European defense and Trump’s fantasy world

Deutsche Welle reports on Donald Trump’s latest create-your-own-reality concoction: “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.”¹

Trump’s revisionist history was in the context of threatening European countries with tariffs, which is the main topic of the DW interview with Ethan Bearman of Loyola Law School. It’s nonsense, of course, though the EU really is a European institution and not some American shell organization. It began with what was called the European Coal and Steal Community (ECSC) in 1952, established by the Treaty of Paris. The “founding myth” of the EU emphasizes the initiative of Germany and France in trying to unify Europe and end the divisions in western Europe that were so central to the two world wars. However, the United States strongly encouraged that process.

As Stephen Walt notes in a piece cited below, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the fear that the US would disengage with Europe provided an incentive to think more seriously about European unity. But that wasn’t an anti-American impulse, it was coupled with a widely-held view that a continued strong US presence would be beneficial. The Soviet Union didn’t share the western European perspective on that point. But they adjusted after a few years to a system of de facto spheres of influence in Europe. And there was no direct US-Soviet war.

The process continued with the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 and membership gradually expanded to include other nations. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 established the European Union, which was a direct continuation of the EEC. The EU expanded to include what are now 27 members. Britain left the EU with its “Brexit,” which took final effect in 2020 after a national referendum in 2016.

The United States actively encouraged expansion of the EU after the end of the Warsaw Pact, seeing it as a way to promote stability, economic development, and democratic institutions. Of course, the US under the Clinton and Cheney-Bush administrations was aware that the EU in some ways was a competing power center, particularly in economic affairs. But there was heavy overlap between EU membership and NATO membership, and the US was and is the dominant power in NATO.

In particular, the US actively encouraged the expansion of the EU to happen sooner rather than later. In one sense, the US saw EU expansion as a kind of economic development and assistance program for former Warsaw Pact countries. And also as a way to prepare those countries for NATO membership, a fact of which Russian policymakers have been very much aware.

The US has always – at least until Trump 2.0 – discouraged the still-modest EU efforts to form a common army and defense policy. The US policy looked to have an EU that was economically strong but dependent on the US and allied to the US in strategic defense issues. There were certainly disagreements over particular policies with NATO, notably over the Iraq War.² And, until now, the EU countries were more-or-less fine with that arrangement, though France was always particularly keen on having a more independent EU position militarily and politically.

(This is being written before the scheduled meeting of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Trump scheduled for Friday, February 28.)

Trump has (so far only figuratively) blown up that decades-old assumption. At the moment, European leaders have to assume that as long as Trump is President, the US is no longer a reliable ally in a potential conflict with Russia. And they can hardly ignore Trump’s statement that the whole purpose of the EU has always been to “to screw the United States.” Combined with what appears at the moment to be a strategic shift toward a pro-Russian foreign policy by the Trump-Musk Administration, the EU now faces a situation where the US can no longer be trusted to honor its mutual-defense commitment under the NATO treaty, though no EU leader is likely to say that out loud.

As Jo Inge Bekkevold recently observed:

Even though U.S. officials have signaled that they still support NATO, the Trump administration is now driving the most comprehensive remaking of Europe’s security landscape since NATO expansion in the 1990s—or, if the transatlantic rift deepens, since NATO’s creation in 1949.³

As Ethan Bearman notes in the DW report, Trump likes to strike a posture of blustering and threatening as part of his particular “transactional” negotiating style, by which most people presumably mean his view of negotiations as a zero-sum game in which one side wins and the other side loses. But it really is doubtful how much of what is normally called a “strategic” view of foreign policy that Trump actually has.

In the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things, traditional power-balancing considerations would suggest that the official US policy since 2011 that balancing against China is the biggest strategic goal means that the US should be trying to improve relations with Russia and to loosen its current close association with China. But, similar to the sea change in policy that Nixon’s improvement of relations with Maoist China during his Presidency represented decades ago, that would require an actual strategic understanding of the many adjustments that would have to be made with various countries to make that happen.

But what that would look like would be more along the lines of: Look, Russia, we are willing to arrange new, extensive nuclear-arms control agreements that mutually benefit us. And establish new trade relationships that do the same. But you to have back the hell off from Ukraine. And we’re willing to come up with some mealy-mouthed formula where NATO pulls back from its unambiguous commitment to making Ukraine a NATO member someday by saying they’re not backing off but that it could take 100 years or so for that to happen.

But declaring that Ukraine started the war and announcing to everybody that the US doesn’t intend to honor its NATO mutual-defense commitments is not likely to lead to that kind of strategic shift. If Russia has a solid alliance with China – which is does at the moment – and the US is sounding like it’s ready to blow off its commitments to its own long-standing allies, that looks much more like the Trump Administration doesn’t really know what it’s doing.⁴

It does sound like it’s in line with the TechBro anarcho-libertarian mantra of “move fast and break things” (in Trump fanboy Mark Zuckerberg’s famous formulation).

Whether move-fast-and-break-things was ever the optimal approach to the tech business itself is questionable:

Larry Fink’s 2018 letter to CEOs articulated the need for a new paradigm of stakeholder accountability for businesses across the spectrum. In the technology sector, venture capitalists must play a role in driving this change. The technologies of tomorrow—genomics, blockchain, drones, AR/VR, 3D printing—will impact lives to an extent that will dwarf that of the technologies of the past ten years. At the same time, the public will continue to grow weary of perceived abuses by tech companies, and will favor businesses that address economic, social, and environmental problems.

