Como a Europa perdeu

O continente pode escapar da armadilha de Trump?

Matthias Matthijs e Nathalie Tocci

MATTHIAS MATTHIJS é Professor Associado Dean Acheson de Economia Política Internacional na Escola de Estudos Internacionais Avançados da Universidade Johns Hopkins e Pesquisador Sênior para a Europa no Conselho de Relações Exteriores.

NATHALIE TOCCI é Professora James Anderson de Prática na Escola de Estudos Internacionais Avançados da Universidade Johns Hopkins em Bolonha e Diretora do Istituto Affari Internazionali em Roma.

Foreign Affairs

Líderes europeus com o presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, na Casa Branca, agosto de 2025
Alexander Drago / Reuters

Quando o presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, retornou ao cargo em janeiro de 2025, a Europa se viu diante de uma escolha. Enquanto Trump fazia exigências draconianas por maiores gastos com defesa na Europa, ameaçava as exportações europeias com novas tarifas abrangentes e desafiava valores europeus consagrados sobre democracia e Estado de Direito, os líderes europeus podiam optar por uma postura de confronto e reagir coletivamente ou escolher o caminho de menor resistência e ceder a Trump. De Varsóvia a Westminster, de Riga a Roma, escolheram a segunda opção. Em vez de insistir em negociar com os Estados Unidos como um parceiro em pé de igualdade ou afirmar sua autoproclamada autonomia estratégica, a UE e seus Estados-membros, bem como países não membros como o Reino Unido, adotaram, de forma reflexiva e consistente, uma postura de submissão.

Para muitos na Europa, essa foi uma escolha racional. Os defensores centristas da política de apaziguamento argumentam que as alternativas — resistir às exigências de Trump em matéria de defesa, recorrer a uma escalada de retaliações ao estilo chinês nas negociações comerciais ou denunciar suas tendências autocráticas — teriam sido prejudiciais aos interesses europeus. Os Estados Unidos poderiam ter abandonado a Ucrânia, por exemplo. Trump poderia ter proclamado o fim do apoio dos EUA à OTAN e anunciado uma retirada significativa das forças militares americanas do continente europeu. Poderia ter havido uma guerra comercial transatlântica em grande escala. Nessa perspectiva, foi apenas graças às tentativas cautelosas de apaziguamento da Europa que nada disso aconteceu.

Isso, claro, pode muito bem ser verdade. Mas essa perspectiva ignora o papel que a política interna europeia desempenhou na busca por acomodação, bem como as consequências políticas internas que o apaziguamento poderia ter. Afinal, a ascensão da extrema-direita populista não é apenas um fenômeno político americano. Em um número crescente de Estados da UE, a extrema-direita está no governo ou é o maior partido de oposição, e aqueles que defendem o apaziguamento de Trump não admitem facilmente o quanto estão limitados por essas forças nacionalistas e populistas. Além disso, muitas vezes ignoram como essa estratégia, por sua vez, serve para fortalecer ainda mais a extrema-direita. Ao ceder a Trump em questões de defesa, comércio e valores democráticos, a Europa efetivamente fortaleceu as forças de extrema-direita que desejam uma UE mais fraca. Em outras palavras, a estratégia de Trump para a Europa é uma armadilha autodestrutiva.

Só há uma saída para este ciclo. A Europa precisa tomar medidas para restaurar sua autonomia onde ainda for possível. Em vez de esperar até janeiro de 2029, quando o pensamento mágico pressupõe o fim do atual pesadelo transatlântico, a UE precisa parar de se humilhar e construir maior soberania. Só assim conseguirá neutralizar as forças políticas que a estão corroendo por dentro.

