The second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy declared that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” That sentiment has animated much of the administration’s foreign policy over the past two years, and its approach to Europe has been no exception. In 2025, the United States suspended military aid to Ukraine, and in May of this year, it announced it would remove 5,000 troops from Germany. President Donald Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, the territory of a fellow NATO country, and promised to levy tariffs against member states that opposed the effort. When the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February, they neither consulted nor warned European powers, which have been left to face the war’s economic consequences largely alone.

Europe has not stood idly by amid this onslaught. It stepped in to fill the gaps left by the United States’ withdrawal of financial support for Ukraine in 2025. During the Greenland episode, European countries facing tariffs convinced Trump to back down by threatening massive retaliatory trade measures against the United States. And the continent has begun to deepen its other relationships. The EU has set up a $168 billion defense-loan scheme, with Canada as its first non-European member. Earlier this year, it finalized the largest trade agreement in its history, with India, and signed a long-delayed deal with the South American economic bloc Mercosur.

These measures have been encouraging departures from the bureaucratic indecisiveness for which the EU has frequently been criticized. But despite its leaders’ newfound interest in self-sufficiency, Europe remains dependent on the United States. In fact, some of its attempts to stand on its own have made it more dependent on the United States. European defense planning, command, nuclear deterrence, and military enabling systems still rely on American capabilities. Increased defense spending buys American weapons. As of 2025, the United States supplied more than half of the EU’s liquefied natural gas imports. Many of the continent’s most promising technology firms still move to New York or San Francisco.

This continued dependence has in turn weakened Europe’s credibility with other countries seeking new security, technology, and economic ties of their own. For decades, the European offer to these countries relied on the continent’s relationship with Washington. As long as the United States underwrote European security and welcomed Europe’s integration with its economy, that offer was an attractive one. Now that Washington has begun to treat both arrangements as negotiable, however, it no longer is. The weaker the transatlantic relationship becomes, the more Europe needs other countries’ export markets, raw materials, defense industrial capacity, and solidarity against coercion—and the less able it is to convince those countries of its worth as a partner. Europe needs a better offer, grounded in its own capabilities rather than those of its mercurial ally.

European countries have long presented themselves as leaders on issues such as the environment, consumer protection, and high regulatory standards. To neighboring countries, Europe dangled membership in and association with the EU. Beyond the continent, it promised developmental and humanitarian partnerships in the form of aid through the EU and national agencies. Until recently, these were appealing terms: 13 countries have joined the EU since 2004, and more than 140 countries accepted some form of aid from EU or member state programs.

The United States upheld the underlying security and economic order that made these offers possible. EU aspirants could count on Washington to underwrite Europe’s defense through NATO, and and non-European countries could count on a U.S.-led rules-based economic order, within which they could easily access European aid, markets, and investment.

But the U.S. retrenchment has accelerated the emergence of a more bellicose “might is right” disorder in which different needs have risen to the fore. Countries are now seeking security partnerships to shore up their defense capabilities, stable trade relationships to protect against economic warfare, and financing to make up for cuts in aid and increases in the costs of government borrowing.

For example, when Ukraine turned to Europe in the early 2010s, it did so because of the prosperity and modernization that economic integration promised. But Kyiv now needs intelligence and weapons to fend off Russia, which Europe can deliver only through the United States. For countries similarly seeking security assistance and cooperation, dependence on such a fickle partner is a liability.

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