By Andrew Stuttaford
Thursday, February 19, 2026
When images of JD Vance and his wife waving American
flags appeared on a large screen at the Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony, some
in the crowd booed. Asked about this, Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime
minister who is now the European Union’s top diplomat, replied, “We have heard
a lot of not-so-nice words from the United States regarding Europe. . . . Our
public also has a pride, a European pride.” Vance’s boss is indeed extremely
unpopular across the Atlantic — and a conflict over an ICE unit’s presence in
Milan did not help. No matter that the unit, Homeland Security Investigations,
has nothing to do with deportations and regularly sends officers to
international events for security purposes.
On the brighter side, the U.S. Olympic team was well
received. And Vance is hardly the only American politician to be at the wrong
end of European jeering. In 1985, the 40th anniversary of the Allies’ victory
in Europe — a victory, if I recall correctly, in which the U.S. played a part —
President Reagan spoke to the European Parliament — and was heckled and booed
by a noisy minority of its members.
Reagan understood what the U.S. needed to do with respect
to Europe back then. Trump and Vance show far fewer signs of knowing how to
deal with Europe now. That said, whether or not one agreed with all of it,
Marco Rubio’s well-crafted speech to the Munich Security Conference on
Valentine’s Day, above all in tone, pointed to a future in which Europe and the
U.S. could work with each other in a new geopolitical era.
With Ukraine in flames and China on the prowl, that had
better be right.
Trump, a fierce critic of Reagan’s approach in the 1980s,
seems to have little grasp of Cold War realities, but the current contests are
more than a sequel. The United States faces a wider range of adversaries than
we did back then — one of which, China, may prove to be the most formidable we
have ever seen. That must mean a change in focus for the U.S., as Germany’s
Chancellor Friedrich Merz evidently realizes, given his observation in Munich
that the U.S. is “adapting . . . at a rapid pace” to the new geopolitical
landscape. But the U.S. has to confront these challenges at a time of deepening
fiscal woes. Our debt-to-GDP ratio in the 1980s peaked at around 50 percent:
It’s now approximately 125 percent.
Trump was correct to press far harder than his
predecessors to “encourage” European NATO to start paying its way. His tactics
have been rough, but they’ve been working. However, a good bit of what he has
done, from trade wars to the Greenland adventure to seeming too cozy with
Putin, has seriously undermined European perceptions of American benignity,
trustworthiness, and, by extension, the reliability of its nuclear umbrella.
This will weaken NATO, an alliance that has served the U.S. well for the better
part of a century, but Europe’s response may make the damage even worse than it
was already bound to be.
***
The reason, as so often over there, is the EU. To
understand why, go back to its ancestral history. The initial premise that
eventually led to the creation of the EU’s forerunners (a premise with which
the U.S. agreed) was that binding Western Europeans closer together would
reduce the chance that they would either resume fighting or succumb to Soviet
attempts to divide and conquer. Additionally, there were one or two in Paris
who dreamt about a united Western Europe regaining the great-power status that
its old empires had thrown away. With Britain content to watch from outside,
France could take the helm.
The formation of the European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC) in 1951 established a “common market” in coal and steel by France and
West Germany as well as Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg (“the
Six”). This was governed, supervised, and policed by transnational
institutions, the predecessors of the EU’s Commission (executive branch),
court, intergovernmental council, and parliament. It was hoped that putting
coal and steel — key resources in waging war — under a single transnational
authority would be a giant obstacle to any renewed hostilities between its
members.
In 1957, the Six signed the Treaty of Rome, under which
the ECSC was supplemented by Euratom (nuclear power) and the European Economic
Community (EEC). The latter was given the task of developing a customs union
and a far broader common market in goods and services. Both shared a parliament
and court with the ECSC, but each had its own councils and commissions. Some of
the Six had been wary of ceding more power (plans for a European Defense
Community were dropped), and the reach of the EEC was broad but shallow — until
the European Court of Justice stepped in. In two cases in the early 1960s, the
court’s creative judges interpreted the Treaty of Rome in a fashion and with
consequences that must have surprised most of those who signed it. Those
judgments paved the way for the young bloc’s march toward the “ever closer
union” referred to in the treaty’s preamble. It is a march that, despite
recurrent dramas and many slowdowns, has, with the qualified exception of
Brexit, never broken Brussels’s greatest taboo, which would be to go into
reverse, however rational, convenient, or popular doing so might be.
