When U.S. President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in 2020, Europe breathed a sigh of relief after four traumatic years.
A return to diplomatic normality would, many hoped, provide headspace for the old continent to recover from what had been a tumultuous period. European leaders and diplomats had been shocked by an American president who made policy decisions, from 2017 to 2020, that seemed driven by anger and had scant regard for how they impacted allies.
Multiple officials in institutions such as the European Commission and Parliament privately admit that they set alerts for Trump’s tweets on their phones while he was president, as his sudden swings were often the dominant news of the day.
The damage of Trump’s first term hasn’t gone away. The former president’s scrapping of the Iran nuclear deal, agreed under the auspices of the European Union, emboldened the anti-Western hard-liners in that country. Pulling out of the Paris climate accord created space for climate skeptic figures to gain influence across Europe at a time of soaring energy bills, and encouraged anti-green rhetoric to creep back into mainstream politics across the continent. And Trump’s comments on NATO led to uncertainty and disagreement about how Europe should be protected and who should pay for it.
European officials predicted that the MAGA presidency would leave exactly this kind of contrail, which is why his defeat at Biden’s hands presented an opportunity to Trump-proof Europe. The calculation that officials made in 2020 was that while Trump had lost the election, the divisions in the United States that led to his rise had not gone away. If he happened once, then Trump—or some other carrier of the torch of isolationism and aggressive hypernationalism—could happen again.
Trump-proofing, a term that gained popularity among officials and experts after the end of his term, meant different things to different people, but essentially boiled down to three points:
The first was to stop European security being reliant on the goodwill of the United States through NATO. The second was Europe developing a foreign policy that was sincerely independent from that of the United States, which meant divergence on issues such as China. And the final objective was a true diversification of economic partners, leaving Europe less vulnerable to trade wars with the United States. These objectives would be achieved through institutions such as European Union and NATO and would serve two purposes: to make Europe itself more stable and, in turn, give Europe a stronger voice on the world stage.
These are all complex problems that require sophisticated solutions—and funds. Over the past four years, global conflict, pandemic hangovers, and inflation have created even more obstacles. But the biggest obstacle to Trump-proofing over the past four years has been disagreement between European nations.
The result? As we count down the days till the U.S. election, few officials sincerely believe any meaningful progress has been made on these priorities. Bluntly, whoever wins the election, Europe is still stuck as the United States’ little sibling, fatally dependent on Washington for both military and economic security.
Most agree that defense and security are the most pressing international challenges for Europeans. The war in Ukraine revealed not just how ill-prepared Europe was for a land war, but also how divided European countries were on how to protect the continent.
For years, European leaders have talked about common defense policies that would consolidate spending, procurement, and even troop-sharing. The European Commission published its Strategic Compass, a plan that addressed some of these issues at the Brussels-level. But when push came to shove, some leaders were not comfortable moving away from the NATO model and spending more money on something that they didn’t believe to be a priority.
Ukraine forced European NATO members to take a hard look at themselves. What they saw was the brutal reality that Trump’s criticism—that Europeans weren’t spending enough on their own defense and relied too heavily on America—was true.
In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, most European countries agreed to supply Ukraine with arms and money, as well as increase their domestic defense budgets. However, plans for common industrial and procurement strategies that would make Europe less reliant on Washington soon shifted focus to meeting minimum requirements to keep the United States engaged.
“NATO hasn’t functioned as a true alliance for years – it’s lopsided; American-dependent,” said Benjamin Tullis, the director of the Democratic Strategy Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank.
“In the long term, we need to return NATO to a mutually beneficial alliance,” Tullis added. “Right now, as a minimum, we need to meet our financial and military targets, whoever ends up in the White House. But we are not even collectively doing that.”
Even with a war on their doorstep, getting European leaders to agree on a defense policy has proven tricky. Hungary, in both NATO and the EU, has dragged its heels on almost every proposal to send weapons to Ukraine or impose sanctions on Russia. France has objected at various points to EU money being spent outside the bloc—including in the United States—even as stockpiles of European weapons and ammo evaporated.
“In terms of defense, we are a vassal state of NATO, which is a vassal state of America,” said a senior European diplomat who agreed to speak under the condition of anonymity. “When we saw that it would take 20 years and a lot of money to genuinely build up European defense, we gave up, and our strategy became ‘keep America happy’ because why bother blowing up something that benefits us when we can spend our money on other things?”
