken toward Europe is an outgrowth of that developed by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
For example, while the Trump administration’s proposed tariff and technology transfer regime is larger this time around, it betrays a preference for the Anglosphere over continental Europe. This is far from a break from the consensus view within bipartisan policy circles. Before leaving office in January, Biden made moves to broaden AI technology restrictions in the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion. The framework grants the UK and Canada preferential access to US AI technology, while seventeen EU countries (out of twenty-seven) fall into a restricted group, which includes Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, and all the Baltic states.
Essentially, both Biden and Trump have realized that to put distance between the United States and China, vast swathes of Europe will, effectively, have to be cut off from American technology. The Trump administration is therefore only making explicit a set of resolutions the Democratic Party elite had also come to by 2024.
The EU and Europe were in a stronger position to negotiate with American power during the first Trump term of 2017–21 than they were during Biden’s tenure. Now they’ve lost much of their leverage. Parties committed to an independent and nonaligned Europe, mostly the radical sovereigntist left such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and a few “neo-Gaullist” and centrist technocrats like Draghi and occasionally Macron, are unlikely to shape the long-term future of their respective nations.
In their place, the neoliberal European center-left and center-right are committed, albeit uneasily, to Atlanticism, even if Trump himself rejects it. Plans for bloc-wide defense spending, such as the €800 billion “ReArm Europe” fund proposed by Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday, will likely increase, rather than challenge, dependency on America because without reindustrialization (green or otherwise), European rearmament will simply be a further cash transfer to Washington.
Meanwhile, Europe’s insurgent populist right is split. Pro-American, pro-Chinese, and pro-Russian factions fill the ranks of the New Right, even within individual parties. The Polish far-right Confederation party is notoriously pro-Russian, while the right-populist Law and Justice (PiS) tends toward Atlanticism, although there are some pro-Russian PiS holdouts in the east.
In Italy, the post-fascist and right-populist ruling Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) are in their public pronouncements pro-American. Behind the scenes, however, they pursue the path of economic rapprochement with China initiated by the late Silvio Berlusconi; meanwhile, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz touts its relationship with Trump while strengthening defense ties with China. This European fragmentation, alongside the growth of Chinese influence across the continent, has allowed Trump to deal with Europe in a more heavy-handed way than would have been possible a decade ago. All these factions on the European right clash and collaborate, producing a foreign policy that is generally pro-rearmament but deeply skeptical of intervention in Russian and Chinese affairs.
Between 1990 and 2020, the competition between China and the United States was muted enough for Washington to maintain its transatlantic alliance system through a fiction of norms, international law, and parity of esteem between members. For instance, in 2003, when France and Germany under Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, respectively, refused to back America’s invasion of Iraq and threatened to veto it at the UN Security Council, very little economic leverage was used against them by President George W. Bush. A couple of decades later, the hinge point between Europe and America is now unregulated access to social media consumers in the EU, not support for wars in the Middle East. Indeed, the EU’s literate, online, and educated consumer market of 450 million people, a good chunk of FAANG customers, might be the continent’s only leverage against the United States’ demands.
Even during Trump’s first term, a minimal amount of leverage was employed against Europe to ensure that NATO members met their 2 percent of GDP on defense guideline, a demand which, because of Europe’s lack of a significant military-industrial complex, is effectively a call for a transfer of cash to Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The stakes are higher this time around. European states, and especially Hawkish NATO nations like Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia (who are all heavily reliant on US military bases), are set to become the main obstacle between Trump and a promised Russia-Ukraine peace deal.
Last month, Kaja Kallas, former Estonian PM and high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs, took to the world stage to proclaim that no peace deal would be struck without Ukrainian and European involvement. Indeed, the Financial Times has reported that Trump is likely to withdraw American troops from the Baltic states. Any peace deal between Ukraine and Russia is now going to sidestep the rest of Europe entirely, taking place in Saudi Arabia.
While the United States may be relatively weaker in 2025 than it was in 2003, the gap between Europe and America has also grown. Meanwhile, China remains relatively self-sufficient and economically dynamic. Beijing is moving away from an overreliance on American consumer markets: creating resilience to tariffs and the ability to rapidly scale the value chain of manufacturing toward AI and EV production at home. BYD, the star exemplar of the latter industry, is arguably the most vertically integrated company ever.
A Trump administration guided less by the idealist civilizational platitudes of a dying neoconservative movement and more by sheer self-interested pragmatism is likely to see Europe as collateral damage in the nascent cold war. While recently addressing NATO, Defense Secretary Hegseth struck a defining note for the Trump era: “I’m here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”
Geopolitics alone cannot, however, explain the causes of this shift. America’s domestic political economy, characterized primarily by the influence of a coalition of carbon-intensive industries and tech, has been the primary motor behind Trump’s move. America’s domestic political economy relies on a model of economic growth that has benefitted from European subservience.
