Europes Precarious Situation

Possibly the end of NATO

Europe’s new foreign policy toward Donald Trump’s America can be described as performative grovelling on a superpower scale, marked by routine bowing, smiling, and pretending it’s all part of the EU’s plan. The NATO table these days resembles an christmas dinner where Uncle Sam is telling everyone he owns the flashiest house, the flashiest car, and has just brought back the purest bags of cocaine from his recent trip to South America, and they’re all wondering just how much he put up his nose before he came to dinner. South County Dublin cocaine fiends high on Venezuelan snuff would be more tolerable dinner guests than Trump right now.

Take Greenland. The world’s largest tundra, famous for ice, isolation, and fewer people than West Cork in the middle of winter, somehow became an object of Trumpian rage-lust.

Greenland is no joke to Trump; it is a frozen aircraft carrier parked on top of the Arctic and pointed at Russia and China, at least that’s what he tells people. What he really sees is an island that sits on some of the planet’s richest deposits of rare earth minerals (if you can get to them), tens of millions of tons of the stuff that makes smartphones smart, missiles precise, wind turbines virtuous and ironically enough, your new fangled electric car with the 50-inch screen, more environmentally friendly. Control Greenland, and you don’t just own a lot of ice; you hold a key to the 21st‑century industrial global supply chain, and with the emerging Arctic shipping routes now being chiselled out thanks to climate change, Greenland is seen as the new frontier and flashpoint in mining for rare earth deposits.

For Denmark and the EU, this unfolding geopolitical saga was like discovering that the loud and annoying neighbour has started asking what your house is worth - purely as a hypothetical, of course. Europe’s soft power, all those well-meaning Brussels seminars on international law and climate governance, melted faster than Greenland’s glaciers when confronted with American avarice for one of its overseas dependencies. The message was simple: when strategic importance and sovereignty collide, strategic importance tends to win, and Washington foregn policy now thinks in Trump-like real estate terms with 21st‑century weaponry. ​

Then there’s Venezuela, the long-running soap opera of socialism and blackouts despite being potentially one of the richest countries in the world. When Trump’s people began talking about Maduro the way a hitman talks about a target, Europe reacted with its usual ritual of press conferences about democracy and the international world order. Europe chose the exact middle point between complicity and courage and then built its entire Venezuela policy there.​

In Europe, the real priority is not Caracas but Kyiv. European leaders will gladly condemn human rights abuses on another continent, but they will not risk a serious split with Washington while Ukraine needs money, weapons, and guarantees just to stay in the game while fighting a deeply fascist Russia that wants to control all of Europe. The pattern is familiar across the rest of the map. Trump’s America doesn’t do ideology; it does invoices. It doesn’t threaten the post‑war order because it misunderstands it—it threatens it because it understands it perfectly well. The EU is weak. If Europe goes along with Washington’s latest bit of international smash-and-grab, it’ll be sawing off the legal limb it’s been perched on since lecturing Moscow about Ukraine, all the while pretending it’s doing the principled thing.

​Nowhere is Europe’s weakness more naked than in Ukraine. The war has turned into a long, ugly test of staying power that Europe talks about in Churchillian tones while funding it like a bureaucratic planned infrastructure project. Ukraine needs tens of billions in external financing and enormous long‑term military commitments; Europe has spent years improvising packages, trying to raid frozen Russian assets, and hoping the spreadsheets will somehow defeat Russian artillery. Planning has been short-term, procurement has been slow, and the bet that the war would be brief has aged as badly as everything else. Europe’s strategic posture: high‑end systems, high‑minded rhetoric is an empty suit. When Trump officials grumble that the U.S. has to support Ukraine because “Europe is too weak to do it themselves,” it stings precisely because it is not wrong.

Why does Europe look weak? For once, the answer is not ideological; it is brutally practical.

• Europe spends too little, too slowly, and too incoherently on defence. There are 27 procurement systems, 27 domestic lobbies, and 27 different ideas of what a “serious” army looks like, most of which involve someone else providing the air cover. In Ireland’s situation, we have a deal with the UK to protect our airspace, in case we discover oil and Trump decides to invade. Within the 27 coutries you also have numerous political parties with their own agenda and some snake oil to sell.

• Political will is seasonal. Support for Ukraine spikes after a Russian offensive and fades when budget season arrives, or an election looms in Berlin, Paris, or Rome.

• Strategic autonomy is treated as a slogan, not a construction project. The EU leadership talks like a superpower but legislates like a sub-committee and arms itself like a historical re‑enactment society.

In the EU, we call this “a complex multilevel governance environment.” In Washington, it’s called “good luck, call us when you’re serious.” Europe talks about defence the way gym members talk about working out: with passion, with apps, with colour-coded schedules, and with absolutely no visible results. NATO, as presently constituted, is dinner‑theatre deterrence: good lighting, earnest speeches, and some dodgy actors that may or may not play the part as advertised. ​

Trump and his imperious MAGA sycophants regard Europe simultaneously as a moral lesson and a dire warning: a welfare‑addled museum of liberalism that proves what happens when a country goes “woke” and forgets to be scary. They respect strength and self‑reliance, which is unfortunate for a continent whose energy policy just spent a decade outsourcing reality to Russian gas pipelines and German optimism. ​We in Europe don’t see ourselves that way, but the Russians and Chinese probably share the same sentiment as Trump’s USA.

The new American line is simple: if deterring Russia keeps your borders safe, you pay; if you want a say in how the empire behaves, you pay, and you pay on time. In return, you get the protection of a superpower that believes alliances are a form of loyalty program otherwise known as Gangster Capitalism.

