Transatlantic rupture

Welcome to the last weekend edition of Europe Express in 2025. 

It’s been a terrible week for relations between Europe and the US. After publishing a new national security strategy (NSS) that is openly hostile to the EU, the Trump administration has ratcheted up the pressure on Ukraine to agree unfavourable peace terms with Russia. 

European leaders have remained largely circumspect, sticking to their strategy of trying to tame President Donald Trump through engagement, persuasion and flattery.

“Europeans have turned so many cheeks to Trump that one wonders if they have any left at all,” Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute for International Affairs, wrote in Foreign Policy.

But a damaging rupture between Washington and European capitals now looks increasingly inevitable.

You can contact me at ben.hall@ft.com.

Declaration of political war

One European response captured the enormity of the US foreign policy pivot. Awkwardly, it came from Moscow. 

“The adjustments we’re seeing, I would say, are largely consistent with our vision,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian television on Sunday.

“That’s it,” former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt responded on X. “Very little else to add.” 

The US national strategy document has caused outrage in Europe with its depiction of “civilisational erasure”, antagonism towards the EU as a threat to US interests and mission of “cultivating resistance” to mainstream parties alongside the Eurosceptic radical right — all of it music to Kremlin ears.

Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the strategy as “a declaration of political war on the EU”. 

Europe’s rope-a-dope strategy has brought some results, such as a reaffirmation of US support for Nato at the alliance’s summit this summer.

But Trump keeps reverting to a position on Ukraine that is fundamentally inimical to Europe’s security interests, a pattern that is now formally part of US foreign policy doctrine.

Tocci says European leaders have lulled themselves into thinking a capricious Trump is ultimately manageable. “This is strangely reassuring, but wrong.”

When it comes to Europe, Ukraine and Russia, Trump has been “remarkably consistent”. Ukraine’s resistance is an impediment to the normalisation of US-Russia ties and to the business opportunities that might come with it.

“The liberal world order is out; in its place comes survival of the fittest. Rather than old-fashioned superpower competition, Trump is keen to pursue imperial collusion with both Russia and China. The rest of the world, including Europe, is on the colonial menu,” she says.

Seriously or literally

Should Europeans take Trump’s NSS literally or seriously?

Kori Schake, director of foreign and defence policy at the American Enterprise Institute, highlights the multiple inconsistencies and contradictions in the document in this piece for Foreign Policy. Her view is that the strategy is no strategy at all but a “statement of values”.

“And those values are vandalism against the very things that have made the United States of America strong, safe, and prosperous.”

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Michael Kimmage says the document codifies the instincts that shaped foreign policy in Trump’s first term — the primacy of power, prosperity and (Trump’s) personality. But he adds:

“No doubt Trump’s second term will be defined more by unpredicted future crises than by any paragraph, sentence, or phrase from the 2025 NSS. That is the story of every American presidency.”

In a commentary for the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), Bildt, on the other hand, argues that in the Trump administration, total allegiance to the president is everything.

“Absent any guidance beyond whatever Trump posts on Truth Social, his administration is likely to see it as gospel. They know that there is little tolerance for deviating from the line.”

Flashpoints

The national security strategy points to three potential flashpoints that could blow up the relationship.

The first is the EU attempts to control US technology companies through regulation and antitrust enforcement. As the FT’s Edward Luce wrote this week, the Trump administration has aligned itself with “broligarchs” for whom the EU is the sworn enemy. Brussels can try to defuse these tensions by soft-pedalling its enforcement, but it can’t do so forever lest it lose its credibility and legitimacy as a regulator.

The second is American interference in domestic political affairs in Europe in support of anti-EU radical right movements. Writing in Le Monde, Sylvie Kauffmann argues the ideological rift with America is more dangerous than the security rift. I’m not so sure. Fed up with the failures of mainstream parties, European voters seem capable on their own of turning towards the extremes. US efforts to “cultivate resistance” in Europe could just as easily backfire against Trump by giving powerful ammunition to opponents of his ideological allies.

Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar, who has made his country’s commitment to and future in the EU a key campaign theme ahead of next year’s general election, will be delighted to hear that Trump will be working with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to break up the union.

Strategic stabilisation

The third and most serious flashpoint is Ukraine, because the doctrine is right now being put into practice as Washington turns the screws on Kyiv to agree to territorial concessions as the price of peace. Ending the war is a “core interest” for the Trump administration, as is “strategic stabilisation” with Russia. 

Strategic stabilisation is, in my view, the most important phrase in the US strategy, as far as Europe is concerned. As Kimmage writes, “it can be realised only by giving Russia some degree of control over Ukraine. Yet were Russia to acquire such control, it would destabilise Nato and non-Nato European countries”. 

The words to my mind also carry an implicit threat. Strategic stabilisation with Russia is the price that Europeans must pay for continued commitment to defence of the continent by the US. If you thwart it by backing Ukraine to the hilt, then you are on your own.

More on this topic:

Listen to Gideon Rachman’s refreshingly direct conversation with former Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg on Ukraine, transatlantic tensions and his dealings with Russia.

Ben’s pick of the week:

Catch up on the FT’s excellent series: “Who killed Europe’s single market dream”. My favourite is: The lone bread maker: Europe’s half-baked single market in services by Barbara Moens, Olaf Storbeck and Jonathan Vincent.