In January 2026, The Economist magazine’s cover artwork depicted a shirtless Donald Trump riding a polar bear. Created using photo-editing software, the image borrowed from a similar depiction of Russian President Vladimir Putin riding a brown bear. The polar bear alluded to Trump’s renewed push to annex the Danish territory of Greenland. The magazine bemoaned Trump’s ‘ominous contempt for Europe’, called on European leaders to ‘prepare for a day when NATO is no more’, and urged ‘America’s friends in Europe and beyond’ to ‘prepare for a world in which they are alone’.
The Economist is right to say that Trump’s contempt is real—but wrong about his intentions towards NATO. He is subordinating Europe, not abandoning it. His goals haven’t changed since his first term as president. And those goals are not unique to his presidency. His abrasive words are different to those of his predecessors, but his core objectives are well within the long-term parameters of US military and economic strategy.
Subordinating Europe—a long-term US objective
In his first term, Trump pushed for a Europe that was subordinate to the United States, economically and politically divided, and geopolitically inconsequential. He tried to weaken the European Union by supporting Brexit and other Eurosceptic forces. He increased cooperation with Poland, Hungary and other European states whose leaders were aligned with his geopolitical vision. He demanded an increase in European military spending, accusing them of free riding on the United States. But he consistently opposed European military autonomy, insisting that it remain reliant on the United States for higher-end capabilities. Previous American administrations also wanted Europe to increase its military spending while blocking its attempts to achieve military autonomy. President Obama had called for more EU military spending, saying that ‘free riders aggravate me’, according to Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016. After Trump, the Biden administration made the same demands, pushing for greater EU military spending while blocking projects that would reduce the EU’s military dependence on the US. This is the context for understanding Trump’s demands in his second term.
Trump’s real objectives were revealed in 2018, when the EU responded to his pressure by proposing ‘permanent structured cooperation’ (PESCO). It involved twenty-five of the twenty-eight EU members working together on cooperative military projects. The EU also proposed a European Defence Fund, taken from the EU budget for research and development. It had US$14.6 billion in planned expenditure over the 2021‒27 budget period. The US, joined by its British lieutenant, opposed both initiatives, calling them ‘protectionist’ and complaining that their defence contractors would be excluded from those projects, which specified that third parties may only ‘exceptionally participate’. As I explore in greater depth in Turbulence, the US said that Europe’s security initiatives ‘might not be harmonious with NATO’s own expenditures and NATO’s needs’. It warned that they ‘could undermine trans-Atlantic security by duplicating NATO efforts and diverting valuable resources’ and ‘make all of us less safe, Americans included’. Faced with US pressure, individual EU states, especially those located near Russia, peeled off from PESCO and the proposed European Defence Fund, thwarting the prospect of EU strategic autonomy. EU dependence on the United States increased during the Biden administration, following the Russian re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump’s pressure on Europe increased in his second term, as did Europe’s obedience. As his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2026, ‘the NATO alliance is very safe’, but the European countries and Canada ‘have a lot of catching up to do’. He claimed that the US had spent 22 trillion dollars more on defence than all of NATO since 1980, while ‘Europeans have been spending the money on social welfare, on roads, on education. And it’s time for them to pay more, which they have agreed to do.’ None of this would have been unfamiliar to President Obama, whose Defence Secretary, Robert M Gates, warned Europe in 2011, in a speech on the future of NATO: ‘the blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress, and in the US body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources’ to the military, and ‘to be serious and capable partners in their own defence’.
European conventional military dependence on the US
The United States recognises that NATO’s European members are unable to integrate their military forces independently of the United States. Repairs, maintenance, spare parts and other vital logistical challenges are very hard to coordinate because European navies use twenty-nine different types of destroyers while the United States uses only four; their armies use seventeen different types of tanks or armoured personnel carriers while the United States uses just one; and their air forces use twenty different fighter planes compared with just six for the United States. During the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, European logistical weaknesses meant that they needed US help to airlift their own evacuees, according to a 2023 report in Foreign Affairs.
Achieving European self-reliance would cost a lot of money—and would not be successful in any case. A 2025 study by two research institutions, Bruegel and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, concluded that an increase of US$270 billion a year, or about 3.5 to 4 per cent of the EU’s gross domestic product, would be needed. At the moment, only five NATO states spend more than 3 per cent of GDP per year on their militaries, and one of them is the United States. Even if every EU member state were to spend 3.5 per cent of its GDP, as the US wants, finding the money would not be the hardest problem. The central problem is the political will to mobilise Europe’s populations and reorient its economies. If Russia attacked a European NATO country, the 100,000 US troops stationed in Europe would be joined quickly by 200,000 additional US troops in armoured units structured for combat on the Eastern European battlefield. If Europeans were to act independently, they would have to mobilise 300,000 troops from their populations, with a focus on mechanised and armoured forces. And that still wouldn’t be enough.
