The Transatlantic Crucible: Why the Crisis Between Washington and Europe May Be a Blessing in Disguise
Eighteen months into his second U.S. presidential term, it may appear that Donald Trump has permanently altered his country’s relationships with its transatlantic allies. His rhetoric toward partners has been corrosive and his policies erratic; his administration’s overall approach has undermined the post–World War II settlement and the post–Cold War security architecture in ways that seemed unthinkable even during his first term. By denigrating NATO, threatening to annex its members’ territory, potentially violating international law, withdrawing defense aid for Ukraine, politicizing intelligence, and halting routine troop deployments to Poland, the second Trump administration has hemorrhaged American soft and hard power. Yet as bleak as the present state of the transatlantic alliance might look, it is also forcing a long-overdue transformation that could ultimately leave the alliance more capable and more balanced than it was before.
Writing in Foreign Affairs in February, the political scientist Stephen Walt rightly observed that Trump was wielding American power like a “predatory hegemon” to “assert dominance over friends and foes alike.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney observed a “rupture” in the rules-based international order, and the 2026 Munich Security Conference report scathingly described Trump as a “demolition man”; the implication is that there will be no going back. Although these characterizations accurately describe the current moment (and their pessimism is understandable), they also suffer from presentism. For beneath the mayhem and discord lies a counterintuitive possibility: the very crisis Trump created is forcing U.S. allies to develop military and intelligence capabilities that could eventually make Washington’s partnerships stronger than ever. The truth is that for decades, the transatlantic relationship had a real free-rider problem. Most European officials will concede that Trump’s second-term behavior—along with the rising threat from Russian revanchism—has finally convinced them to try to stand on their own feet in military and intelligence matters.
European investments in satellite reconnaissance, air defense, drone development, and munitions production could augment U.S. capabilities by affording Washington more (and more diversified) intelligence, deeper joint stockpiles, redundancy in its communications systems, and a strengthened eastern flank. In short, the United States would no longer have to be the default provider of every critical element in a response to a European crisis. Capability, however, is only one part of the alliance equation; a harder question is whether its political and moral foundations can be repaired. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Munich Security Conference this winter that fundamental shared values still bind the United States and its historic allies in Europe. But that trust is now in tatters. Mending it is urgent because the threats facing both Europe and the United States are formidable: revisionist states such as China and Russia, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and even the national security implications of climate change.
Washington will have to restore trust through a mix of action and restraint. Beyond changing their tone toward Europe, future U.S. administrations must recommit publicly and repeatedly to NATO’s Article 5 guarantee and consult allies before launching major military operations, regardless of the theater: the Iran war has demonstrated the global repercussions of seemingly localized conflicts. They must support Ukraine’s sovereignty and enhance their deterrence posture on NATO’s eastern flank. And Washington must stop treating allied territory as an expansion opportunity and allied elections and domestic politics as opportunities for political interference.
THE LAST STRAW
Long before 2025, Europe’s free-rider problem was a source of frustration for Washington. Especially after the Cold War ended, many European countries underinvested in defense and intelligence, seizing on a peace dividend to expand social programs and relying on the United States for high-end warfighting capabilities, intelligence, and military mass. Successive U.S. administrations tried to cajole European countries into sharing more of the burden of ensuring the continent’s security. But they never really succeeded. Trump’s consistent threat to withdraw from NATO, as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, has finally lent legitimacy and urgency to European rearmament.
The most obvious way Trump has ruptured the transatlantic relationship is with his rhetoric: beyond his threats to leave NATO—or seize its members’ territory—he has persistently harangued Europeans for failing to adequately help the United States during its so-called global war on terror and now during the prosecution of its war against Iran. In fact, NATO fulfilled its Article 5 duty after the September 11 attacks; many European countries contributed, and lost, troops in Afghanistan. So these broadsides have made Europe more reluctant to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in war.
Beyond its rhetoric, the Trump administration has proved that the United States might be unreliable in a crisis. Most NATO allies see Washington’s turn away from democratic Ukraine in its existential war against Russia and Trump’s apparent sympathy for Putin’s perspectives as a catastrophic breach of America’s guiding ideals. The White House has spurned the consultative norms that underpinned the transatlantic alliance, particularly ahead of its sudden attack on Iran in late February, for which it neither sought a UN resolution nor consulted with allies beyond Israel.
The United States’ transatlantic allies not only doubt its commitment to them; they are also questioning Washington’s fundamental strategic judgment. Viewing the recent war the United States and Israel launched against Iran as a mistake, U.S. allies mostly declined to help. But the trouble goes deeper still: many American allies are beginning to think of the United States as a security risk, as the Danish Defense Intelligence Service stated publicly last December. An independent review commissioned by the British government and released in late March warned of “an emerging willingness of foreign actors and private citizens, including from allies like the United States, to interfere in, and influence, politics abroad in pursuit of their own agenda.” The Trump administration’s recent actions have only deepened the concerns behind these threat assessments. Its own 2025 National Security Strategy called for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” and both the U.S. vice president and secretary of state openly intervened in Hungary’s recent elections by campaigning for the incumbent.
