America Is No Longer Europe’s Ally — And This Time It’s Structural

The question is no longer whether the U.S. is a reliable ally. The question is whether Europe is finally willing to act like a power.

Published: 23 January 2025

Europe has made a familiar mistake. Again.

Faced with Donald Trump’s return to power and his escalating threats — from Greenland to trade coercion to open interference in European politics — many European leaders still cling to the comforting illusion that this is a personality problem. A temporary fever. A deviation from the “real” America that will pass if Europe just holds its breath long enough.

That illusion is now dangerous.

What Europe is confronting is not Trump the man, but Trumpism as an operating system — one that has fused American nationalism, economic coercion, institutional vandalism and imperial nostalgia into a durable model of power. Even if Trump were to disappear tomorrow, the structural conditions that produced him would remain intact.

The United States has changed. And Europe has been slow to accept it.

From Ally to Adversarial Power

The turning point did not come with an offensive tweet or a crude Davos remark. It came with the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which openly pledged to strengthen “patriotic European parties” against the European Union itself. That is not allied behaviour. That is political warfare.

When Washington begins to treat the EU not as a partner but as a contested political space — one to be fractured, weakened, and selectively co-opted — the relationship has crossed a qualitative threshold. At that point, trust is no longer the relevant category. Risk is.

Europe is now dealing with an America that:

• views alliances as protection rackets,

• treats trade as punishment and reward,

• regards international law as optional,

• and sees internal EU disunity as an asset, not a problem.

This is not an aberration. It is a strategy.

The Myth of “Waiting It Out”

The most persistent fantasy in European capitals is that Europe can simply wait out the Trump era — appease when necessary, avoid confrontation, and resume normal transatlantic relations once the pendulum swings back.

That strategy assumes three things that are no longer true:

1. That the U.S. political system reliably self-corrects.

2. That America’s institutions constrain its executive power in foreign policy.

3. That Europe’s dependence on U.S. security and technology does not fundamentally limit its freedom of action.

All three assumptions have collapsed.

The Republican Party has internalized Trumpism. The U.S. security bureaucracy now plans for transactional diplomacy as the norm. And Europe’s reliance on American military guarantees and digital infrastructure gives Washington structural leverage that no friendly rhetoric can offset.

Waiting is not neutrality. It is strategic drift.

Denmark Should Terrify Europe

Nothing exposes the new reality more starkly than Denmark.

For decades, Denmark was among America’s most loyal allies — bleeding alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Few countries paid a higher per-capita price for Atlantic solidarity.

And yet today, Denmark finds itself publicly humiliated, its territory openly discussed as a potential acquisition, its loyalty dismissed as “ingratitude.”

That is the lesson Trump’s America is teaching Europe’s smaller states: loyalty no longer buys security.

If that lesson is internalized — in the Baltics, in Central Europe, in the Balkans — the EU’s cohesion will not survive.

Appeasement Is Now Actively Harmful

Appeasement is often defended as realism. In today’s context, it is the opposite.

By accommodating Trump’s demands — soft-pedalling interference, absorbing tariff threats, avoiding hard responses — Europe incentivizes precisely the behaviour it fears. Worse, it deepens internal EU fractures by rewarding governments willing to act as American proxies inside the Union.

Appeasement does not preserve stability. It exports instability inward.

Europe has already seen this movie before. And it knows how it ends.

Pride Is Not Posture — It Is Capacity

Europe does not need anti-Americanism. It needs anti-dependency.

Regaining standing will not come from grand speeches about the rules-based order, nor from nostalgic invocations of the transatlantic bond. It will come from irreversible actions:

• a genuine European defense pillar that can operate without Washington’s permission,

• targeted reduction of U.S. technological chokehold dependencies,

• enforcement of EU regulatory power as geopolitical leverage,

• and a foreign policy that no longer requires American mediation to function.

None of this requires hostility toward the United States. But it does require abandoning the fiction that America is automatically Europe’s protector.

The Choice Europe Faces

Europe now has two paths.

One leads to managed decline: quiet appeasement, strategic paralysis, and a future as a wealthy but irrelevant appendage of American power — useful when compliant, expendable when not.

The other leads to something harder, lonelier, but ultimately more dignified: strategic adulthood.

Trump’s America is not a temporary embarrassment. It is a stress test — and Europe is failing it.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. is a reliable ally.

The question is whether Europe is finally willing to act like a power.

---

Leon Vermeulen is an independent historian and commentator specialising in European memory, conflict, and reconciliation.