AMBITION DEFICIT DISORDER

Europe’s acquiescence to Trump on defense spending makes the most sense. The war in Ukraine is a European war, with Europe’s security at stake. The catastrophic Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025, in which the latter was berated and humiliated, was an ominous sign that the United States could abandon Ukraine entirely, immediately threatening the security of Europe’s eastern flank. As a result, at the NATO summit in June 2025, European allies acknowledged Washington’s concerns about burden sharing in Ukraine and in general promised to drastically increase their defense spending to five percent of GDP while also buying a lot more American-made weapons in support of Kyiv’s war effort.

Then, after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in mid-August, a group of European leaders, including Zelensky, flocked to Washington in a collective effort to sweet-talk Trump. They managed to box in the U.S. president by backing his mediation ambitions and by developing plans for a European “reassurance force” to be deployed to Ukraine in the (unlikely) event that Trump succeeded in brokering a cease-fire. These careful placation efforts, one can argue, have worked: Trump today appears to have much higher regard for European leaders; he seems to have settled on allowing Europeans to buy weapons for Ukraine; he has extended sanctions to the Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft; and he has not actually pulled out of NATO.

But this outcome is more the product of Putin’s intransigence than European diplomacy. It is also a success only when compared with the worst possible alternative. So far, Europeans have failed to secure further American support for Ukraine. They have also failed to nudge the U.S. president into endorsing a package of comprehensive new sanctions on Russia, with a bipartisan bill of crippling active measures on hold in Congress. And by focusing on scoring political wins with Trump, they still have not developed a robust and coherent European strategy for their long-term defense that does not in essence rely on the United States.

The new five percent target for military spending, for example, was not driven by a European assessment of what is feasible but rather by what would please Trump. This cynical ploy was made plain when NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, sent text messages to Trump hailing his “BIG” win in The Hague—texts that Trump later gleefully reposted on social media. Meanwhile, many European allies, including large countries such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, agreed to the five percent target knowing full well that they are not in the fiscal position to reach it any time soon. European commitments to “buy American” were also made enthusiastically without any concrete plans to significantly reduce those structural military dependencies in the future.

Europe’s failure to organize its own defense can best be understood as a lack of ambition—one that is directly tied to the nationalist fervor that has swept the continent over the past five years. As far-right political parties have gained momentum, their agenda has dampened the European integration project. In the past, these parties pushed for exiting the EU altogether, but since the United Kingdom’s withdrawal in 2020—now widely recognized as a policy failure—they have opted for a different, and more dangerous, agenda of gradually undermining the European Union from within and stifling any European supranational effort. To see the effect of far-right populism on European ambition and integration, one need only compare the significant response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when the EU collectively mobilized over $900 billion in grants and loans, and the underwhelming defense initiatives today. For collectively defending Europe against external aggression, which is arguably a much larger threat, the EU has mustered only about $170 billion in loans.

The irony, of course, is that precisely because far-right forces made a strong EU defense initiative impossible, European leaders felt they had no choice but to rely on a strongman from America. Yet the far right itself is unlikely to pay the political price for this submission. On the contrary, the five percent NATO defense and security spending target risks becoming further grist for the populist mill, especially in countries that are far from the Russian border, such as Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. European leaders may have to compromise public spending on health, education, and public pensions to meet the target, which fuels the “guns versus butter” narrative on the far right.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

European capitulation to Trump’s trade demands is even more self-destructive. At least in the defense realm, the transatlantic relationship was never one of equals. But if Europeans are military lightweights, they pride themselves on being economic giants. The sheer size of the European Union’s single market and the centralization of international trade policy in the European Commission meant that when Trump unleashed a trade war on the world, the EU was almost as well positioned as China to drive a hard bargain. When the United Kingdom rapidly agreed to a new ten percent tariff rate with the United States, for example, the general assumption outside the United States was that the EU’s much greater market power would enable it to extract a much better deal.

Trade was also the area in which, ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, a fair amount of “Trump proofing” had already taken place, with European countries wielding carrots, such as the acquisition of more American weaponry and liquefied natural gas, as well as sticks, such as a new Anti-Coercion Instrument, which gives the European Commission significant power to retaliate in the event of economic intimidation or outright bullying by unfriendly states.

