When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, European countries at first chose appeasement as their preferred U.S. strategy. Faced with a belligerent Washington that threatened to withdraw the American security umbrella, back Russian President Vladimir Putin by brokering an unjust peace in Ukraine, impose punitive tariffs on their exports, and help far-right parties, European leaders convinced themselves that flattery and restraint were the best response. They avoided confrontation, absorbed humiliation, and hoped that by giving Trump enough of what he wanted they could preserve the essentials of the transatlantic partnership.

For a time, that strategy seemed to have a logic. Europe still depended on the United States for its security. Ukraine, still at war with Russia, continued to need U.S. weapons and intelligence. European economies seemed too fragile, and European domestic politics too fractured, to risk an outright trade war with Washington. And as far-right parties continued to gain ground on the continent, many EU leaders feared that direct confrontation with Trump would only strengthen his European admirers. But as we argued in these pages earlier this year, appeasement came at a substantial cost.

To give Trump a “win,” last June, European countries in NATO agreed to a five percent defense and security spending target that not all of their own military analyses fully warranted, opening space for opposition parties to mount damaging critiques that incumbents had traded their citizens’ butter for guns. Europe also continued to rely on U.S. technological and defense industrial supply chains and dampened its efforts to combat online disinformation to mollify the Trump administration. And the EU left a great deal of economic leverage on the table: in July, in Scotland, a fearful Brussels swallowed a profoundly unfavorable trade deal with Washington. Last year, Europe did not merely lose leverage over Trump’s America. In constant reactive mode, it lost confidence in itself.

Since the beginning of 2026, however, Trump’s own excesses have helped European leaders recover some of that confidence. In the second year of his second term, the U.S. president has become even more radical than many Europeans ever expected. He authorized a surgical military strike on Venezuela, threatened to invade Greenland (which is European territory), amped up his threats to withdraw the United States from NATO, sought new legal means to keep higher tariffs after the Supreme Court rejected them, insulted the pope, meddled in European elections, and launched a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran that plunged Europe and the rest of the world into an unprecedented energy crisis.

This overreach has made Trump politically toxic among most European voters. And it has jolted European leaders into working more effectively as a bloc and taking stronger action to shore up their own defense, trade, energy security, and democratic resilience. In truth, European leaders are now doing things they ought to have done many years ago. And although the change is uneven, incomplete, politically contested, and therefore reversible, for now, Europe’s trajectory has materially altered. After a year in which Europe tried to placate Trump, 2026 may become the year in which Europeans finally begin to act on the strategic autonomy they have long claimed to pursue.

The watershed moment came in January, when Trump doubled down on his threat to take Greenland, by force if necessary, to secure U.S. interests in the Arctic. This was not merely another transatlantic irritant. It was a direct, unprecedented assault on the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark, which is a member of both the EU and NATO. And it was completely unprovoked: both Copenhagen and Nuuk had already welcomed stronger cooperation with Washington on security, defense, and critical minerals.

The European response was firm. In mid-January this year, seven countries—Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—joined Denmark in conducting a joint military exercise in Greenland. After Trump threatened that gang of eight with new tariffs, Brussels suspended its planned ratification of the U.S.-EU trade deal, which is meant to govern roughly $1.6 trillion in annual transatlantic trade in goods and services. The EU discussed deploying its anticoercion instrument, a powerful tool adopted in 2023 that lets the bloc retaliate against economic bullying from third countries by imposing tariffs, restricting market access, or limiting their participation in EU procurement. European leaders began to speak more openly about the need to defend the continent not only from Russia or China but also, when necessary, from the United States. At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Trump of pursuing policies that “openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe,” while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for “permanent” European independence from........

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