CALL TO ARMS
Europe now has no choice but to hedge against an unreliable United States—and, in doing so, European countries are making structural changes to their defense and intelligence strategies that will persist no matter who next occupies the Oval Office. They are racing to decrease their dependence on Washington by, first, building out their defense industrial bases. Russia’s war on Ukraine exposed just how reliant Europe still was on the U.S. arsenal and supply chains. To rectify the problem, in July 2025, Germany broke with decades of fiscal orthodoxy and announced that it would double its defense budget to $178 billion by 2029, aiming to fill capability gaps and expand industrial depth. Other U.S. allies are banding together to coinvest in advanced platforms and limit their exposure to U.S. export decisions. Alongside historic investments in their domestic industrial bases, European countries are diversifying their sources of military equipment procurement and “friend shoring” supply chains, reducing their dependence on U.S. arms manufacturers by turning to domestic, European, South Korean, and other suppliers, especially for drones, air defense, and munitions.
In the short term, Europe’s effort to reduce its dependence on American arms is complicated by the fact that it is buying far more U.S. weapons than it did a decade ago. Yet these emergency purchases, driven by the need to arm Ukraine and refill European stockpiles, may represent a longer-term hedging strategy: to “de-risk” from Washington without foreclosing future military interoperability should the United States once again become a reliable ally. Europe is simultaneously building its mobilization capacity and growing its munitions stockpiles, pursuing greater operational autonomy, and ensuring that its logistics infrastructures can function without U.S. support. And European states are putting a renewed emphasis on territorial defense and resilience by hardening their ports, rail hubs, bridges, airfields, fuel depots, and power grids, as well as strengthening cyberdefenses and adding redundancy to their communications networks.
Washington used to guide NATO’s defense planning. Now, European states are picking up the slack in leadership. After the United States withdrew from chairing the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (which coordinates military support for Ukraine) in April 2025, for instance, Germany and the United Kingdom took the reins, signaling that European allies were prepared to assume more responsibility for sustaining Ukraine’s defense. European defense cooperation frameworks are deepening, creating a more distributed security architecture. For example, the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative is pooling air- and missile-defense efforts among 24 European countries, and the EU’s new ReArm Europe plan—backed by $175 billion in Security Action for Europe loans—will finance joint procurement to strengthen the continent’s defense industrial base.
For decades, European defense spending was the subject of American complaints and European procrastination. Trump’s coercion (and Putin’s aggression) accomplished what decades of U.S. diplomatic pressure could not: it made European rearmament acceptable, even desirable, to European publics. Parliaments that once resisted defense budget increases are now eager to announce them.
INTELLIGENCE TEST
The shifts happening in the intelligence domain may be less visible, but they are equally important. The Trump administration’s fraught relationship with the United States’ own intelligence community has had cascading negative effects on that apparatus’s relationship with liaison partners. European capitals worry that intelligence they pass to Washington could be leaked or politicized or might enable breaches of international law. In an October 2025 joint interview, the heads of the Dutch domestic and military intelligence agencies noted that these concerns were leading them to reduce intelligence cooperation with Washington. In November 2025, CNN reported that the British government had begun to withhold information from the United States related to countering drug trafficking to avoid complicity in potentially illegal strikes on boats, while Canada placed stricter limits on the operational use of its own intelligence because of the same concern.
Washington’s long-standing allies cannot currently replace the intelligence the United States provides. But they are hedging by investing more in their own analytical and collection capabilities. This shift is most visible in the realm of space-based intelligence: European states are expanding their satellite constellations to ensure independent imagery and radar coverage. France continues to grow its military optical and radar reconnaissance systems. Beginning in 2022, Germany fielded cutting-edge satellites to provide Berlin with all-weather, 24-hour imaging. Italy now operates a constellation of small, advanced satellites that provide high-resolution, all-weather, day-night images of the Earth’s surface for military surveillance and maritime security as well as civilian purposes such as disaster response. Countries with more modest budgets are turning to commercial solutions and open-source geospatial data for alternative information streams.
And European governments are belatedly giving their spies far more legal leash and strengthening signals intelligence and cyber-intelligence capabilities by building interception platforms and digital exploitation capabilities that do not rely entirely on U.S. agencies. Germany is the best example: after World War II, its foreign intelligence service was constrained by a self-imposed operational straitjacket and ended up overly reliant on the United States. In late 2025, Berlin proposed a significant expansion to the intelligence service’s authorities and resources to permit broader foreign communications collection and offensive cyber-operations. Other European countries are also affording their intelligence services greater capabilities and authorities, expanding their staff, purchasing open-source intelligence tools, and creating fusion cells that integrate military, intelligence, cyber, law enforcement, and private-sector reports into faster, more actionable threat assessments.
These investments are not explicitly tied to concerns about U.S. intelligence. They were long overdue, and Putin’s predations also underscored the weaknesses and gaps in European security and intelligence. But reinforcing the capacity for sovereign judgment is a critical hedge against an unpredictable United States. When the United States retreated from its role as the largest provider of intelligence to Ukraine, for instance, France was able to make up substantially for the gap.