Europe’s answer to this has been to mutter about values and international order. So Europe drinks to Caesar’s health, mutters about solidarity, and tries not to notice that the empire it depends on has gone full mercenary. The empire, in turn, pours another whiskey and starts eyeballing the menu, from Greenland’s minerals to Venezuela’s oil and Ukraine’s trenches.

Polling experts tracking European views of the United States are probably the only people more despondent than Europe’s foreign ministers. Over the past couple of months, they have been asking Europeans what they think of Trump’s America, and the answers boil down to: “We don’t like him, we don’t trust him, and we can’t get rid of him.”

Support for the United States has dropped across Western Europe since Trump’s comeback tour, with his regime’s favourable views falling by anything from high single digits to eye‑watering double digits in key countries. Confidence in Trump himself is stuck in the political graveyard; only a small minority express anything that could be mistaken for admiration outside the usual MAGA orbit. For most Europeans, Trump sits somewhere between reality‑TV villain and mid‑ranking Bond antagonist.​

The most telling shift is linguistic. Europeans have stopped calling the USA an “ally” and started calling it a “necessary partner,” and in some cases “necessary evil”, which is diplomatic code for “we still need the tanks, but we’re hiding the silverware.” In survey after survey, majorities say the EU must rely more on its own forces because Trump’s Washington is simply not trustworthy as a long‑term security guarantor or ally. This is less a grand strategic revelation than the political equivalent of waking up after a 20-year “End of History” peace dividend bender and wondering who is in the bed besides you.

Asked about Trump personally, Europeans do not mince words. Roughly half of those surveyed across multiple countries now describe Trump as an “enemy of Europe” or at least as someone opposed to European interests. A solid chunk considers him to have authoritarian tendencies; the rest are presumably distracted by the geopolitical fireworks.​

In Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries, Trump is viewed with a mix of horror and anthropological fascination. In Britain, people are torn between their love of American culture and their dislike of being treated like a discount client state. In Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Romania, things are more complicated: they still fear Russia more than they fear Trump, and a superpower that occasionally threatens to abandon you is still better than one that threatens to invade you.​

The real dividing line is ideological. Voters for far‑right parties tend to see Trump as the one honest man in a den of globalist thieves. Centrist and left‑leaning voters, by contrast, think he’s thrown a live grenade into the post‑WW2 order and is now complaining that the shrapnel is woke.​

What Europeans dislike most is not simply Trump’s personality, though there is plenty to dislike, but his foreign policy style. It is, to use a polite term, extremely Trump.​

He treats alliances as subscription services, NATO as a protection racket, and security guarantees as something you renegotiate every time the ratings dip. For decades, Europeans told themselves that the transatlantic relationship was founded on shared values, common purpose, and the solemn lessons of history. Trump treats it like how much are you paying, and why aren’t you paying more?​

This has consequences. The same polls show Europeans increasingly believe the US under Trump makes the world less safe and more unstable. They see the dithering over Ukraine, the flirtations with Moscow, the tariff threats against Europe, and the routine insults to their leaders as part of a pattern: America is not to be trusted and now sometimes works part‑time for the Russian gang.​

Ukraine is where the fear really bites. European polls show overwhelming support for Kyiv against Russia, but many think a Trump‑brokered peace would look suspiciously like a Russian victory with better marketing. When asked whether they trust the United States to stand firm against Moscow, Most Europeans react as if they’ve been offered a car from a crime scene: the odometer wound back to a lie, the chassis quietly warped from an old impact, and that sour, metallic smell in the upholstery that suggests something worse than petrol once soaked in.

NATO, once sold as the bedrock of European security, now looks like a gym membership: everyone says it’s essential, almost nobody meets their commitments, and the trainer keeps threatening to cancel your plan. Europeans hear Trump talk about walking away from allies who don’t pay up and conclude, correctly, that the Article Five guarantee now comes with a small‑print clause: “subject to the mood of the President and applicable news coverage.”​

Unsurprisingly, more and more Europeans tell pollsters the EU must “learn to defend itself,” which is a bit like saying a lifelong pedestrian must learn to be a Formula One driver by next season. The sentiment is noble. The logistics are terrifying.​

The tragedy, from a European point of view, is that they still like America’s culture and many of its people. They just don’t like its foreign policy, especially when Trump is driving the foreign policy car like it’s stolen.

You can see this split in the numbers: favourable views of “Americans” often remain higher than views of “the United States as a global actor,” and both are significantly better than views of Trump. Europe still wants American movies, American music, American tech, and, in a crisis, American marines. It just doesn’t want American diplomacy conducted as a live‑streamed tantrum.​

So Europeans have settled on an uneasy formula. The United States is no longer the benevolent hegemon of their post‑war imagination. It is now a powerful, volatile, indispensable country whose president, at least for the moment, most of them wouldn’t trust with the TV remote control. They don’t want to break up with America. They just want a little distance, a backup plan, and, if possible, someone else in charge.​

Somewhere between Greenland’s ice and Venezuela’s crude, between Kyiv’s artillery map and the Straits of Gibraltar, the old transatlantic alliance trudges on, half comedy, half co‑dependence, entirely absurd. Europe clings to the language of moral leadership while subcontracting the hard power to a United States that has discovered it rather likes being paid in cash, minerals, and deference. Until Europe stops treating geopolitical power as something you outsource like IT support, performative grovelling at superpower scale will remain its default foreign policy setting.

The latest podcast of the Atlantic Current is out.

Venezuela/Greenland are the topics.

Apple Link.

https://podcasts.apple.com/.../ep-7.../id1854443989...

Spotify link