For example, in response to the U.S. president’s announcement of 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum in February 2025, European Commission officials could have immediately activated a prepared package of roughly $23 billion in new tariffs on politically sensitive U.S. goods, such as soybeans from Iowa, motorcycles from Wisconsin, and orange juice from Florida. Then, in response to Trump’s reciprocal “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, they could have chosen to trigger their economic “bazooka,” as the Anti-Coercion Instrument is often referred to. Since the United States continues to have a significant surplus in so-called invisible trade, EU officials could have targeted exports of U.S. services to Europe, such as streaming platforms and cloud computing or certain kinds of financial, legal, and advisory work.

But instead of taking (or even threatening to take) such collective action, European leaders spent months debating and undermining one another. This is yet another example of how increasingly strong far-right actors have been weakening the EU. Historically, trade negotiations have been led by the European Commission, with national governments taking a back seat. When the first Trump administration sought to increase trade pressure on the EU, for instance, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was then president of the European Commission, defused tensions by flying to Washington and presenting Trump with a simple deal framed around joint gains.

A Europa adotou, de forma reflexiva e consistente, uma postura de submissão.

In the second Trump administration, however, the situation could not be more different. This time, the commission’s bargaining position was undercut from the start by a cacophonous chorus, with key member states preemptively voicing their opposition to retaliation. Notably, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a far-right favorite of Trump’s, called for pragmatism and warned the EU against setting off a tariff war. Germany also urged caution; the new government, led by the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, was concerned about recession, which would have further emboldened the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the main opposition party. France and Spain, by contrast, have centrist or center-left governments and favored a harder line and more biting retaliatory tariffs. (Spain, it is worth noting, is also the only NATO country that flatly refused to raise its defense spending to the new five percent norm.)

The level of European disunity was so profound that in late spring and early summer, companies even concluded they might do better negotiating on their own: the German car makers Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW conducted their own parallel negotiations with the Trump administration on auto tariffs. It wasn’t until late July 2025, after months of paralysis, that Brussels accepted U.S. tariffs of 15 percent on most EU exports—five percentage points higher than what the United Kingdom had negotiated.

Faced with mounting internal criticism for the deal, European leaders have again claimed that the EU had no choice: since Trump was bent on imposing tariffs no matter what, they argue, retaliatory tariffs would have only ended up hurting European importers and consumers. Retaliation, in this view, would have amounted to shooting oneself in the foot. Worse, it could have risked triggering Trump’s ire and seeing him lash out against Ukraine or abandon NATO.

But again, this is Catch-22 logic. A Europe that accepts transatlantic economic extortion as a fact of life is a Europe that allows its market power to erode while further emboldening the far right. According to a leading survey conducted late last summer in the five largest EU countries, 77 percent of respondents believed the EU-U.S. trade deal “mostly favors the American economy,” with 52 percent agreeing that it is “a humiliation.” Not only does Europe’s submission make Trump look strong, increasing the appeal of imitating his nationalistic policies at home, but it also takes away the original rationale for European integration: that a united Europe can more effectively represent its interests. If a post-Brexit United Kingdom can extract a better trade deal from Trump than the EU can, many will rightly wonder why it is worth sticking with Brussels.

DIPLOMACY OVER DEMOCRACY

The starkest European accommodation has been on democratic values. Over the course of 2025, Trump has escalated his attacks on the free press, declared war on independent government institutions, and undercut the rule of law by putting political pressure on judges to take his side. And he has taken this fight to Europe: U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have openly meddled or taken sides in elections in Germany, Poland, and Romania.

Vance, for instance, did not meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 but did meet with the AfD leader Alice Weidel and publicly criticized the German firewall policy that keeps the party excluded from mainstream coalition talks. In Munich, Vance also lashed out against the annulment of the first round of presidential elections in Romania by that country’s Constitutional Court in light of significant evidence of Russian influence through TikTok. He said in his speech that the greatest threat to Europe came from “within” and that EU governments were “running in fear of their own voters.” Noem, meanwhile, took the extraordinary step of openly urging an audience in Jasionka, Poland, to vote for the far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki, calling his centrist opponent “an absolute train wreck of a leader.”