US forces are not just more numerous; they are also more cohesive. They are organised into corps-sized units with a unified command-and-control structure and are backed by US strategic enablers, including strategic aviation and space assets. Replacing them is much more complicated than forming fifty new brigades by conscripting 300,000 Europeans. The new European troops would have to come from twenty-nine national militaries—with a serious risk of inter-country bickering—not from a single country like the United States. One estimate is that stopping a rapid Russian breakthrough in the Baltics would require at least 1,400 tanks, 2,000 infantry fighting vehicles and 700 artillery pieces. This is ‘more combat power than currently exists in the French, German, Italian and British land forces combined’, according to the Brueghel/Kiel report. It is easier said than done to replace an alliance intentionally designed to rely on US leadership, strategic enablers, airlift, intelligence, and coordination.
European nuclear dependence on the United States
Even if the United States were to stop sabotaging European strategic autonomy, the EU does not possess its own nuclear deterrent. That is not because of technical inability but because the EU cannot resolve the question of hierarchy among Europeans. For example, should France or Germany be the dominant state? Many wars have been fought in Europe to resolve such questions. The United States, through NATO, froze or blocked inter-European rivalries during the Cold War. It did not resolve them.
President Emmanuel Macron of France is the most outspoken European advocate of strategic autonomy. That is because France’s nuclear arsenal would give it ascendancy within the EU. France conducts nuclear-signalling exercises every few months. Known as Exercise Poker, they take place on a clear night when the skies are free of cloud cover. Macron joins his nuclear force commanders in a command-and-control bunker located twenty stories beneath Paris. They wait for a Russian spy satellite to make a regular pass over French skies. Then, Rafaele fighter jets take off with dummy nuclear bombs strapped to their wings, simulating nuclear attacks on an unnamed country. France spends billions of dollars a year to maintain its nuclear arsenal of 290 warheads. It operates its nuclear deterrent independently of the United States and produces all its components domestically. France’s nuclear-armed submarines allow it to deliver an assured second strike, thus guaranteeing nuclear deterrence for the EU. But that would also mean France dominating Europe’s decision-making councils because the decision to use nuclear weapons would always remain with the French president.
It is one thing for EU states to agree to US supremacy: doing so has stalled questions about hierarchy inside Europe for eighty years. It would be quite another thing to accept France at the top of the European pyramid. Germany would not accept such a situation, which is why it remains committed to a large US military presence on the continent. From a strategic planning perspective, the most vital questions remain unresolved: will France allow other European states to share nuclear decision-making, or will it simply assume the nuclear deterrence role unilaterally? Would France allow its weapons to be extensively redesigned so that they can be launched from non-French submarines and aircraft? And the most important question—would France risk the destruction of Paris as retaliation for a Russian strike on Berlin? Europe has avoided thinking seriously about these questions for decades. It could never be certain that the United States would risk the destruction of New York or Los Angeles as retaliation for a Russian attack on a European state—but the fact of NATO meant that the question was not urgent.
The problem would persist even if the United Kingdom were to rejoin the EU. It is true that Britain has operational nuclear independence because its nuclear-armed Trident missiles are carried on four British submarines controlled by Britain’s own commanders. They can launch those missiles when the British prime minister gives the order; permission from another country is not needed. In their history of the modern UK submarine service, Hennessy and Jinks note that the PM writes four identically worded letters to the commanding officers of the four submarines. They contain orders on what to do if UK submarine officers become convinced through certain pre-arranged tests that the UK had already been destroyed. (One order is believed to be to seek shelter in Australia.) These handwritten letters of last resort are destroyed unopened after the PM leaves office. Ultimately, however, Britain’s nuclear program remains dependent on the United States’ nuclear program. It obtains its Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles from a pool of missiles shared with the US Navy. British submarines test-fire the missiles under US supervision near Cape Canaveral in Florida. US laboratories evaluate those missile tests. The US Strategic Weapons Facility at Kings Bay, Georgia, services the missiles. Britain plans to purchase US planes with US-controlled source code to drop US-owned nuclear bombs from the air, making it heavily dependent on the US. It plans to replace its Vanguard-class submarines, but the high cost (US$129 billion) means a trade-off between nuclear and conventional forces.
