When Vice-President JD Vance told the Munich Security Conference last year that America’s European allies were destroying themselves with immigration and unfairly barring the far-right from power, it was a shock to the trans-Atlantic alliance.
There was much more to come.
In the year that followed, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on European goods. He pushed to end the war in Ukraine on terms largely favourable to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and threatened to pry Greenland from Denmark by any means necessary. He mocked European leaders in a bullying speech in Switzerland, declaring Europe would be nothing without the US.
It has been a dizzying unravelling of the friendship that bound the West together for three-quarters of a century, since World War II. That has left European leaders more wary — and in some cases, more defiant — toward America, as they meet again in Munich, for Europe’s largest annual gathering of politicians and security officials.
Diplomats and heads of state across the Continent say they no longer expect relations with America to revert to a pre-Trump normal, even after Trump leaves office. They have accelerated efforts to reduce their military and economic dependence on the US, even as they continue to court the president with flattery in an effort to maintain influence with him on Ukraine and other global issues.
“Trans-Atlantic relations have changed, and no one in this room says this with more regret than I do,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, who will open the Munich conference with a speech, said. “But nostalgia and reminiscing about bygone better times won’t help us.”
The question on many Europeans’ minds is whether they can ever really trust the United States again — and what they need to do if they cannot.
“Of course, we’ve had a serious loss of trust, no doubt about it,” Wolfgang Ischinger, the chair of the security conference, said in an interview. “Of course, trust can be rebuilt. But we all know losing trust is easier than rebuilding it.”
In a report before the gathering, staff at the security conference called Trump a “wrecking ball” and one of the “demolition men” destroying the norms and institutions of the international order. Last month, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark questioned how long America would remain a European ally.
Administration officials do not see it that way. They say Trump is pushing Europe to be a stronger, more self-sufficient partner, after decades of relying on US troops and nuclear weapons to ensure their national security.
Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, suggested in Berlin this week that the administration viewed Europe as a child who had grown up and needed to find a job.
“We’re not asking for European autonomy,” he said. “We’re asking for European strength.”
Europeans, though, are talking about Trump in terms that are more resigned and more urgent than a year ago.
At the time, when Vance stunned the Munich crowd, which had been expecting to hear about Trump’s plan to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, European leaders tried to rebut him. “This is unacceptable!” Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, shouted from the audience as Vance spoke. He later singled out the vice president from the Munich stage.
“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “This is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live.”
Weeks later, Europeans watched as Trump and Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office. In December, they read the White House’s updated National Security Strategy, which warned that Europe faced “civilizational erasure,” echoing language from far-right European political parties.
Nathalie Tocci, the director of the Institute of International Affairs, a research group in Rome, said those events and Vance’s Munich speech were clarifying.
“Those three moments indicated that we’re not in a ballgame of disentanglement, disengagement, detachment or even abandonment,” she said, “but we’re really in a scenario of betrayal.”
Europeans have questioned Trump’s strategy of scorning Europe when America needs their support to compete against Russia and China.
Jan Techau, a former German defence official and an analyst at the Eurasia Group, said, “It’s just absolute folly to throw away an empire and to throw away your best allies, to alienate them at a time when you need them.”
Europe’s leaders have often sought to mollify Trump by flattering his ego and giving him small wins.
They pledged to increase military spending within Nato, one of Trump’s longtime goals. They called Trump the only leader in the world who could broker peace in Ukraine — in an effort to steer him away from Putin’s influence.
They cut a hasty trade deal to limit the damage from Trump’s threatened tariffs. Last month, they promised to bolster Nato’s defence of the Arctic in an apparent handshake deal to stall Trump’s attempts to take Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally.
The Greenland crisis seems to have brought Europe to the acceptance phase of its grief, understanding that the traditional reliance and dependence on the United States is no longer possible or even strategically wise, said Ivo H Daalder, a former US ambassador to Nato.
“Europe cannot trust America today and cannot trust America tomorrow, unless and until the US engages in behavior designed to regain that trust,” Daalder said. “And it’s possible, if not probable, that Europe will never trust us again. The nature of the relationship between the US and Europe will never go back to where it was.”
The European public appears to think in similar terms.
The latest Cluster17 survey of 7,498 people from seven European countries, conducted in January for Le Grand Continent, a French journal, was startling. A large majority backed sending European troops to defend Greenland, if tensions there escalate.
Steven Erlanger
The writer is a US journalist who has reported from more than 120 countries
Jim Tankersley
The writer is a tax & economics reporter for TNYT
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