Instead of rejecting such hostile election interference, however, the EU leadership has largely stayed silent on the matter, likely hoping that cooperation elsewhere might survive. This transactional approach is most clearly seen in the European Commission’s investigation into disinformation on X, the social media platform primarily owned by the former Trump ally Elon Musk. Initially, Brussels had robust accusations against X, including that the platform was amplifying pro-Kremlin narratives and dismantling its election-integrity teams ahead of the EU elections. But the investigation has since slowed and been downplayed: X has been granted repeated extensions for compliance, and Brussels has signaled a preference for “dialogue” over sanctions.

This strategy is not only failing to produce deals in the European interest but also comes at a political cost: it normalizes illiberal moves in the United States while narrowing Europe’s own space to defend liberal standards at home and abroad. Right-wing leaders have already embraced the political messages coming from Washington. After Vance’s comments in Munich, for instance, Hungarian officials praised the vice president’s “realism.” And after the murder of the American right-wing personality Charlie Kirk, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban condemned the “hatemongering left” in the United States and warned that “Europe must not fall into the same trap.” Across the continent, far-right parties have seized on such moments to portray themselves as part of a broader Western counter-elite, while mainstream European leaders, wary of inflaming tensions with the United States, have refrained from denouncing the rhetoric as forcefully as they once would have.

As with defense spending and with trade, many in Europe argued that it wasn’t worth it to poke the bear on U.S. democratic backsliding. European pushback was not likely to influence American domestic politics, after all. And some proponents of a more passive European response theorize that Trump’s followers’ abrasive support for the far right in Europe could sow the seeds of its own demise. In both Australia and Canada, the pro-Trump front-runner candidates ended up losing in the spring 2025 elections.

Some early results showed that this strategy could work in Europe, too. Vance and Musk, for instance, offered full-throated support for the AfD, but it had no discernible effect on the outcome in Germany. And in Romania, the pro-Russian and pro-Trump front-runner in the presidential election lost, while in the Netherlands, the liberals made an impressive comeback. But in Poland, the Noem-endorsed candidate ended up winning the presidential elections. And in the Czech Republic, the populist pro-Trump billionaire also won. While the evidence is not yet conclusive, what is clear is that appeasement has yielded little protection against Europe’s own illiberal drift. By soft-pedaling its defense of democratic values abroad, the EU has made it harder to address their erosion at home.

ONE FOR ALL, ALL FOR ONE?

Europeans already know what they need to do to stop this vicious cycle. The road map for a stronger EU was laid out in 2024 with two comprehensive reports by two former Italian prime ministers that aimed to build on the successes of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund. Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi proposed deepening the EU’s single market in areas such as finance, energy, and technology and establishing a new major investment initiative through joint borrowing.

But despite the positive attention these proposals initially received, most of them remain dead letters just one year later. European leaders face electorates that are anxious about the cost of living, skeptical of further integration, and sensitive to any large joint debt initiative that might appear to transfer sovereignty or raise fiscal risks. What is required, therefore, is not another maximalist blueprint but a focused effort on what is still politically achievable. Although there is no single remedy, the union can take smaller steps on defense and trade that would reduce its dependence on the United States, and it can make changes regarding its relations with China and its energy policy that would restore its agency and bolster its autonomy.

The EU has tried in recent years to address the problem of its security architecture. It has, for instance, launched the European Defense Fund, created a framework to coordinate joint projects, and established the European Peace Facility, which was used to finance arms deliveries to Ukraine (until Hungary blocked it). It has also developed a defense industrial policy and proposed a 2030 defense readiness plan featuring initiatives on drones, land, space, and air and missile defense. But these instruments are still mostly aspirational, and when they do deliver, the results are narrow and slow, focused mainly on defense-industrial coordination and small-scale missions.

