In Europe, coverage of the transatlantic alliance is in desperate search of anything that might pass as good news. So, for the dozens of European and foreign leaders who descended on Paris in early December to attend the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral, the main event was really the meeting between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, labeled a much-needed “win” for French President Emmanuel Macron.

“Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop this madness,” the United States president-elect wrote on Truth Social of his alleged plans to orchestrate a peace deal nearly three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On December 10, Zelensky, for his part, thanked Trump for his “strong resolve” to end the war.

Was diplomacy bridging a transatlantic divide on the war in Ukraine, and tempering the president-elect’s stated indifference to the security of the European Union?

Gauging what’s to come from the foreign policy of the incoming administration in Washington is tantamount to reading tea leaves, much like judging how Moscow, Tel Aviv, or Beijing might respond. Trump’s campaign promise to resolve the Russia-Ukraine war “in a day” has stoked broader fears in Europe of a US abandonment of its NATO allies. In the weeks since November 5, however, those concerns have been somewhat tempered by the slated appointment of figures like Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio to head the National Security Council and the State Department, respectively.

Though staunch hawks on China, both are viewed as potentially closer to the foreign policy status quo on other questions. In the Middle East, Trump has pointed toward a return to “maximum pressure” against Iran, in lockstep with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet he also has a certain indulgence for the sensitivities of Saudi and Gulf power circles.

What most agree on is that Trump’s worldview is “transactional.”

Current Issue

December 2024 Issue

All of this is speculation until Inauguration Day. But one thing’s increasingly clear: Europe is prepared for little besides begrudgingly accepting the new US president’s redefinition of the NATO alliance. It seems chronically unable to construct an alternative to its dependence on American power.

A unified “European foreign policy” remains aspirational thinking at best. Germany and France, the EU’s leading powers, are bogged down by political crises at home.

Looking across the 27-member EU, the bloc is divided on many of the most pressing international questions, whether that’s the defense of international law in the face of Netanyahu’s genocidal war on Gaza, to say nothing of applying pressure to stop it, or the Gordian knot posed by an escalating US-China trade war.

In fact, the rise of the far right across the continent is only making Europe look more like Trump’s America. For all the talk about European “strategic autonomy” and a possible transatlantic split, it seems safer to parse just how European states might learn to accommodate the new master of the White House—and adapt to the next chapter in the bloc’s being economically and diplomatically vassalized under Washington.

Take the recent issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) approved the warrants in November, commentators feared that the move would provide yet another tripping stone in US-EU ties. Financial Times editor Gideon Rachman went so far as to predict that Israel “will split the Western alliance.” For Rachman, “another bitter transatlantic confrontation—this time over Israel—is the last thing the Western alliance needs. But that is what is coming.”

In the end, it’s barely looking like a skirmish. Before his replacement by the approval of the new EU commission at the end of November, the EU’s outgoing international relations chief, Josep Borrell, urged that the warrants be enforced. But that response gets far murkier if you look to the individual member states, where real foreign policy power still largely is found.

The commitment to uphold the order from The Hague divided along the lines that have emerged over the last 14 months of war. European states that took the belated move to recognize Palestinian statehood last spring, such as Ireland and Spain, indicated that they would uphold the warrants.

By contrast, close Netanyahu allies like Viktor Orbán of Hungary lambasted the ICC and found himself on closer terms than usual with the EU’s leading powers. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani called the warrants “unfeasible,” a punt matched by Germany, which said that it would need to “examine” the court order. France likewise distanced itself from the ICC, claiming that Israel’s status as non-signatory to the court meant that its leadership benefited from immunity—a standard not applied in the case of French support for the arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin issued by the same jurisdiction.

Nobody would consider Gérard Arault to be a campist. But France’s former ambassador to Washington and Tel Aviv had the gumption to see in Germany’s position the “collapse of all Western pretensions.”

The same can be said of Europe’s moot reply more broadly, symptomatic both of Europe’s own blindness on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and of fears of eventual US reprisals or sanctions against the ICC.