PARADOXICAL REACTION
The tragedy is that Europe’s defense and intelligence spending is now shaped as much by the need to hedge against American unreliability as by a desire to make the transatlantic alliance more capable. Money that might have gone toward filling NATO’s most urgent gaps must now be used to buy sovereign capabilities that ensure that Europe can act if the United States does not. But if transatlantic trust can eventually be restored, Europe’s present investments could yield a far more powerful military and intelligence collaboration than the one Trump has all but severed.
More munitions production, stronger domestic industrial bases, and more independent operational capabilities could allow these U.S. allies to sustain high-intensity operations longer, assume greater responsibility for regional contingencies, and reduce the strain on U.S. capabilities. This would not only make Europe a more credible security actor and strengthen its deterrence posture but also allow the United States to allocate forces more flexibly across theaters, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. Self-reliant allies can also move faster in the early phases of a crisis, rather than waiting for Washington to initiate every response. A stronger Europe would ensure, for instance, that NATO would be able to repel a conventional Russian incursion without a great deal of involvement from the United States.
In the intelligence realm, more satellite constellations, better resourced intelligence apparatuses, and more risk-tolerant overseers would allow European allies to contribute information and assessments derived from their own sources, creating a more reciprocal intelligence exchange with the United States. Washington would gain additional perspectives, regional expertise, and coverage depth. It might lose the agenda-setting power that came with being the dominant supplier of intelligence, but it would gain more capable partners that could usefully confirm or challenge and sharpen its assessments.
History offers instructive examples of the costs that are incurred when an alliance’s different intelligence services lack adequate independent capability. In the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, Berlin and Paris were deeply skeptical of Washington’s claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But they lacked comparable intelligence collection capabilities to mount an effective challenge to U.S. intelligence. Had they possessed their own technical intelligence platforms and human networks inside Iraq, their doubts, if supported by credible independent collection, might have carried enough evidentiary weight to force a harder look at the American case at the UN Security Council. Instead, their skepticism was dismissed as European diffidence, and the United States proceeded toward one of the costliest strategic blunders since the Vietnam War.
Transatlantic trust will not simply reappear after Trump leaves office.
More recently, Russia’s war on Ukraine illustrates the downsides of unequal intelligence sharing within an alliance. Ahead of Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion, U.S. and British officials urgently warned their European allies. Yet some key capitals doubted the warnings because they lacked the sovereign collection and analytic capacity to corroborate the most sensitive U.S. and British reports. Stronger intelligence services might not have predicted the invasion with the same precision, but they would have been better positioned to confirm and act on U.S. and British warnings; less time would have been wasted in an attempt to persuade partners that the threat was real, and more time could have been spent preparing Kyiv’s defense. The same logic applies to independent military capability: larger European stockpiles and stronger defense industries could have delivered more artillery, ammunition, air defense, and armored vehicles earlier in the war and sustained Ukraine more effectively when U.S. materiel support was withdrawn.
Europe may grow stronger in ways that help the United States. But the transatlantic relationship will still need to be deliberately repaired in order to reap any future dividends from the current crisis. Trust has been broken, and it will not simply reappear after Trump leaves office. Restoring it requires a long-term change in the tone and behavior of U.S. leaders over multiple electoral cycles to reassure allies that already feel the urgency of learning how to survive without the United States. Washington will have to consult its transatlantic partners before it acts, abide by both the language and the spirit of its treaty commitments, offer measured rhetoric when it disagrees, exhibit restraint and strategic thought in the use of force, ensure its intelligence assessments are untainted by political considerations, and sustain its support for Ukraine and NATO’s eastern flank while sharing the burden more equitably.
European allies cannot stake their future security merely on the hope that the next U.S. president will be more predictable. Nor will they abandon their plans for greater autonomy if a committed Atlanticist returns to office. Allies will look for long-term evidence that the United States’ commitments can survive transitions of power and once again become anchored in law, institutions, congressional support, bipartisan political consensus, and routine defense planning. Rebuilding trust will therefore also require Washington to recover the constitutional discipline that once gave U.S. commitments institutional weight: Congress must restore meaningful oversight of America’s use of force, and the U.S. political culture must treat alliances as durable national commitments rather than discretionary favors done by a sitting president. The American public—blessed with peaceful neighbors and surrounded by large oceans—seems to have forgotten that alliances are not charity. They give the United States forward defense, intelligence reach, diplomatic leverage, and partners that can help carry burdens Washington would otherwise bear alone.
Although the damage and resentment from the second Trump term runs deep, a future administration committed to restoring alliances would find willing partners. Over time—and it may take a decade, even a generation—if Washington’s allies can be convinced that the United States has turned away from predatory hegemony, they will be eager to recommit to a transatlantic security architecture in which the burdens are more evenly shared. The paradox of the Trump years is that by treating allies as adversaries (and actual adversaries as admirable), seeking constant concessions, and operating as a rogue imperialist, the president may have catalyzed a needed transformation that enables more equal and beneficial partnerships. If reconciliation can be achieved, the transatlantic alliance that emerges may ultimately prove more valuable to all its members.