They have also exposed the EU’s Achilles’ heel: its requirement for unanimity on foreign and security policy. An organization in which all 27 members have an equal say can easily be hijacked. Orban of Hungary, for instance, has vetoed aid to and accession talks with Ukraine and sanctions on Russia at least ten times. Beyond the veto, the Hungarian member of the European Commission, Oliver Varhelyi, was recently accused of being part of an alleged spy network in Brussels. While this is so far only an allegation, it raises the broader question of whether sufficient political trust still exists to discuss vital security questions.

A meta de gastos de 5% para a OTAN serve de munição para os populistas.

The EU’s members also have divergent sensitivities toward the United States: eastern and Nordic countries continue to see Washington as their ultimate security guarantor, while France, Germany, and parts of southern Europe favor greater autonomy. Meanwhile, EU members that are not in NATO, such as Austria, Ireland, and Malta, are hampered by constitutional neutrality laws that restrict participation in collective defense. And several members have unresolved bilateral conflicts, such as Turkey and Greece’s dispute over Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean.

Instead of devising an EU answer to Europe’s defense problem, a more realistic path lies in a European “coalition of the willing.” The group that has coalesced around military support for Ukraine provides a good foundation for such an alliance. Although still informal, this group—led by France and the United Kingdom and including Germany, Poland, and the Nordic and Baltic states—has begun to take shape through regular coordination meetings among defense ministers and bilateral security compacts, most notably the European-led security agreements with Kyiv signed in Berlin, London, Paris, and Warsaw last year. It has shown a commitment to Kyiv irrespective of political shifts in the United States or at home, backed by sustained arms deliveries, long-term bilateral aid pledges, and joint training and procurement programs designed to keep Ukraine’s war effort viable even if U.S. support falters. Its rationale is both normative and strategic: these states understand that European security ultimately depends on Ukraine’s military defense and national survival.

The coalition has not been perfect, of course. Its focus thus far has been too abstract, centered on the hypothetical reassurance force, and it has only recently shifted its attention to sustaining Ukraine’s defenses without U.S. support. As it evolves, it should focus on boosting, coordinating, and integrating conventional forces. And ultimately it should tackle the hardest question facing European defense: nuclear deterrence.

Nuclear deterrence is almost a taboo subject in Europe, since there is no good alternative to the American umbrella: the French and British nuclear deterrents are ill equipped to counter Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal. But Europeanizing such a deterrent opens countless dilemmas, such as financing an expanded French-British nuclear capability, determining how decisions would be reached on its use, and providing the conventional military support needed to enable a nuclear deterrent and strike force.

The question of how to ensure nuclear deterrence in Europe, however, is so vital that Europeans cannot continue ignoring it. Poland and France took a first step when they signed a bilateral defense treaty in May, and Polish leaders have welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron’s idea to extend France’s nuclear umbrella to European allies. This is a promising start, but these conversations should not take place bilaterally; ideally, they would extend to the coalition of the willing. The goal is not to replace NATO but to ensure that if Washington steps back abruptly, Europe can still stand on its feet as it faces external threats.

MAIN CHARACTER ENERGY

This same logic applies to trade. Europe’s prosperity has always relied on openness, but the EU’s uneven deal with Trump exposed how easily the bloc’s commitment to free transatlantic trade and commerce can be exploited. Yet the EU has like-minded partners. It has already begun diversification efforts, signing and implementing trade deals with Canada, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It should deepen these trade ties but also press ahead by signing and ratifying other agreements with India, Indonesia, and the Mercosur countries in Latin America, while accelerating negotiations and reaching deals with Australia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and others.