Here was an order issued by a Europe-based institution, the type of body that Europeans like to find pride in when they compare their global standing to that of their more muscular and unilateral partner across the Atlantic.

Unlike the United States, all 27 nations of the EU are members of the ICC. Faced with an opportunity to chart a different course, Europe’s principal leaders caved.

Perhaps what Rachman called a “bitter transatlantic confrontation” is precisely what is needed—and not only on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead of its junior position in a hardening Western bloc, Europe, like many parts of the world, would benefit from a tug-of-war within the West.

Trump’s return to power is the latest reminder of the desperate need for new actors and ideas to address everything from the climate crisis and the rise of China to the legitimate critiques posed by the Global South of the broader post-WWII international system.

There would be serious reasons to doubt Europe’s sincerity in confronting any of these questions. And even if not, Europe would still find itself playing catch-up in order to hold its own and act in an independent way.

In terms of raw economic power, the bloc is falling behind its peers, notably the United States. Since Putin’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, it has traded an energy dependence on Russia with an American one. As Washington and Beijing double down on subsidies for domestic industries, Europe remains wedded to its reliance on the global trade flows of the 1990s and 2000s.

Between a China that looks set to offset trade tensions with the United States by increasing exports to Europe and the EU’s growing economic and industrial subordination to US capital, the bloc is struggling to muster the political will for a collective industrial policy. Mario Draghi’s recent call for 750 billion euros of annual EU investment in infrastructure, green energy, technology, and defense is likely to remain a dead letter until there is a major reversal on fiscal policy by the bloc’s conservative northern member states.

Without a self-reliant defense industrial capacity, Europe finds itself a spectator to Trump’s pledge to force Ukraine into negotiations with Russia. It’s Trump’s assumption, of course, that Moscow will even accept to talk.

But the incoming administration’s drive for talks will surely leave undiscussed a broader European peace that might address the deeper problems in Russian-EU relations, tracing back to the failures of the post–Cold War moment.

Europe may be left with the worst of both worlds, which won’t be compensated by the chest-thumping seen in Macron’s early 2024 support for NATO troop deployment to Ukraine, an idea revived by Poland and the Baltic states.

Assuming that negotiations actually take place, these suggestions point to Europe serving as guarantors of a frozen conflict, underwriting a Trumpian peace.

As the immediate hangover of reelection has passed, the policy discussion in Europe is shifting toward a debate on just how to appease Trump. There is talk of assuaging Trump’s tariff threats by promises to buy more US gas, as European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde proposed in November.

Comparing the relative weakness of its own technology sector, European fears of the power of Silicon Valley have seen attempts by Brussels to regulate Big Tech. Yet the new European tech commissar, Hanna Virkkunen, looks to be walking back the confrontation with Elon Musk begun by her predecessor, Thierry Breton.

On more strictly military terms, European leaders have indicated that their plans to expand defense budgets—and reach NATO targets—ought to be paired with more purchases of US military hardware and technology.

In November, the French government ditched its opposition to the use of money from a new EU defense fund for the procurement of non-EU-sourced supplies. Trump may not have a personal interest in Europe, but a good hedge would be to keep the US defense industry invested and with a stake.

That’s one argument driving Europe’s recent shopping spree for US F-35 jets.

Europe’s bind did not begin on November 5. It is paying the price of what is now a long dependence, one first contracted in the Cold War and deepened—paradoxically—after the fall of the Soviet Union.

What major transatlantic confrontations there have been are by now distant memory. When Trump scuttled the 2015 Iran agreement in his first term, European states got in line, fearing the economic and sanctions clout of the US. Those grumblings were already a faint echo of the opposition by Germany and France to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 2019, Macron said that the NATO alliance was “brain-dead.” Four years later, just as much seems to point towards the emergence of a darker Atlanticism, shorn of any claim to international law and unabashedly committed to what Trump called “the fundamental question of our time” in his 2017 speech in Warsaw: the West’s “will to survive.”

If history is any guide, Europe can lull itself into it—the privileged stooges of America First.