The payoff—weakening the Brussels Effect
A militarily subordinate Europe gives the United States economic leverage over it. For US corporations, in whose interests US foreign policy operates, the objective is to reduce Europe’s regulatory power. The EU has more than 400 million people who make up a $20 trillion market. From this market comes an important tool of European power—the ability to force technology corporations to comply with regulations that protect citizens’ privacy, human rights and consumer rights. EU regulations are exported to or copied by other jurisdictions, forcing US technology companies to adapt to European standards rather than US ones. Known as the ‘Brussels Effect’, it allows the EU to indirectly set global rules and norms in platform accountability, artificial intelligence, digital competition, and even climate regulations. And this is precisely what Trump, backed by the technology billionaires who invested in his election campaign, wants to weaken. He wants to impose a regulatory model that privileges the rights of technology companies over those of citizens and reserves a very minimal role for governments.
The fight over technology regulations is behind the search warrant executed by the French police against the Paris offices of social media company X (formerly Twitter) in February 2026, along with a summons issued by French prosecutors to the company’s owner, Elon Musk. France’s cybercrime authorities said they were investigating X in relation to multiple accusations, including that X had stopped using a tool meant to restrict child sexual abuse imagery, that it was permitting content that denies crimes against humanity, and had engaged in the fraudulent extraction of data. For its part, X stated that it ‘categorically denies any wrongdoing’ and called the investigation ‘politicized’ and one that ‘distorts French law, circumvents due process, and endangers free speech’.
At stake is a broader dispute over the cyber-sovereignty of European countries. France imposes criminal penalties for hate speech, Holocaust denial and glorification of terrorism. Its authorities have previously been willing to hold top tech executives personally liable for the behaviour of platform users. French police detained and charged Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, in 2024. Durov denied personal responsibility for what users post on Telegram, but the company has since changed its policies and begun working more cooperatively with French law enforcement agencies.
Trump is solidly on the side of US corporations in this struggle. In his first term, he called the EU a ‘foe’ that had been created ‘to hurt the United States on trade’. He demanded that the Europeans ‘take down their barriers’ and ‘stop charging us massive taxes’. He objected to the EU’s regulations and standards, saying that ‘We’ll make a product, and they’ll make a standard that’s different than the product, lower or higher. But it’s different. So then our product can’t come into the EU. They do that all the time. And, frankly, they have to start treating our companies better, because they sue all of our companies for billions and billions of dollars. They’re picking up all this money from our companies.’ In his second term, he repeated the accusation, saying that the EU ‘was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.’ Trump’s under-secretary for public diplomacy, Sarah B. Rogers, described European financial penalties on US tech companies as a ‘de facto tax’ intended to raise revenue. While it was ‘undisputed that Europeans get to have their own laws in Europe’, she said the Trump administration was ‘not willing to give up American freedom of speech in the bargain’.
A matter of will
How this will play out involves more than questions of trade policy. It involves questions of human agency—how do EU policy planners see themselves? Human agency involves free will and is impossible to predict accurately. Europe’s advanced industrial powers (Germany, France, the Netherlands) may not indefinitely obey US orders. They may not indefinitely accept decline or deindustrialisation. The rest of Trump’s term, assuming it isn’t interrupted for reasons of ill-health, will likely see more turbulence and resistance.
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This article, written in February 2026, is proudly dedicated to Professor Noam Chomsky, with gratitude.
Lo v’-khayil v’-lo v’-koakh, ki im-b’-rukhi. Zechariah 4:6
Comments
Trump is following the US fossil fuel, faux free-market network run by the Koch brothers and the anti-immigrant Tanton Network, which equal Project 2025. Fox News does public relations and nudges the Right-Wing Mainstream Media (RW MSM) further right.
Brexit, Britain leaving the European Union, was a fossil fuel and anti-immigrant US and Russian coup. A similar architecture was present in Hungary, but Prime Minister ‘mini Putin’ Orbán was ditched The newbie is going to dismantle funding and architecture used by Abbott’s friends.
The neoliberal Anglosphere of US ‘radical right libertarians’ (Jane Mayer, Dark Money) has ensured, for example, that in Australia the European Union never warrants positive attention, as opposed to the Anglosphere and nostalgia for it. Ditto Asia, even though Australia almost has a Eurasian majority locally, and just signed an EU Free Trade Agreement. But nada in local media?