Trump’s victory was essentially a triumph over an alternative economic model pushed forward incoherently but purposively by the Biden administration. This model championed green growth and a massive expansion of the public sector as an alternative source of American economic development. But Biden’s insistence on accommodating, rather than combating, the carbon coalition set the stage for its resurgence, which it did with a vengeance when Trump took office in January.
The Biden administration’s regulation of the service and tech industry under the guidance of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and the more ambitious elements of the Inflation Reduction Act — a policy which intentionally threw money at Republican states in an effort to break the hold of the carbon coalition — were serious attempts to reorient American political economy. Together, they sought to weaken the influence of firms such as Amazon and Meta while using lavish tax credits to direct capital to green investment.
While environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards held sway in large investment companies like BlackRock during the early years of Biden’s presidency, it seemed as if key sections of American capital had embraced green growth. The Democrats had wind in their sails. The party’s hope was, as the political economist Mark Blyth argued in a talk earlier this year, that market incentives alone could work to decarbonize America’s economy.
However, while Biden’s party handed out cash to green firms, it also, through its championing of liquid natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, empowered American carbon capital rather than rebalancing the economy away from oil and gas. By the last months of Biden’s presidency, LNG exports to the continent had reached record levels, a fact that strengthened the sectors of American capital standing to gain from European energy dependence. As long as these carbon interests were balanced by countervailing green ones, nascent though they were, it was possible to imagine a world in which European autonomy was not directly a problem for America’s growth model. (Some more optimistic interpreters of the moment imaged the possibility of Chimera Mark II, in which Chinese exports of green technology smoothed the way for an energy transition that took place on both sides of the Atlantic.)
What the Democrats did not bet on was the possibility that Republicans would wage a brutal campaign of lawfare against ESG and other forms of preferential treatment for green investment. They did not, perhaps, also imagine that upon taking office Trump would seek to tear apart large sections of the Inflation Reduction Act, despite its benefits to Republican constituencies. Rather than making the risky move of attempting to become technologically competitive in a new sector, green technology, which required the United States to make the never-before-made move of reindustrializing a largely deindustrialized advanced economy, the Republicans instead chose to double down on the carbon intensive growth model that has characterized the US for a century.
Growing European energy dependency made this outcome more likely, but it was not decisive. The key factor was the failure of Biden to pass, alongside his green infrastructure programs, the more ambitious sections of Build Back Better, which would have expanded the public sector and strengthened the Democratic coalition.
With Biden defeated, tech firms like Meta could crawl out from under the thumb of the Democratic Party and use their proximity to the new administration to lobby directly for repeal of European regulation of social media firms. If they succeed, they will have effectively undermined one of the few achievements of the European center-left and -right.
America’s arms industry will, much like its tech and energy sector, also benefit from European weakness. In 2023, 80 percent of European spending on arms went toward procurement rather than domestic production, a fact which is, as mentioned, largely beneficial to American firms. It is unlikely that plans for a new €800 billion arms fund proposed by von der Leyn this week will do much to alter this trend. This outsourcing of defense engenders a broader problem. Because of the relative weakness of European industry and the urgency of developing a viable military, Europe will, at least in the short to medium term, be unlikely to create the virtuous cycle between military spending and domestic investment characteristic of the United States during the era of military Keynesianism.
The cumulative effect of these shifts is that the relationship between Europe and the United States is likely to become even more antagonistic in the coming years. While some speculate that this opens the door to a European green growth model based around rearmament, it remains to be seen whether the political tensions within the continent — Atlanticism vs. neo-Gaullism or pro-Chinese and pro-Russian orientations — could be overcome.
For now, Europe remains a willing victim of Trump’s grand strategy. Buying into naive end-of-history ideas, the continent’s elites largely failed to imagine the possibility of a world in which geography, let alone geopolitics, mattered or could affect supply chains. Few seem ready to reckon with the fact that they, rather than China, are the main target for Trump and the bipartisan American political class. Even worse, despite all the signals, Europe’s political elite seem to have made little effort to hedge against a major transformation in US policy.
With America pursuing a raft of confused policies aimed at correcting its trade deficit and adopting an export model based on arms, energy, and social media, Europe — without its own military, technology, and energy industrial complexes — has deprived itself of the ability to shape its fate.
Great Job Samuel McIlhagga & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