In short, the “move fast and break things” era is over. “Minimum viable products” must be replaced by “minimum virtuous products”—new offerings that test for the effect on stakeholders and build in guards against potential harms.⁵

In dealings with Russia, that “build in guards against potential harms” thing is pretty important!

European powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Poland are very focused on the “potential harms” of Trump’s European policies at the moment.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt, who tends to be right in his calls on foreign policy than even his colleague John Mearsheimer, recently made this argument:

For most European leaders - and certainly for those in attendance at Munich last week—the situation feels very different today. For the first time since 1949, they have valid reasons to believe that the president of the United States is not just indifferent to NATO and dismissive of Europe’s leaders, but actively hostile to most European countries. Instead of thinking of the nations of Europe as America’s most important partners, Trump appears to have switched sides and sees President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a better long-term bet. Speculation about Trump’s affinity with Putin has been swirling for years; those sympathies now appear to be guiding U.S. policy.⁶ [my emphasis]

He notes that, in the abstract, it would seem to be a “realist” move for the US to try to improve relations with Russia to balance against China, as referred to above. But Trump 2.0 is doing something else:

If only that were true [that Trump is pursuing a realist approach]. In fact, Trump, [J.D.] Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and other administration officials have gone well beyond the long-standing disputes about burden-sharing, the need for a more sensible division of labor within the alliance, or the long-overdue reassessment about how to handle the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia. Their aim is to fundamentally transform relations with long-standing U.S. allies, rewrite the global rulebook, and, if possible, remake Europe along MAGA lines. That agenda is openly hostile to the existing European order. [my emphasis]

He cites the trade-war threats Trump makes against Europe as arbitrary and dishonestly justified and Trump’s seeming willingness to disregard even the most serious international commitments like NATO. Then there’s this whole seizing-territory thing he keeps talking about:

No wonder Trump is not troubled if Russia ends up with 20 percent of Ukraine, given that he wants all of Greenland; may reoccupy the Panama Canal Zone; thinks Canada should give up its independence and become the 51^st state; and raves about taking over the Gaza Strip, expelling its population, and then building some hotels. Some of these musings might seem utterly fanciful, but the worldview they reveal is something no foreign leader can afford to ignore.

Walt also points to the Administration’s support for anti-liberal-democracy elements like Viktor Orbán and the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany as a grim sign. Walt doesn’t support the sort of missionary diplomacy represented by neocon “democracy promotion” efforts and doesn’t trust the associated claim that democracies don’t go to war with other democracies because democracies are somehow particularly peace-oriented. The latter assumption, after all, isn’t clearly compatible with the history of democracies during the last couple of imperialism spreading “higher” civilizations to the benighted races abroad. But the “realist” viewpoint doesn’t not have any particular preference for authoritarian government, who are at least vulnerable to making bad, non-“realist” assumptions about other countries as democracies often are.

But Walt also makes the key point that the Trumpistas are not anti-European in some generic sense:

… Trump and his minions support European far-right nationalist movements that share their basic worldview. They are hostile to a vision of Europe as a model of democratic governance, social welfare, openness, the rule of law, political, social, and religious tolerance, and transnational cooperation. One might even say that they would like America and Europe to have similar values; the problem is that the values they have in mind are incompatible with genuine democracy. [my emphasis]

And he observes in good realist fashion, “openly bullying other countries tends to encourage national unity and a greater willingness to resist (as we are now seeing in Canada), and the chaos Trump and Musk have been unleashing here in the United States may make Europeans wary of trying similar experiments at home.”

And he also describes what a hard-headed European approach to Trumpist America First policies might look like:

Finally, if America is now an adversary, Europe’s leaders should stop asking themselves what they need to do to keep Uncle Sam happy and start asking what they must do to protect themselves. If I were them, I’d start by inviting more trade delegations from China and start developing alternatives to the SWIFT system of international financial payments. European universities should increase collaborative research efforts with Chinese institutions, a step that will become even more attractive if Trump and Musk continue to damage academic institutions in the United States. End Europe’s dependence on U.S. weapons by rebuilding Europe’s own defense industrial base. Send EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas to the next BRICS summit and consider applying for membership. And so forth.

Because all of these steps would be costly for Europe and harmful for the United States, I don’t want to see any of them actually happen. But Europe may be given little choice. Although I’ve long thought the transatlantic relationship was past its high-water mark and that a new division of labor was needed, the goal should have sought to preserve a high level of transatlantic amity rather than encourage open hostility. If Trump’s diplomatic revolution turns 450 million Europeans from being some of America’s staunchest allies into bitter and resentful adversaries increasingly looking for ways to hinder the United States, we will have only ourselves—or, more precisely, the current president—to blame. [my emphasis]

The current European rearmament discussion is a reminder that weapons that can be used for legitimate defense and just wars can also be used for illegitimate and criminal ones. But European policymakers facing a potential US-Russian squeeze including concentrated efforts like J.D. Vance recent campaign speech for the AfD in Munich need to be thinking very pragmatically about what changes need to be made.

1. Trump floats 25% "reciprocal" tariff on EU goods. DW News YouTube channel 02/27/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-02).

2. Gordon, Philip H. & Shapiro, Jeremy (2004): Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq. New York: McGraw Hill.

3. Bekkevold, Jo Inge (2025): Trump Remakes the Security Order. Foreign Policy 02/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-02).

4. Russian state media praise Trump and the US - and not everyone is happy about it. DW News YouTube channel 02/27/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-02).

5. Taneja, Hemant (2019): The Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over. Harvard Business Review 01/22/2019. <https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over> (Accessed: 2025-27-02).

6. Walt, Stephen (2025): Yes, America Is Europe’s Enemy Now. Foreign Policy 02/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-02).