“Strategic Autonomy” is Brussels speak for diplomatic independence. In simple terms: By balancing diplomatic and economic relations between several allies, Europe can avoid overreliance on one partner. In even simpler terms: Find ways of working with both the United States and China so you don’t get squashed by either.
In December 2020, the EU and China finished their seven-year negotiations on the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Economic ties with China had been a key EU priority in the 2010s and became a central plank of aspirations for strategic autonomy.
One small snag: In the intervening years, the EU—along with the United Kingdom, United States and Canada—imposed sanctions on Chinese officials alleged of involvement in human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims. China responded by sanctioning members of the European Parliament, and the pact has been on ice ever since.
European countries are divided on the path forward with China. Lithuania, for example, caused a diplomatic stink—and a headache for the EU—when it allowed a de facto Taiwanese Embassy to open in Vilnius. However, many other Eastern and Central European countries are reliant on Chinese investment, while wealthy (read: frugal) Western European nations, such as Germany, see trade with China as a lucrative export market and as the cheapest way to reach their climate targets. Why build our own solar panels or electric cars when China has warehouses full of them?
Disagreement on Chinese engagement can even be seen in the fudge of Brussels’s formal position on China. The European Commission officially adopted a “de-risking” policy for security reasons earlier this year, but didn’t go so far as to “decouple”.
The EU has, for example, launched its own plan to rely less on China—or any other power—for semiconductors. And some European countries, notably the usually cautious Netherlands, are in favor of U.S.-style hostility toward China in the so-called chip wars. The difficulty, however, is finding sufficient commonality among 27 countries with different economics and priorities.
Even under Biden, the United States has taken an increasingly hard line on China. It is unlikely that this will change any time soon, and it’s expected that if Trump wins, he will put maximalist pressure on Europe to make a choice. That could get messy in a dangerous world where Europe’s economy remains sluggish but also relies on Washington for security.
Economically, meanwhile, no amount of diversification can mask the harsh reality that the United States is still Europe’s largest export market. No amount of EU directives can change the fact that U.S. protectionism hurts European countries. Under Trump, talk of secondary sanctions for companies working with Iran and threats of trade wars sent Eurocrats into meltdown. Major disasters were averted, but the United States is not a bastion of free trade. Europeans were extremely unhappy with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, claiming that its subsidies for U.S. companies unfairly discriminated against European firms.
Europe does have tools at its disposal if a trade war kicks off, and it has used them in some cases—most notably the Boeing-Airbus dispute, during which each side accused the other of using subsidies to give its plane manufacturers an unfair advantage. Both imposed tariffs on other goods as punishment, but they ultimately resolved the issue in 2021.
Yet diplomats fear that in the current geopolitical climate, getting into a dispute of this scale would spill into Europe more than the United States. The United States has recovered far more successfully from the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still dragging on the European economy.
Many of these problems go back to Europe’s fundamental divides. There is a maxim in diplomacy that only a nation with stable domestic politics can have a meaningful foreign policy. The idea is that for foreign policy to be taken seriously, you need to know that it has the support of your own legislature.
In Europe, this is multiplied across the 27 EU member states, the non-EU countries that are reliant on the bloc, the European institutions, and NATO. If that wasn’t complicated enough, few European countries have stable internal politics. Recent gains from populist groups whose priorities range from being rampantly nationalist to overtly aggressive will have a knock-on effect.
It is not just the case that on issues such as defense, economics, and foreign policy, Europe has a binary divide; each country has subtly different positions on each issue. In many cases, because of the fact that many European governments are formed through coalition, those positions are not even consistent within their own governments.
“The EU’s inability to assert a unified leadership role on the global stage, particularly in response to crises like the Ukraine war, reveals a political vacuum,” said Velina Tchakarova, a leading geopolitical strategist based in Austria.
“As a result, Europe may find itself increasingly reactive to U.S. decisions rather than charting its own course, especially if Trump returns to office with a more unpredictable foreign policy. … Should Trump adopt a more isolationist or transactional approach, these divisions within Europe could deepen, weakening its ability to respond to global challenges,” Tchakarova added.
Division breeds inertia, which leaves vacuums that must be filled. And with the world looking so unstable, the United States is still the best answer to many of Europe’s toughest questions. Whoever ends up in the White House, Europe must make its case on Day One for Washington to remain interested and actively friendly. It simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to deal with upsetting the one constant truth that has played the most important role in stability for decades: Europe needs America.