Jean Monnet, the most influential of the EU’s founding
fathers, would have been frustrated by the frequently sluggish pace of that
march, but he would have been delighted by the commitment to its
irreversibility. After two world wars, Monnet believed that Europeans could not
be trusted with their own countries, but he also recognized the depth of their
attachment to them. The project to subordinate the national to the
supranational would have to be top-down, step-by-step, often opaque, and
implemented, as Monnet once put it, by “zig and by zag.”
“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait
and see what happens,” commented Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime
minister, in 1999. “If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t
understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no
turning back.” Juncker later became president of the EU’s Commission. One
reason the single currency was established was to bind the states that signed
up for it even closer together — forever. No provision is made for a country to
abandon the euro: “There is no turning back.”
The fundamental flaws in the euro’s construction, most of
which arose out of the fact that its primary rationale was political rather
than economic, were widely predicted to lead to a crisis, and so they did. But,
according to the teleology of ever closer union, that was not necessarily a bad
thing. “I have always believed,” Monnet wrote in his memoirs (1976), that
“Europe would be built through crises, and that it would be the sum of their
solutions.” To borrow a phrase widely attributed to Jacques Delors, one of the
wilier Commission presidents, a “beneficial crisis” could speed up the EU’s
integration. Speaking in 2010, in the middle of efforts to save the euro, one
of Delors’s successors, José Manuel Barroso, declared, “A crisis can accelerate
decision-making when it crystallizes political will. Solutions that seemed out
of reach only a few years or even months ago are now possible.”
Some crises are so grave that they overwhelm the
reluctance of even the less enthusiastically “European” (to use the EU’s
preferred adjective) member states to hand over even more power to Brussels.
That was the case during the eurozone crisis, after the pandemic, and again
after the “full” Russian invasion of Ukraine.
***
Could Donald Trump, an unlikely deus ex machina, be
triggering the next beneficial crisis? Despite decades of propaganda from
Brussels and its evangelists, any shared European identity felt by the EU’s
citizens is dwarfed by their national loyalties, which are regarded with some
suspicion by many EU leaders today. This is why they embrace the EU’s
essentially post-democratic structure and advocate censorship; it’s why they
attack Euroskepticism with hysterical shrillness (without the euro, there will
be war and so on), and why they’re keen to take advantage of the opportunity
that Trump has given them to portray him, MAGA, and, to a degree, even America
as a foe of “Europe.” There’s not much substance to the “Europeanism” that
Brussels likes to peddle. It’s an ahistorical, artificial construction, filled
with platitudes. By contrast, anti-Americanism adds something spicier to the
mix. Nothing unites like an enemy.
The idea that a united Europe should rival the U.S. has
been around since before the Treaty of Rome, as alluded to above, but the
failure to achieve that ambition led to envy. Arguing for a single currency in
1965, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, France’s finance minister (and future
president) grumbled about the “exorbitant privilege,” a telling choice of
words, that the dollar’s reserve status gave the United States.
That envy, souring not infrequently into animosity, lives
on, as demonstrated by Brussels’s repeated looting — lightly disguised as fines
for alleged breaches of this regulation or that law — of American high-tech
companies. But most of it revolved around issues that resonate primarily with
the Brussels elite, not those who live under their rule. Unfortunately and
understandably, some of Trump’s actions have angered “ordinary” Europeans,
even, in cases such as Greenland, supporters of parties normally sympathetic to
him.
As Kallas’s forced-sounding references to “Europe”
suggest, Brussels and its allies will do everything they can to use Trump to
scare its citizens — “subjects” would be a better word — into greater loyalty
to the EU at a time when there is the prospect of severe turbulence ahead. The
outlook for the bloc’s economy, long burdened by overregulation, is bleak, and
its industrial sector, ground down by Brussels’s green zeal, might be on the
edge of disaster, with even higher levels of Chinese imports poised to add
another twist of the knife. The heavy indebtedness of several large eurozone
countries only makes matters worse. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 117 percent;
Italy’s is 137 percent. For some extraordinary reason, France’s President
Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge to have the EU borrow more money.
