President Donald Trump’s first year back in office shattered any remaining illusions among European leaders that he can be managed or controlled.
His open hostility toward the European Union has strained a transatlantic alliance that’s endured since World War II and deepened rifts between Europe’s national leaders and within the bloc, imperiling its ability to respond to Trump’s threats and taunts with the kind of unity and strength he respects.
That’s left Ukraine’s fate hanging in the balance heading into 2026, not to mention unanswered existential questions about European security at a moment when many fear Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial aims extend further westward beyond Ukraine.
But in many ways, Europe has survived the roller coaster — for now.
“The Europeans cannot afford to cut ties and to hand in the divorce papers because they are still too dependent, especially when it comes to security and an American military commitment to defending Europe,” said Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
But, she continued, the efforts by leaders to maintain solid ties with the U.S. based on short- term interests do not mean the past year hasn’t clarified that the long-term interests are, for the moment, no longer aligned.
“We need to be pretty clear-eyed,” she said. “In the old days, there was a clear mainstream understanding of the old transatlantic relationship enshrined by the Western values and norms and principles, the rules based international order. And now I think we see a competing project emerging.”
The administration is clear-eyed, too, heading into the new year.
It sees a continent losing its values and identity, beholden to liberal ideals that are doing far more to imperil European security than any missive from the White House. The act of a friend, the White House argues — as it pushes Europe to spend more on its own defense, restrict immigration and end the war in Ukraine — is to set it straight.
“President Trump has great relationships with many European leaders, but he never shies away from delivering hard truths,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said. “The devastating impacts of unchecked migration, and those migrants’ inability to assimilate, are not just a concern for President Trump, but for Europeans themselves, who have increasingly noted immigration as one of their top concerns. These open border policies have led to widespread examples of violence, spikes in crime, and more, with detrimental impacts on the fiscal sustainability of social safety net programs.”
After a blistering start to the year with Vice President JD Vance lecturing Europe over free speech in Munich and then tag-teaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Europeans have adjusted to Trump’s worldview — a shift, as Romania’s Nicușor Dan described it, from a “moral way of doing things to a very pragmatic and economical way of doing things” — and succeeded at bringing the White House back into the fold on several fronts.
The EU’s submission on trade, accepting a new tariff of 15 percent, limited the short-term economic damage. NATO appeased Trump with its pledge to boost defense spending by 5 percent over the next decade, cemented at its June summit — thanks largely to allowing existing, non-defense spending to count for 1.5 percent of that new total.
Instead of abandoning Ukraine, Trump agreed in July to provide additional defense aid for its war with Russia as long as Europe pays for it. And Europeans have been able to withstand Trump’s August meeting with Putin in Alaska and the administration’s announcement of a 28-point peace plan crafted in secret with the Kremlin, which they have worked with the U.S. and Ukraine to revise.
In an interview with POLITICO earlier this month, Trump blasted European leaders as “weak,” asserting that they “don’t know what to do” about immigration in particular. He questioned whether European leaders should continue to be allies, saying that “it depends” on their policies and that he wouldn’t hesitate to intervene in European elections to back far-right parties challenging the very coalitions and leaders he’s currently working with.
That coincided with the issuing of a new National Security Strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” to European centrism that’s committing “civilizational suicide” and expressed disdain for the European Union, which the administration labeled as “adverse” to U.S. economic interests.”
Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, called the Europe sections of the new NSS a “game changer” for leaders across the Atlantic that has “permanently changed” long-term strategy with the U.S.
“It shouldn’t be underestimated how much of a shock it was for European leaders and publics to read the Europe chapter of the National Security Strategy and to see put in writing that this administration thinks of Europe, or European political centrists, as unreliable allies and is taking such an adversarial one against them,” she said. “For 2026, we need to buckle up and plan for the worst on all counts. We have obvious vulnerabilities, and those are going to be exploited.”
Trump is also ending the year by reminding Europe of his brazen desire, outlined in his first term and again shortly before his second inauguration, to seize control of Greenland from Denmark, a reliable NATO ally whose per capita defense spending is among the highest of all member nations. On Saturday, he appointed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, a job that Landry said would focus on efforts to “make Greenland a part of the U.S.”
“This is shattering for a lot of the countries who thought that there was nothing safer than their bilateral relationship with the United States,” Stelzenmüller said.
While openly threatening Denmark, the administration has worked to drive a wedge into the European Union by suggesting that countries would get better trade deals by splitting from the 27-nation bloc and engaging with the White House bilaterally.
“At the end of the year, the fundamental question facing the Europeans is whether they think tactical victories are enough to win the strategic war, which is to maintain the transatlantic alliance that’s stood for eight decades,” said Ivo Daalder, a U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who earlier this month declared the “Pax Americana” to be dead, seemed open to the possibility, saying last week that it’s become “quite obvious” that Trump “cannot relate” to the EU and that “at least there are individual member states, including Germany first and foremost, of course, with which such cooperation can continue.”
Merz led a failed push in Brussels last week for the EU to repurpose $200 billion in seized Russian assets in a loan to Ukraine when Belgium, Italy and others balked. But he ultimately succeeded with a back-up plan of sorts, as the EU approved a $90 billion loan for Ukraine aimed at sustaining its military on the battlefield for two more years. Three Trump-aligned leaders in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic opted out of the loan but did not block its passage.
While Trump quietly opposed the EU effort to shore up Ukraine’s war chest, Europeans have mostly supported his diplomatic efforts to end the war, pushing for stronger security guarantees to ensure Ukraine survives long-term. Finnish President Alexander Stubb appeared Sunday on Fox News to declare that Trump’s efforts have helped advance the talks “closer [to a peace deal] than at any time of this war,” a comment seemingly aimed at the proverbial audience of one and only loosely grounded in what most European leaders actually believe.