Beyond bilateral deals, the EU should invest in a broader strategy to sustain the global trading system itself. The World Trade Organization has been completely paralyzed since 2019, when its Appellate Body ceased to function because the United States had blocked the appointment of new judges. The EU, however, could develop an alternative mechanism for dispute settlement and rule-making by working with members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. With more than 20 countries collectively representing over 40 percent of global GDP involved in trade with the EU, such an effort would effectively create a complement to the WTO. It would offer an outlet for cooperation between middle powers that share Europe’s interest in maintaining an open, rules-based order. And it would show that Europe remains capable of shaping global economic governance rather than merely reacting to U.S. or Chinese moves on the geopolitical chessboard.

To further demonstrate this agency, Europe needs to finally develop an autonomous policy toward China. As competition between the United States and China has grown, Europe’s policy toward China has become a function of Washington’s. During the Biden administration, this was not considered a problem: Europe was strategically dependent on U.S. intelligence and at the mercy of U.S. export-control frameworks, but it had a reliable and predictable partner across the Atlantic. Now though, as Trump’s China policy oscillates between escalation and deal-making, Europe has lost its bearings. Brussels continues to enforce tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and to complain about Beijing’s backchannel support for Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine. But it is unclear how the EU can stand up to China while Washington strikes bilateral deals with Beijing behind its back.

To reclaim its credibility as a global actor, the EU should pursue a dual track with China: firm and clearheaded where its members’ security is at stake, but pragmatic and economically engaged elsewhere. On security, Europe won’t be able to convince China to stop trading with and buying oil and gas from Russia. But Europeans could persuade Beijing to stop exporting dual-use goods—those valuable to both military and civilian purposes—to Russia. China would expect something in return, of course, including concessions that some in Europe may consider distasteful, such as a pledge by NATO to no longer formally cooperate with East Asian partners.

Europe must also confront its energy predicament. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have replaced one vulnerability—reliance on Russian gas—with another, heavy dependence on U.S. liquefied natural gas. Although this shift was inescapable in the short term, it cannot be the basis for long-term energy security, especially given the volatile state of transatlantic relations. As a fossil-fuel-poor continent, the EU must forge a more sustainable path. At a minimum, this means broadening its network of energy partners and cultivating suppliers in the Middle East, North Africa, and other regions. But it also means doubling down on the European Green Deal, which is currently being diluted through omnibus laws backed by the center right and the far right.

The politics of the Green Deal are difficult, particularly amid a cost-of-living crisis and slow growth. But the alternative, continued fossil fuel exposure and geopolitical vulnerability, is much worse. The message should be clear: energy diversification is not just about climate change but also about sovereignty. Moreover, a credible green-industrial strategy would help create the high-technology jobs that nationalist parties claim to want to defend. It would show that decarbonization and economic strength can be mutually reinforcing in practice.

O PODER DO NÃO

Em conjunto, essas medidas não transformariam a Europa da noite para o dia. Contudo, começariam a alterar a dinâmica política que aprisionou o continente em um ciclo de deferência e divisão. Cada iniciativa — preparação para a defesa, diversificação comercial, uma política interna para a China e transição e autonomia energética — demonstraria que a Europa ainda pode agir coletiva e estrategicamente em condições adversas. O sucesso em qualquer uma dessas frentes reforçaria a confiança nas demais e criaria apoio político para medidas mais ousadas.

O objetivo mais amplo é restaurar a sensação de que o destino da Europa ainda está em suas próprias mãos. A autonomia estratégica não exige confronto com Washington nem o abandono da aliança atlântica. Exige a capacidade de dizer não quando necessário, de agir de forma independente quando os interesses divergem e de sustentar um projeto coerente internamente. A política de apaziguamento tem sido a postura padrão da Europa por tempo demais. Foi compreensível, até mesmo racional em alguns casos, mas, em última análise, foi contraproducente e alimentou as chamas de uma reação nacionalista.

A alternativa não é a ostentação ou o isolamento, mas sim uma atuação firme e deliberada. Se a Europa conseguir isso, poderá emergir deste período de turbulência transatlântica como um ator mais autossuficiente, mais unido e mais respeitado no mundo do que era antes.