Meanwhile, a good number of European leaders have
concluded that the country that elected Donald Trump twice cannot be relied on
as their ultimate military guarantor (they would have done well to think about
that during the Biden and Obama presidencies, too), and that they will have to
do more to provide for Europe’s defense than hike spending to meet Trump’s
demand du jour. The manner in which Trump has provoked this change of sentiment
has been reckless, graceless, and unnecessarily counterproductive. Ironically,
if the result is a more equal, and therefore intrinsically healthier (if
probably trickier to manage) partnership between the U.S. and a Europe that is,
short of a massive nuclear attack, able to defend itself (there is talk of
expanding the European nuclear umbrella, but that can go only so far), that
will be something to be celebrated.
To be successful, such a transition will take time and
therefore patience — not a quality for which the Trump administration is well
known — as well as money. In many cases, finding the latter may involve painful
budget cuts elsewhere, a task that will be even harder if the economy turns
down. Poland and the Baltic states have dramatically boosted their defense
spending, and Germany seems set to join them, but other countries are dragging
their heels. One suggestion, inevitably, is that the EU itself should turn to
the bond markets specifically to help finance the increased spending, but
Germany and other members of the EU’s “frugal” group do not agree.
This process would become yet more difficult in the event
of a significant populist breakthrough somewhere in the bloc, starting, maybe,
with France. Macron’s term ends next year, and there is a reasonable chance
that his successor will come from the populist-right National Rally, a party
that has been too close to Russia in the past, and perhaps not only then.
***
There is also a clear danger that, in trying to turn this
geopolitical moment into a beneficial crisis, the EU will put its “ever closer
union” ahead of broader Western interests. It’s no surprise that Ursula von der
Leyen, the Commission’s president, has been taking the opportunity to push for
further reductions in the number of areas of EU decision-making where a
national veto has survived. That is bad enough, but her call for the EU to
“activate” its mutual-defense clause is worse. It risks a possibly chaotic overlap
with NATO’s Article 5 and, even more worrying, could be the opening shot in a
campaign to insert the EU into NATO. Von der Leyen has also proposed that the
EU enter into closer security collaboration with the U.K., Norway, Iceland,
and, eh, Canada — all non-EU NATO members. Germany’s Merz argues that this
would not be a replacement for NATO but “a self-supporting, strong pillar
within the alliance.”
We’ll see, but even setting up a separate bloc (let’s
dispense with that benign-sounding “pillar”) within NATO at a very testy time
looks uncomfortably like the preamble to a divorce, especially as organizations
based in the EU are looking to declare “independence” from the U.S. in other
areas, from payment systems to digital infrastructure, lest they be weaponized
against them. Before Greenland, such fears would have sounded nuts; now they
merely come across as overwrought. Sadly, the effect of these and other
measures, such as a possible “Buy European” policy, described as necessary to
protect against dangerous dependencies, could operate against the improved
efficiency and deregulation that, it is widely agreed, even in Brussels, are
urgently required if the EU is to build the competitive economy it will need to
be more than just a regulatory superpower.
And how credible is a deregulation campaign spearheaded
by an institution that gets so much of its clout, within Europe and beyond,
from regulation? It’s no coincidence that the EU’s prescriptions for making it
easier to do business within its realm tend to be more integration — more
Brussels — not less. It’s akin to handing matches to an arsonist. And then
there’s the small matter of the EU’s climatist “green deal,” an economic,
political, and geopolitical catastrophe. It has been trimmed here and there, but
if the EU is to flourish, it must be shredded. There are few signs that it will
be.
As von der Leyen continually makes clear by word and by
deed, “ever closer union” remains sacrosanct. Giving fresh life to the idea of
a multispeed EU in certain circumstances, the Commission plans to allow member
states to proceed at their own pace, but only toward ever closer union. There
is still no reverse gear.
And without a reverse gear, a major crisis, whether
external or internal or both, is coming. To assume that it will be beneficial
is to make a very big bet.
