The News
US Vice President JD Vance again on Monday criticized Europe over its security reliance on the US, as analysts grow increasingly skeptical of the transatlantic alliance’s ability to hold.
“European leaders have radically underinvested in security, and that has to change,” Vance told UnHerd, adding that an independent Europe could act as a check on US foreign policy.
The widening gulf between the Trump administration and the European Union could complicate the effort to avoid a trade war, with both sides planning tariffs on the other if an agreement can’t be reached.
SIGNALS
Trump’s trade war has deepened Europe’s mistrust of the US
Donald Trump’s tariffs have reinforced a growing European perception that “the US under [Trump] is not only an unreliable partner, but a partner that cannot be trusted in any way,” one expert told The New York Times. “Friends and allies and foes are being treated the same, with no respect,” a former Danish official told The Wall Street Journal, with some commentators concluding that Washington has effectively become Europe’s adversary. Even as it pursues tariff negotiations with Washington, the European Union is already diversifying its trading partners. Ironically, tariffs could also drive up the cost of US defense products, fueling Europe’s push for military independence, too, a Chatham House analyst noted.
Europe increasingly regards the US as a security threat
Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Russia has poured fuel on some European officials’ concern about intelligence sharing with Washington: “There’s less of a consensus about who the common enemy is,” one analyst told Politico. The transatlantic relationship has deteriorated to the extent that the European Commission is now equipping some of its US-bound staff with burner phones and basic laptops to avoid cybersecurity threats, a measure usually reserved for trips to China, the Financial Times noted. Though Europe has sought to bolster its traditional defense capabilities, the continent may be vulnerable to an increasingly “autocratic and hostile” US, an Irish civil liberties expert argued in The Guardian, noting that besides TikTok, US companies control almost “every major digital platform that Europeans use to debate and share news.”
Transatlantic souring has forced Europe to adjust
“Europe cannot fathom what it should do to fix its already broken relationship” with the Trump administration, The Economist wrote, with a prevailing perception among American Europhobes of the continent as being in economic and moral decline. Donald Trump’s “foreign-policy style and process have already done lasting damage to [economic and strategic] relations,” two experts warned: The basis of Europe-US alliance could shift from a “complex mixture of norms, values and interests” from the post-World War 2 era, to “baseline mutual interest” on AI, climate and other issues. In this reality, Europe must “rediscover its economic and military strength in order to survive in this new world — one defined by the naked pursuit of power,” a Der Spiegel editorial argued last month.